Sue Lines (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would just like to start by putting the Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment (Streamlining Regulation) Bill 2015 and the Education Services for Overseas Students (Registration Charges) Amendment (Streamlining Regulation) Bill 2015 in the context of the sorts of changes that the Turnbull government is seeking to put across all aspects of education in our country, whether it is early childhood education and care, primary school, secondary, TAFE or other education. In that concept, there is one word that links all of those services together, and that is 'deregulation'.

We have heard the concerns of the sector in relation to deregulation. Last week in this place, Labor asked the minister a number of questions about the casualisation of the early childhood sector. We saw in the media a couple of weeks ago comments that Minister Birmingham made previously about moving to a voucher system in primary schools. Imagine that: a voucher system, completely deregulating our primary school sector! We have seen the sorts of concerns and indeed the explosion of private colleges in the TAFE area, and we have seen in Victoria the Victorian government move to take back 8,000 TAFE qualifications.

And now we have seen—and we have fought in this place and in the wider community—the Turnbull government's deregulation of the university sector. We spent most of last year fighting their moves to introduce $100,000 degrees. Despite them trying to say that we got it wrong, that has now been shelved, but it has not gone away. It is still their intention to introduce $100,000 degrees, just not yet, because they have not got the support for it. Labor from day one, along with the National Union of Students and a whole range of other community organisations, has opposed that move, and thankfully crossbench senators and the Greens also do not support the deregulation of universities, which would make it incredibly expensive and prohibitive for a range of Australian students to attend university.

Those opposite can shake their heads, but deregulation is the key word from the Turnbull government when it comes to education, whether it is early childhood education and care—and I must say I was appalled last week to stand in this place and hear about early childhood education and care. We all know the critical impact that early education has on children from the ages of nought to three, and what did we hear from the Turnbull government? We heard 'business models' and 'profit'. How disgraceful. There was no mention of quality.

Again, we see in this place the impact of the government's proposal to deregulate international students. It is important to acknowledge that international students are big business for Australian universities. This is one thing I have learnt in all of the inquiries that we have done across the university sector, whether they were into the government's disgraceful attempt to introduce $100,000 degrees or this latest move by the government to deregulate. International students are big business, but they should not just be big business. We should be proud of the country being able to offer quality educational services to all who seek them, whether it is our own local students or it is international students.

What should be at the forefront of that experience of people coming to study at university in Australia is quality: proper, quality courses that change people's lives. I can say from my own experience as a very young mature-age student—I went to uni as a 26-year-old, and I went to Murdoch University in Western Australia—that that was a life-changing experience. That is what we want higher education to be. We want it to change people's lives, to give them greater opportunity. That is really what we want to do.

Unfortunately, we know that that requires our universities to be transparent, and it requires regulation. It does not happen on its own. It is not a trickle-down effect. It does not happen because nobody is watching, and it will not happen if we continue to deregulate our higher education sector. Of course, it should be regulated to the highest standards. The privilege to go and study at a higher education institution should be made available to many people in our community, whether they are international students or not. That should be an opportunity that is open to all. But it should be a proper opportunity, a life-changing opportunity, a life-enhancing opportunity.

That needs good, strong regulation—of course, not overregulation. That is not what Labor is calling for. It needs regulation to make sure that, when international students pay funds, those funds are protected and that universities act with great transparency and act in a proper way in relation to international students, because they are big business. Certainly, when we held the inquiry into the government's shelved $100,000 degrees, university after university told us that international students were a significant part of their student body. It did not matter if they were a rural or regional university or, indeed, a university based in our capital cities: international students were very much a core of their student bodies. We want to make sure that that core is protected—and, of course, our reputation.

We want to keep and indeed enhance our reputation as a country which is open and transparent, a country where students can come without fear of being ripped off and without fear of paying a lot of money and not getting a quality course or indeed not getting a degree at the end that is worth very much. Those are very important and they are also important to Australia, to continue as a leading country in terms of international students. We have world-standard universities and we have quite a small university body, which reflects our population, and we do want to keep that at world standard. We can name the universities which are competing at world standards and which are very highly ranked, but I think that all of our universities are at a world-standard level. So we want our reputation to be upheld. We want that quality and our reputation to grow and we want to continue to be held at a particular level.

International students make a significant investment, as do their families when sending a child overseas. Not only do they have to pay fees but that child also has to be supported either through working or through continuing to be supported at home. Families make a significant decision when they choose an overseas university, and we want them to keep choosing Australia so we have to have the highest standards. We have to have a quality educational service, and in order to get there we need regulation. It will not happen without regulation.

When Labor was in government we commissioned a review of reporting requirements for universities and, of course, Labor does support, in part, some of the streamlining of regulation. We do not want to see students and universities overburdened by regulation, but we do want to see very clear protective regulation in part. And some of that streamlining of the regulations is outlined in the bills, as recommended in that report—a report which Labor commissioned.

The second part, though, relates to the government's deregulation agenda. As I said at the outset, in early childhood education and care right through to higher education the government's keywords in those areas are not quality, protection for students or even cost, surprisingly. It is 'deregulation'.

