Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is really interesting, in this debate on the quality of Australian universities and how we are going to preserve that quality, that the focus of the government has been on cutting red tape. I can imagine similar debates going on where we actually forget the fundamentals of what we are trying to do here with the regulation of universities and the development of TEQSA, which was a Labor government initiative in 2011. Of course, every organisation is, quite rightly, constantly reviewed and does have to develop a culture of continuous improvement. Indeed, we were responsible for initiating the review which has led to the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment Bill 2014, which is before us today.

The member for Cunningham set out very well our concerns about the bill. We are concerned as to whether or not we have really captured in a properly nuanced way all of the concerns that came back from the review. For all the talk about cutting red tape, can I please, please, implore you to be very mindful that preserving the quality of Australian universities is absolutely critical to us maintaining our place, not only in ensuring that we are able to produce students of the highest order to really be part of the knowledge economy. But also we have to be concerned about the view that our neighbours have of us and about the international students who we believe are a very important part of Australian university life.

I do not think the real focus of bringing international students is or should be on subsidising our university sector. It really should be on the enrichment that comes from bringing together the brightest and the best from around the world, and international students play an important role in that regard. It is quite interesting looking at the different approaches that different countries have to attracting foreign students. I think that unfortunately Australia has tended to focus on it as some sort of cash cow to fill in the gaps rather than seeing it as part of what we need to do to create dynamic, competitive and intellectually engaging institutions.

I was just doing a bit of background research on this. I was interested to see that last year the Council of International Students Australia president, Arfa Noor, told an education conference that Australia:

… would not attract the best and brightest from overseas until universities lifted their game.

"I don't mean to be harsh or anything but universities need to make sure that they are good enough to attract a very intelligent student," the Pakistani business student told more than 100 academics at the Universities Australia conference.

"You do hear sometimes from students who come from very good institutes back home, who work a lot, and they come into university and they say it feels like they're back in grade 2 …"

The Melbourne Institute of Technology student said her organisation had complaints some tutors could barely speak English, class sizes were too big, and lecturers simply stood and read from slides.

"If you're from a country, especially from the Asian region, where education is very competitive … you would have a certain level of expectations, and a lot of students are disappointed by the quality of education," …

She did go on to say that lots of students do actually enjoy their lifestyle in Australia, so they really have a good time, but we need to be very, very conscious of this.

As we talk about, as we put our focus on, cutting red tape—and I am not saying that there is not an argument for sharpening up some of the things we do—the fundamental thing that we must do is ensure the quality of our universities. If, with this review and with this legislation, we are taking our quality assurance backwards, I think that would be a very, very negative impact.

It is not only PISA. We have had many discussions in this place about the PISA studies that are showing that our performance vis-a-vis our OECD and Asian neighbours is falling in primary and secondary schools, but we have to look at what is happening to our universities. It is very alarming that Australia's top universities have lost ground in the latest Times Higher Education index. I know that there are various indexes and that there will be variability among them, but one of the themes that seems to be coming out is that Australian universities are slipping down the rankings, and many of our Asian neighbours are beginning to move up. For example, Australia's top-ranking University of Melbourne fell by six spots to 34th in the latest Times Higher Education index world rankings. By contrast, Singapore moved up to 23rd, placing it 11 spots ahead of Melbourne instead of one spot behind. The story is pretty sad generally across the place, with a few exceptions. So we have to be very focused on this. This issue of rigour has to extend to our universities. I just think that the intellectual leadership that the government is able to provide is very lacking if the government's focus on the qualities of universities is all on the cutting of red tape.

We had some interesting debates in parliament on the appropriations earlier today, where members of the government were recognising some of Labor's legacy from the 1980s, when we put in place a proper regime for regulation of the banking system. That meant that we did not have the subprime crisis that we saw in the United States, which sparked the global financial crisis. But here I place a word of caution. If we are looking at in some way dumbing down and reducing the size, the scale and the operation of the Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency, we have to think what the long-term consequences of that might be. In Asia we have a very, very competitive environment. Those students that are looking to come here are not going to come to Australian universities if they are considered to be lowbrow, even though they might enjoy the lifestyle. They will be selecting universities elsewhere, in the United States and the United Kingdom, where these standards have been maintained. And, among our own students, we will see more and more of our brightest and best wanting to leave and go to universities elsewhere if our universities are not held in high regard.

Unfortunately there are Australian universities—and I do not think this is confined to Australian universities, but I hear this very frequently from academics—where they feel compelled to pass fee-paying students. That word soon gets around, and the quality and the prestige of those degrees decline. When we are in this global environment, in a region that is marked by a growing rigour in the education of our Asian neighbours, such that they are zooming up all the educational charts, the idea that our focus on higher education would be on the cutting of red tape seems to me to be absolutely absurd.

This issue is critical to our future. I repeat a statement I made the other day which I think is very important. When we are looking at the standing of our universities, our top universities must have decent levels of research funding, because, through those decent levels of research funding, you get the top operators within any field, and that becomes the basis of the universities' prestige and the interest that both Australian and overseas students will have in coming to those universities. If we want to truly have centres of excellence, we need very high, rigorous quality assurance standards as well as a very high level of well-funded research.

I do not have a lot of confidence that the government is going to show a great deal of intellectual leadership here in the area of higher education. To have your first piece of legislation dealing with higher education all about the cutting of red tape and reducing the levels of quality assurance augurs rather poorly for the future of our universities. But I ask members to have a look at where we are going—not just where we are going in primary and secondary schools vis-a-vis our Asian neighbours but where we are going in our universities. We cannot continue to have this view that, as this little white bastion at the bottom of Asia, we are going to be continually able to outperform and attract students from that region. We need to lift our game. We are in a globally competitive world and our Asian neighbours are lifting their game much more rapidly than are we.

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