Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I support the introduction of a unique student identifier. Obviously that is in the context of Australia having debated for decades the merits or otherwise of unique identifiers, right back to the Australia Card of the 1980s and 1990s. The lesson we learned in that debate is that there has to be significant net benefit to citizens if we are going to contemplate the privacy issues around unique identification. But there is pretty much no doubt in this chamber or across the nation that a unique student identifier delivers for us a range of important benefits. Not the least of those is being able to track the up to three million Australians who, together with overseas students, often move in and out of the VET sector, picking up courses, changing courses and even changing providers.

I want to acknowledge that there have been a large number of participants in developing this student identifier. They have done a good job. I might be slightly critical and say that it should not have taken the years that it has. This really was something that should have been achieved five years ago. It should have been in place a long time ago. The fact that it has fallen to us to finally legislate on it indicates that there was a lack of progress under the previous Labor government in this area.

The benefits of a unique identifier are, firstly, for students, secondly, for RTOs doing training, thirdly, for employers and, finally, for government—fourth out of four, and that is appropriate. I want to make the observation that the one significant change made by the coalition government was to say, 'We don't need another agency to do this.' Isn't this a recurring theme that we have heard in the last few weeks? What was it with Labor and their predilection for setting up new agencies and giving each one of them a fancy acronym? What was it about Labor that they fixated on this? The only form of job creation they were truly behind was making government agencies larger and larger. The message is fairly simple: enough of the water bubblers, tea rooms and pot plants. What we need to do is run them as efficiently as possible, and with the registrar supporting the work of a department you will see that the unique student identifier with modern technology can be done without floors and floors of publicly funded office workers in high-rise buildings in major capital cities. Let's release those very good, capable, impassioned and talented people into the private sector where they can drive our economy and build GDP.

The introduction of mandatory collection of this sort of activity data has already started. In January of this year multiple data for the purposes of planning and tracking has already been collected, but with this legislation comes the unique identifier itself. What we now have is, of course, risk framework; and that simply means that instead of a carte blanche surveillance by which government can monitor, profile and target their audits the more high-risk providers of education or reduce oversight of those who are lower-risk providers. That will support more efficient allocation of training subsidies, because we do not want to be crowding out private subsidy where there is willingness to pay for degrees and where people are keen to acquire that qualification or know there is significant private benefit in gaining it. Then, of course, the need for public subsidy reduces.

That responsive deregulation is clearly a coalition vision that was never going to be adopted by Labor. I note that the Greens have released a website with details of what students will be paying for each of their degrees. That is very impressive, given our inability to predict the weather or even the fuel price next week. The Greens' website also says, 'If this makes you mad and we're mad too, why don't we recruit you to our party?' It is a cheap trick and it is a stunt and most students will see it for what it is.

Deregulation allows the market to meet the demand in a way that high-quality universities have never been quite able to do. I went through a sandstone university medical degree. Medical degrees were pretty much MacDonaldised right around the country—they were very similar—but, despite the passion, the qualification and the high esteem I held for my lecturers, there was very little movement or intellectual exchange between our campuses. The notion of bringing someone from overseas as a high-impact professor to alter the program in Australian medical courses simply was not contemplated in the 1980s and 1990s. I see a day when the greatest lecturers and professors in the world come to Australia, because they are attracted to be here by a deregulated system that rewards them for their ability and rewards them for what they can do for a course. But that can never happen if we are simply doling out fixed, rationed arrangements to every university, because, naturally, they will play the game of delivering services as efficiently and as leanly as possible, but they will never contemplate the idea of investing more in quality until fees are deregulated.

Let's be honest: in a few years from now when courses are deregulated, high-merit students will be offered multiple places at multiple universities for varying prices. They will make an assessment of whether that price is appropriate for the degree. Students are perfectly capable of doing that—of comparing courses, comparing campuses and deciding what to pay for and what not to pay for. As long as we simply have the same size, the same shape and the same flavoured degree in every location, we will be left behind by international providers who are taking their degrees to new levels, as reflected in university rankings.

