Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate the opportunity to make some comments on this very important piece of legislation, the Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment Bill 2013. It is a piece of legislation that is going to contribute to the protections that are in place for international students who are studying in Australia. Two specific amendments are on the table before us this afternoon. The first is to ensure that the Tuition Protection Service has the power to force the refund of prepaid fees where a provider fails or a course is cancelled. The second is to ensure that the Tuition Protection Service has the power to force a refund of prepaid fees where a visa is refused for a prospective student. I will speak a little bit about those amendments in detail, but I want to state first off that these are really important steps to ensuring that Australia's higher education sector remains attractive to students overseas and remains competitive, because we are competing with other nations in this extremely important export industry. This is also a bit of an opportunity for me to reflect on Labor's legacy in growing this very important industry, and I will speak about that in due course.

Let us get started by thinking a little bit about the importance of international students in my electorate of Hotham. I am incredibly lucky to represent a very diverse and very interesting population in Hotham. We are within a stone's throw of Monash University. Many of you would know Monash as one of the best universities in the whole of Australia. It is also one of the most international universities in the whole of Australia. I was lucky to be a student there for quite a few years and I can say that, whether it was being in a sporting team or joining students in a sports class or engaging in a few student political activities—which many of us got into in our younger years—or in the course of tutorials or university lectures that we shared, having international students learn with us was one of the most enriching parts of that educational experience. It is enriching for the life of that university and it also enriches life for the people of Hotham. Hotham is a vibrant and diverse place, and our international student community is very much a part of that.

But we have to be up-front and say that, for all the benefits and all the excitement that we have for the international students that are studying in Australia, there is a seedy underbelly to this too, and that is that there are many providers and we have been through a number of regulatory changes that at various times have made it, I think, too easy to provide courses. We have seen some very disturbing stories. Some of these have occurred right in my electorate of Hotham, unfortunately. I am not going to mention names or go into the gory details, but I can say that there have been incidents where teachers in colleges have purported to have qualifications and that later proved not to be true. There have been issues around course structure. One example in my electorate was where a course was being taught to the students back to front. There have been examples where students have been charged exorbitant and, frankly, exploitative fees to study at these institutions. So the legislation that we have before us is about protecting the best of this industry and making sure that that seedy underbelly does not pervade what we put out there as one of our critical exports to the world.

This is an industry that is absolutely worth protecting. I think everyone in Australia knows that this industry is important but many would not realise its critical economic importance. Educational exports is our fourth largest export industry. We export $15 billion worth of education every year to people visiting Australia. It is actually more than our whole tourism industry combined. It supports 100,000 jobs. It has also, for better or worse, come to be a pivotal part of funding our higher education sector, and that is for students who are visiting from overseas but also for Australian students who are accessing tertiary education. About a quarter of our students at the moment are international students. They more than pay their way, and our universities are now very frank and up-front about how important that is for their survival.

These are some of the hard financials, but those of us who have been lucky to participate in this know that we reap a lot of other benefits from having international students studying with us in Australia, that it is not just about the dollars. In October 2012, the Labor government released the Australia in the Asian century white paper, a fantastic document which I think just started to unravel some of the difficult issues that we need to face to really embrace our proximity to Asia and get the most out of the Asian century. A report that considered the white paper pointed out that 80 per cent of the international students studying in Australia were from the Asian region and it said:

International education is a pillar of the people-to-people relationships that drive economic, cultural and social outcomes for Australia in the Asian Century …

I am very committed to this sentiment because I have been lucky to study in America as well and just about all of my classmates were from different countries around the world. I can absolutely say from personal experience that those person-to-person relationships are pivotal to the way that we liaise with other countries. When you look in the economics textbooks they are all about numbers on a page, but people really matter when it comes to building economic links. I think it is also relevant when we think about foreign affairs. A key plank of Australia's soft power and aid strategy is really being pursued through this exposure that we are giving to students all over Asia to Australian culture, to improved fluency in English and to the building of friendships that I have talked about. Perhaps even more relevantly for Australia as a nation, surrounded as we are by mostly Asian countries, it is a fantastic opportunity for us to learn about their culture, their language and the way that they do business.

A final point I would make on this is: just think of the fantastically skilled workforce that we are creating by helping turn out so many skilled graduates from our higher education institutions around Australia. This is hundreds of thousands of mostly young people, mostly from Asian countries, who are learning more about the English language, more about our Australian culture and forming ties to people, companies and institutions.

