Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Science) Share this | Hansard source

I turn to the substance of this proposition we have before us—that is, why do we need an extended period of time? I particularly want to talk about the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment Bill 2013. Quality and standards are fundamental issues when it comes to our higher education system. I remind the chamber that, if Labor's forward projection on funding and higher education assistance stands, by 2017 we will be spending $17.7 billion every year on higher education in this country. This is a sector of the economy that is producing some $15 billion a year in terms of our economy and employing over 100,000 Australians by attracting international students, so the issue of quality and standards is of some significance.

I think we need to state, and the chamber needs to examine, the way in which we have a genuine national regulator for the higher education system—a regulator that is able to preserve the international and domestic reputation of our higher education system in this country, particularly in the context where the government has explicitly put the view that it wants to expand the provision of private operators in the system. We need a regulator that is independent yet accountable. We need to be able to assure the public, given that so much of their money is engaged in the higher education sector, that it is actually money well spent and includes appropriate probity arrangements. We need genuine quality assurance by universities, as they are self-accrediting institutions, but we need a quality assurance regime by those universities that is verifiable. We need to be able to recognise that there will be different approaches for the research system, as there are for the teaching programs in this country. These are significant issues that require our attention.

The last time conservatives were in office and allowed the extension of private operators into the system, we saw a number of very damaging scandals for universities in this country. I just remind the chamber, because I spent a lot of my time on my feet on these issues, of those occasions. I remind the Senate about Greenwich University, which was operating from Norfolk Island and marketing itself as an Australian university. We had the University of Asia, registered in the Turks and Caicos Islands, operating from a post-office box in Adelaide and offering Australian degrees to international students via the internet. We had St Clements University—this was a real beauty—which was operating through a whisky distributing company. These are quite clearly unacceptable, and so the issue of quality assurance and the issue of standards are pretty fundamental to the way in which we operate in terms of our higher education system.

This is a government that dropped this bill into the House of Representatives last Thursday. They dropped in the bill with no consultation. There was no consultation with vice-chancellors; no consultation with the reviewers of the current regulatory regime, Professors Lee Dow and Braithwaite; and no consultation with students. They just dropped the bill in the chamber—in secrecy yet again. Why? Why would you need to do that on such an important matter?

We know that there was a review process which the Labor government introduced. In fact, the reviewers reported to me, so I am very concerned about pursuing this issue. I will quote directly from the report. Many people may well say what a quality report Professors Lee Dow and Braithwaite produced. They said:

It is easy to recommend apparently straightforward amendments to legislation which appear agreed by everyone. But this is worryingly simplistic, patching individual pieces of legislation can fix functional irritations, but will not necessarily change the way in which the legislation is being applied and why.

If ever there was a reason for proper scrutiny of an important piece of legislation which will have profound consequences for many years to come, it is surely a piece of legislation such as this, and how we develop a system in which there is genuine partnership that allows for a cultural and mutual respect to develop and which we can all be confident will be able to protect the reputation of this country at home and abroad.