David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The need for the Australian Government to implement a national housing and population plan that manages international student growth based on consultation and without unintended consequences for the economy or Australian students.

It seems to me that there is a clear need for the Australian government to implement a national housing and population plan that manages international student growth based on consultation without unintended consequences for the economy or Australian students.

GDP growth was 0.2 per cent in the June quarter of this year. Capital Economics today forecast that the government's Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment (Quality and Integrity) Bill will shave 0.7 per cent off growth in 2025. I'll let you do the maths on that one. The Albanese government say that they want a future made in Australia, that they want Australia to be more than a 'dig it and ship it' country: 'We're going to be the smart country and develop a new economy.' Yet, they bring forth a bill that will cripple our fourth biggest export industry: international education. This is the biggest export outside iron ore, coal and natural gas. It doesn't seem to square to me. They're happy to give our gas away mostly for free. Here we have an industry that isn't doing that, yet they've taken out the sledgehammer. Under the guise of education reform, we see what is clearly just an immigration bill.

We obviously need a sensible conversation about immigration in Australia; we absolutely do. It is not fair on Australians and it is not fair on new Australians, new migrants, who arrive here into a housing crisis. It's not working, and we need to be looking at the number of people who are arriving here and having a really sensible conversation about what the trade-offs are when it comes to the environment of a growing population. It was in the State of the environment report. It is very clear. But we should do that in a sensible way, set targets and then have a plan to actually achieve that. How big do we want Australia to be? I don't hear too many people I talk to here in the ACT saying they want a big Australia, so that means we need to actually have a plan.

Instead of a plan that takes into account things like housing, accessibility, affordability, infrastructure, the environment and water and our priority skills, we have legislation that is rushed, is poorly drafted and will do immense harm to our economy and our higher education sector, a sector that is already on the rocks after COVID. We currently have the lowest research and development spend on record. We have to turn that around, and we have not seen the government deal with that. They finally commissioned a review to look at our R&D spend, right at the end of their term.

As a former well-respected senator in this place and a former higher education minister said today, this bill ignores the Faustian deal that, when the universities were not properly funded, they turned to international education as a way of securing the revenue they needed. Removing funding for research meant they had to go after international students to cross subsidise, and here we are taking that away from them and not giving them extra research funding. Obviously there is broad agreement that the integrity and quality measures in this bill are welcome; there are some shonky providers that need to be cleaned up. But we are in a situation where the unintended consequences are severe not just to the economy, as I have discussed, but also to domestic students. Western Sydney University really highlighted this in their evidence to the Senate committee. They have a small percentage of international students, but, as Vice-Chancellor George Williams said:

In our case, for every dollar we take in from an international student, 24c goes to supporting other activities, particularly our domestic students. So 24c in every dollar goes to our food pantry for domestic students, to equity issues and to study help. So we're thinking very carefully about how this will affect our Australian students, because we will no longer be able to offer some of the vital programs they need to get through university.

The other thing we need to talk about in this bill is the extraordinary power this bill confers on the minister. Surely the Morrison administration taught us the enormous risks with this approach.

In closing, I will say the Senate hasn't even begun debate on this bill, and the government wants it to start on 1 January next year. It's untenable and creates enormous risks. We should be talking about immigration, not using higher education as a scapegoat.