Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I listened to the minister's answer to Senator Wong's question carefully. But I don't accept that the level of care and attention to the inclusion of the university sector is the way that the minister has characterised it. The evidence provided to the committee and the evidence provided during the estimates process clearly sets out that the university sector was never consulted during the process of the bill being established.

The Australian university sector is a critical national institution. Our university sector is perhaps more important to us as a country than university sectors are in comparable countries. It is critical because, depending on the year, it's our third or fourth largest exporter. Our export of education services to people around the world is of enormous material benefit to Australia, but it also has enormous soft power and soft diplomacy potential, a potential that has never been taken seriously by this government. It's the potential to have thousands of people who have had a good experience of their education in Australia, in a liberal democracy and in institutions that value teaching and learning to spend the rest of their professional careers in countries all over the globe, in countries that Australia hopes to have good relationships with, as advocates for Australia, as people who have deep relationships with Australians in the public service and in business. We have squandered that capacity. We have squandered that soft diplomacy capacity no more at any other time than we have over the course of the last 12 months.

Universities are profoundly important in a country that occupies a big continent with a growing population that is reliant upon them for its future prosperity and security. Our universities are fundamental as places of innovation and research, product development, the development of ideas, the development of ways of managing our economy more effectively and more efficiently and making sure that when we improve the economy it lifts the living circumstances of every Australian and the strength and resilience of our democracy. Universities are deeply important.

But there is a profound hostility on behalf of some members of the coalition to the university sector. You may shake your head, Minister Payne, but at every opportunity some of these characters are out there denigrating our universities and driving a completely hostile and wholly negative government approach to the university sector. How else could you explain what has happened to the university sector this year that's culminated in this zero consultation bill that seeks to regulate the operations of universities in terms of their research work with overseas institutions? At the beginning of the year, when the coronavirus pandemic implications for Australia became clear, the Prime Minister's message to foreign students was, 'Go home.' It was not, 'We're going to look after you.' It was not, 'We're going to support you.' It was not, 'We're going to include you in the government's package to make sure that you are looked after and have decent access to work.' The message was, 'Go home.' When I walked through the inner suburbs of Sydney—I'm fortunate enough to live in a university district, sandwiched between the University of Sydney and the University of Technology Sydney—what I saw in my suburbs were two things that should never have been seen: furniture tossed out on the street as overseas students were pushed out of rental accommodation and food queues. I saw food queues in Australia for overseas students. How could this be?

Our contract as a country when educating young people in Australia is not just a commercial transaction. It should be, if we've got an eye to our soft diplomacy and relationship issues with other countries, a solemn contract between us and the parents of those young people that we will look after their kids. Can you imagine if you'd sent your kids to an overseas jurisdiction and that was the treatment meted out to them? That's what happened during the coronavirus to the university sector. It's done untold damage to the capacity of the sector to market its services around the world.

We saw a botched and mismanaged approach to university fees, with an absurd set of propositions that you would think that the party of the free market would be on top of. If you make it cheaper to do the courses that you want people to do but deliver less income to the people who deliver the courses that you say you want students to do, guess what that means? Cut classes, fewer tutors, fewer resources, bleeding universities dry and bleeding the very parts of the universities that you want to cut because of some misplaced hostility that some creatures on the coalition backbench have to the liberal arts and some courses that are pursued. I know that some of these backbenchers probably turned up to their first tutorial and were talked over by somebody who'd done that week's reading. This was a bitter humiliation for them and I understand their hostility to the arts and a series of these important things. So that was the second wave of hostile change.

Now we have this: no package for the universities in terms of the coronavirus; a terrible message sent to overseas students and to people in the sector; and we have zero consultation. I agree with Senator Wong: there absolutely is room for more improvement and effective regulation of the university sector. Universities are global institutions. They are required to undertake effective research, whether it's sequencing the coronavirus genome, developing the Gardasil vaccine or whatever the work is, and that requires global collaboration. And in many cases it will require collaboration with universities in the People's Republic of China. That is no excuse for zero consultation with the university sector, because that doesn't send a message that the Commonwealth is here to help, here to enable more institutional resilience and here to support academics and university administrations to make sure that they get their engagement with overseas universities right—that there is probity, a regard for the national interest and transparency. None of those things has happened; the message instead is a punitive one. It's about a veto, not a process, and it completely flies in the face of all the other efforts the government has made to improve the sector's resilience and effectiveness.

My questions are: does the minister support more or less collaboration between Australian universities and overseas universities? Does the minister believe that the amount of research collaboration between Australian universities and overseas universities will increase or decrease as a result of the legislation? How will that work be supported and evaluated over the coming 12 months, two years and three years with the review provisions of the proposed legislation?