Let me pull back to a little history of how we came to the identifiers. In April 2012 the Council of Australian Governments came together to realise the benefit in having some form of student identification, which obviously provides students with the ability to have a complete vocational educational report of everything they have done. It enables them to provide it to future training providers where necessary and they can give permission to those training providers online to access their academic records. This is far simpler than the old days of having to certify academic transcripts. That initiative was developed jointly by all state and territory governments, and so it is a further nationalisation and harmonisation of what was a very fractured and state based vocational education sector. It all comes together with advances in ICT.

Subject to what we are passing today, the identifier will be implemented and it then becomes a building block for a whole lot of other vocational education reforms, which I will just touch on briefly. The ability to follow students who often move between publicly funded and private providers is just one example. If the government is going to be funding education, we need to know absolutely that the dollar goes to where it is delivered and to where it most makes a difference and to where it has most impact. There is no point crowding out private investment and there is no point government trying to pick winners on where money should go or how many people are taken into courses—all of that can be done by the sector itself. Universities know that well; they understand their market; and decisions should be left to them to make. As part of the broader VET reform agenda we are seeing for the first time people who are contemplating study do not face significant upfront costs. Almost buried in the hysteria around the budget is the fact that millions of young Australians, who will not necessarily go to university to obtain those highly-sought-after and restricted degrees, will not face upfront costs when they pursue vocational and other forms of TAFE based education.

Many of those students will be in and out of educational training. That is the reality. They are not all going to go into three-year degrees in three years. Many of them will have children; many will come from very complex backgrounds; many will be barely literate or numerate because they have failed the school system—or the school system has failed them. For Australia to increase its proportion of its population with some form of tertiary qualification ,we realise that we are moving to those who are not the orthodox university attenders of a generation ago. We are behind in those proportions; other nations are well ahead. We know that keeping people in formal education for a year longer has direct GDP benefits.

We know that, by increasing the number within our population who have a tertiary qualification, that has a direct GDP outcome. We are a low-population, leading economy. We are short on labour. We cannot afford those people to be unqualified lacking in confidence or self-esteem. We need those people engaged, training, gaining capability because only with capability can you have opportunity. The two are integrally linked, and capability is the antecedent.

Training providers will have a few extra obligations. It will be a requirement under this legislation we are debating and the conditions of registration that providers have a valid USI for student before they can graduate the student, provide them with a qualification or a statement of attainment. That will apply to new students, pre-enrolled students and those who are continuing. The process for all students to obtain that USI will be pretty much the same but, importantly, thanks to ICT, it will be closely interwoven with training provider access to that information.

Once USIs are available, nationally, courses will only be able to be entered if you have a USI and you will not be able to receive your qualification without it. Training providers will not necessarily be required to apply for a USI, but in many cases that might be the most convenient way of doing it with the student support. That can all be accessed through a website or through a web server interface.

The training providers have, as I said, requirements. They need to verify a USI, if it is provided by a student, and they need to collect one from the student directly if that is not the case. They need to ensure a student has a valid USI before completing a program and they have got to ensure the security of a USI. All of that related documentation should be destroyed along with any personal information once it has been collected solely for the purposes of generating the USI.

Accessing transcripts, I have pointed out, becomes far simpler and that is thanks to, currently, the very good work that is being done at the NCVER. I think it is important also to mention very briefly the range of authorities and participating groups that are on the reference group—that is, TAFE Directors Australia; ACPET; the Enterprise Registered Training Organisation Association; the Industry Skills Council Collective; Adult Learning Australia; ASQA; and a number of other state based bodies.

The USI important advance should have occurred years ago. It allows training to follow the student. It is further evidence that benefits well outweigh any inconvenience or risk, and that having a unique identifier is increasingly being adopted as a comfortable thing for the Australian. There is an important lesson for us in health care where we are moving towards similar efforts with the personally controlled electronic health record—memo for health planners: make sure that the benefits for the patient increasingly together with the provider outweigh any concerns or detriments. Unlike Labor, who again came up with this fabulous idea of yet another agency and even more bureaucracy, it is a coalition government that is delivering this reform without needing to place an unnecessary burden on the taxpayer.

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