Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As I said, the Greens have turned around and they want this open-ended approach, rather than making sure that we have a proper system, which this bill clearly starts bringing in. You've got the hard, mad Left on one side, and you've got the Right on the other side. Quite clearly, we've come up with the—I'll use the words—militant middle, which says that this is the right approach to take to get our education system on the right track.

This bill amends the ESOS Act to safeguard the quality and integrity of our international education sector and to provide the Minister for Education with the power to set limits on the number of international students that can come to Australia each year. The bill is the result of two years of consultation as part of the Universities Accord, which is a blueprint on how we can reform our higher education system to make a better and fairer system. We heard from prominent experts such as Professor Mary O'Kane, Jenny Macklin, Barney Glover, Fiona Nash and many, many more people who presented to that committee. The Universities Accord recommended:

That to address issues with the integrity and quality of teaching and facilities in international tertiary education and ensure that international education providers maintain their social licence to operate, the Australian Government—

should be—

taking an evidence-based approach to issues including:

i. managing demand volatility

ii. course concentrations and the quality of the student experience

iii. access and availability of affordable student housing.

So you've got the Greens on one side saying, 'Let it loose,' and you've got the conservatives on the other side giving many different positions. But the only thing they are doing is politically making a point of trying to turn around and say, 'Whatever's brought up by Labor is wrong.' They're in a coalition, the 'no' coalition, when it comes to actually reforming this important sector of education.

The government has committed to implementing 29 of the 47 recommendations of the accord in full. An obvious first step is that the ESOS agencies who regulate the education sector need the power to drive out the shonky providers who lure international students here with false promises. This is a critical part of the bill, but those opposite want to shy away from it because they want to turn around and say, 'We're not backing the shonks,' whilst they back them. They are in this place backing some of the shonkiest operators, and I'll go to some of the reasons why in a moment.

This bill also requires education agent commissions to be transparent and requires new providers to demonstrate a track record of delivering quality education to domestic students before they can recruit international students. Those opposite don't want to tell you that either. That's what they're voting against—transparency of the rip-off merchants, the agent commissions and the shonky operators out there. They want to turn around and give them a free pass. That's what they're doing. That's what this bill is intended to rectify and will rectify.

The inquiry into the bill heard there was widespread support for these integrity measures, but there was not a word from those opposite. They're not making sure that we are doing the right thing. They don't back in these sorts of proposals. In actual fact, if they had a different view, they should've put it in their own minority reports. They should've put those views and put suggestions about what they thought should be happening in those reports, but, no, what they've done is simply make a shonky arrangement, allowing shonks to survive in this sector. Professor Attila Brungs, Vice-Chancellor and President of UNSW Sydney, said:

We support the government's intention in parts 1 to 6 of the legislation, which are around integrity measures to weed out unscrupulous providers who exploit students, which is excellent.

Paul Harris, from Innovative Research Universities, told the committee that they support the 'ongoing work with the government to improve quality and integrity across the national education system'.

The integrity measures outlined in the bill are important to safeguard this critically important industry, but it's an industry that has lost community trust. The government has been taking this problem seriously, and the integrity measures in this bill are on top of a number of integrity measures that we've put in place since coming into office. We have introduced financial capacity requirements, implemented a genuine student requirement, increased the English-language requirements and issued ministerial direction 107, which is a directive to public servants at the Department of Home Affairs to process student visa caseloads based on the risk level of education providers and the student's country of citizenship.

Despite widespread support, the majority of this bill has been caught up in the hypocritical politicking of the Liberals and Nationals. The bill was referred to the Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee in May this year. The inquiry was extended in August, and then extended again in September. They called for four committee hearings on this bill, delaying this debate and going over the same issues time and time again because they didn't want to be held to account for the measures that they're voting against.

The Liberals and Nationals tried to delay this bill—