As Labor has said, and as you will hear other Labor senators say in this place, that is a danger, as it seeks to remove a range of requirements that affect providers and were indeed partly introduced in response to the last major crisis in the international colleges in 2008 and 2009. None of us in this place, no matter where we come from, want a return to that—where our international reputation, particularly in relation to Indian students, was well and truly on the line. We had some awful protests. We had Indian students allegedly being bullied. We had collapse after collapse, with shonky operators taking the significant funds they received from international students and fleeing. We do not want to see that, because that is not the sort of country we are. We are not a country that promotes shonks and we are not a country that allows people to rip students off in that way. That is not who we are as a country. And of course, that was significant damage to our reputation. Partly, that collapse occurred because we did not have the regulation in place.

We do need to keep updating regulation. It is probably not appropriate to say that regulation that applied in 2008-09 is going to lead us forward from 2016 onward. It does need to be something we continue to review, because regulation can become a burden if it no longer matches what is being provided. But regulation in and of itself is required because none of us in this place want to go back to what we saw in 2008 and 2009. And we know already that in the era of international education we must have proper regulation that protects students who come here in good faith.

When you choose a university it is a very exciting time. You make the choice and you make your decision about what sort of degree you want to pursue, and it sets your career opportunities up for the future. It is a very exciting time, so we want to make sure that the highest standard of regulations are in place so that that decision made by the international student and their family is made in an environment they can feel comfortable in. We want to make sure they know they will get the highest-quality education and will be secure in the knowledge that they are not going to get scammed or ripped off by a shonky operator or someone taking advantage of them.

It is very confusing when you come to Australia from another country. You arrive and everything is different, and you may have English as a second or third language. It is an environment where we need to welcome students, and we need to be able to say to them confidently, 'We have good, strong regulation in place that's going to protect your interests. It's designed to protect you as the international student.' It is us saying in another way how much we value that international student and their family making that often-difficult decision to send their child overseas to study.

When Labor were in government we initiated in response to those college collapses in 2008-09 a range of reforms, including the creation of the Tuition Protection Service. Alarmingly, some of the requirements in this bill seek to remove those protections that Labor put in place.

We have seen another form of exploitation of international students in this country with the appalling and shocking exploitation of students by 7-Eleven. We heard in evidence that students were getting paid $12 an hour. The Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, the union in the retail sector, told us that they had calculated for one of those international students that he was working for about $5 or $6 an hour. That is shameful, and I am not suggesting for one minute that anyone in this place thinks that is okay, but it does demonstrate that where international students are concerned there is a market for some who are unscrupulous to exploit them. In the 7-Eleven case, we have already heard in evidence just from the Fels panel that they have done underpayments for 101 students, and that amount of underpayment is more than $2 million. I think people perhaps do not appreciate that these are low-paid jobs. These are jobs where students are earning about $20 an hour, so, to get to an underpayment of around $23,000 per student, which is what the Fels panel is telling us, is a staggering underpayment.

We have also heard, in relation to 7-Eleven's international students, how they were forced to work more than 20 hours a week, breaching their visa conditions, putting at risk their university career and degree, putting at risk all the money their family had got together to enable that student to come to Australia to study—all of that put at risk because a dodgy company chose to exploit them. We know that in the area of visa workers for international students the current regulations we have are not enough. We certainly want to see a beefing up of regulation there.

Of course I am not suggesting for a moment that our universities are behaving with some of the unscrupulous practices we have seen from 7-Eleven and others—Pizza Hut just last week. These are all going on now. But it does clearly demonstrate that international students are seen by some as big business. Obviously, where there is a lot of money out there, we do see elements of exploitation. In the cases of 7-Eleven and Pizza Hut, there has been shocking exploitation of international students.

That damages our reputation. It may not be about the quality of the educational experience the student is receiving, but nevertheless people reading the story—particularly a student looking at Australia as a market to come to to study next year—will take it into account. 'Gosh, I've got to work to look after myself, and I'm entitled to work 20 hours a week, but it seems that I'm going to be exploited.' That is bad for everyone. It is certainly bad for our reputation overseas and it is bad for our universities to be caught up in that kind of story. If there is no story—if people have a good story about the quality of their educational experience in Australia and a good story about not being exploited at work—that in and of itself promotes Australia as a destination that is safe and welcoming to come to. So we do not want to see that kind of thing. We know that, if we want to retain our reputation and our world-class systems, international students need more protection, not less.

Labor certainly wants to put on the public record in the Australian parliament that these bills before the Senate today remove or weaken student protections. We want that loud and clear. We do not want there to be any mistake that Labor thinks that this is additional protection for students. We do not. We absolutely believe and want on the public record that these bills remove or weaken student protections. These bills will not, as the government states, give international students more protections; they will give them less. We are very clear about that. It is wrong to argue, as the government will, that all deregulation is good. We can look back at the events of 2008 and 2009 to see the perils of not having enough regulation in place, of getting the settings wrong. None of us in this place want to go back to that situation. It is there for us to learn from, but it would seem that the government has not learnt or is not listening, because the current bills will weaken protections for international students. That history of 2008 and 2009 shows us that regulation is needed.

We do not want to see scams and rip-offs of international students. We see in the visa area that without adequate protections students are vulnerable. International students are big business, and some unscrupulous operators will take advantage. We do not want that. It is bad for all students. If there is a scam around an Australian university, that affects not only international students but also the local students who have a choice about what university they go to. 'No, I won't go to University X, because they've had all that horrible scam of international students.' It affects us all. We want a quality, well-regulated system that protects international students.