Sarah Henderson (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to rise and speak on the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment (Prohibiting Academic Cheating Services) Bill 2019. Whether it's safeguarding against foreign interference and foreign influence, whether it's ensuring the integrity of university research, whether it's providing consistent academic standards, including for non-English-speaking international students, or whether it's combating cheating in university exams, the integrity of our university sector is critical to the reputation of our graduates, the success of our businesses for which these graduates will go on to work and the prosperity of our country.

I don't think I can remember a time when the integrity of some universities has been so in the spotlight as now, and that is principally the reason that this bill is so important. We just heard a very good contribution from Senator Chandler in relation to the importance of the bill. I just briefly want to touch on the bill, and I want to make a couple of comments about Senator Carr's contribution.

The bill amends the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Act 2011, the TEQSA Act, to make it an offence to provide or advertise academic cheating services for students studying with Australian higher education providers, whether the service is provided from within Australia or overseas. There are serious penalties in this bill for the provision of a cheating service. We are not talking about incidental help or students getting a bit of assistance here and there. We are not talking about parents or siblings giving some helpful advice. We are talking about professional, commercial cheating services which seek to undermine the very integrity of our universities. That's why there are criminal and civil penalties provided for in this bill of up to two years jail and fines of up to 500 penalty units, around $100,000. That is how seriously our government is treating this issue. Strict liability will apply to the criminal offence of providing an academic cheating service in order to undermine the service's tactics of disingenuous disclaimers regarding the purpose and the use of the products. TEQSA will be appointed to enforce the new law, with its new powers to include monitoring, intelligence gathering, investigation and the prosecution of identified offenders.

I want to quickly refer to Senator Carr's contribution. I am concerned about his characterisations of the work of our government in ensuring the integrity of our university and research sector. I commend the journalist who wrote the report in today's Australian newspaper, because it shines a spotlight on what is a very serious issue and one that our government takes very seriously—and that is foreign interference and foreign influence in our universities. We saw the disgraceful, appalling conduct of the University of Queensland in the way that it treated Drew Pavlou when he dared to criticise the Chinese Communist Party. Of course, that was very much influenced by the university's very close links with the CCP through the Confucius Institute. But again today we have seen more concerning reports about the many dozens of academics in Australian universities who have been involved in a program called the Thousand Talents Program. The report includes information that the names of these academics have been included in Chinese patent applications in a manner that may not only compromise the intellectual property of our universities—of course, universities are reported to have said they didn't even know about this in some cases—but also compromise our national security.

These are issues we take very seriously. We must at all stages protect the integrity of our universities. We are doing that, whether it's through the espionage and foreign interference act, through the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, through new electoral funding and disclosure reforms or, of course, through this bill. I commend the bill to the Senate.