So there are a lot of benefits that I have talked about, but there have been challenges. When we see the thriving state of the sector today it is important for us to remember that this did not just happen organically. Significant intervention was required at certain times to make sure that things did not fall off the rails. Initially, the Howard government took a very hands-off approach to international education, with near disastrous consequences for the sector. I think we can remember that back in those days just about any old duffer could start up an international college of some sort and start providing some type of higher qualification. There were issues with lax immigration rules, which led to the entry of completely unsustainable levels of international students. Frankly, the institutions were unable to absorb those sorts of numbers. We saw the entry of some dodgy operators, who affected the whole export industry.

I think that, as well, we are all across a lot of the practical issues that were faced by those international students and that the government eventually had to come in and give a hand with. On issues around housing, we have all heard the stories of 17 young people crowding into and sleeping in shifts in bedrooms and all those sorts of things that have been going on. We have heard the endless stories about work exploitation that has taken place where international students were being paid well below the minimum wage and were not being given appropriate awards and conditions in the work that they were doing. We have heard about massive international attention being given to incidents of violence against international students—very disturbing stuff.

One of the things that we are seeing and that we have seen in recent years is that this is a very discerning group of consumers. These students who are coming to study in Australia have options presented to them all over the world. This is an open competition where countries like Australia are competing for these young students to come and study. When you look at the numbers you can see some of the sensitivities here. From 2008 to 2009, we had 70,000 visa applications granted to international students from India. I believe that was the peak of applications from India. It was also the time when some of those controversies started to bubble up a little bit. The following year, that dropped by more than 50 per cent. There were just 30,000 applications that following year. It is a staggering decline and just illustrates the importance of making sure that we have our eye on that industry. It does not need to be overregulated, but at the same time there are consequences for our whole economy and for this huge export industry if we let things run without some proper oversight.

The summary of this particular point is really that policy matters when it comes to this area of our economy. Leadership really matters, and national leadership at a time of global challenge is imperative. We saw the Rudd government come in and show leadership to try to grow the sector and to try to restore integrity so that those many thousands of Indian students who came in 2008-09 and then turned away the following year would feel more confidence in their decision to study in Australia. Just as important to restoring integrity to the sector is ensuring that we are restoring the appearance of integrity to the sector, because, as I said, this is a very discerning group of consumers.

A package of reforms was put forward to try to provide an appropriate level of protection and oversight to the industry. The Tuition Protection Service is an integral part of that. The Tuition Protection Service is a very important reform of the previous Labor government. It is simple. It provides a single contact point for students who are affected by provider default. It illustrates, I think, a deep level of commitment to protect these students who have made Australia their home for a period while they are trying to get higher education. The way that it works is that providers pay a levy, and the levy is used to support students who are trapped by provider default. It helps those students to either be placed in an alternative course or be paid a refund. It is very simple and very much an issue of justice when you think about it. The legislation said that, where students had paid up-front for a course and that course could not be provided to them, they were able to get help. They were able to be diverted into a new course or, at the very least, get their money repaid. It is shocking to think that we would even need legislation of this nature. You would think that this would not be required, but unfortunately there have been so many instances where we have seen students taken for a ride in this sector that the Rudd government had to come in and put this reform in place.

It is important to note also that the Tuition Protection Service has been essential because there have been so many instances, and I think there are predicted to be even more instances, where some of these institutions go into default. I think the Tuition Protection Service reported last year that up to 22 providers, serving 4,400 students, would close in the coming year through either business failure or regulatory action. Let us just absorb that. That is 4,400 students who went through the process and got themselves a visa, many of whom got on a plane and came to Australia to participate in these courses, and were then told, 'I'm sorry; the college has gone into default.' All we are really saying here is something pretty straightforward: these people deserve to get their money back or to be assisted into another type of institution.

In conclusion, we have talked about how important this sector is for our whole economy. Not all sectors are like this, but this one in particular is one where regulation has been very important. National leadership from our federal government has been essential to growing this sector and essential to maintaining the integrity of the sector so that a group of students who are showing themselves to be increasingly discerning about where they study will continue to choose Australia. And students like me, who had the great fortune to study with so many international students when I was a student at Monash, will continue to have that fantastic experience, and we will continue to see built those person-to-person links that will continue to help Australia move into this, the Asian, century.

Labor supports these amendments. We support any measures to help protect these international students, who are so much a part of our community and so much a part of my community in Hotham. I am pleased to speak in support of the amendments.

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