Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australia's student visa industry is of enormous importance to Australia's national economy and it enjoys the strong support of members on this side of the House, as it has for many years. At its peak in 2009 there were more than 491,000 international students enrolled in courses in Australia, generating $18.6 billion and making it the nation's third largest export industry, behind coal and iron ore. At the start of this financial year more than half of the 332,700 international students in Australia were studying at universities, while a third were on vocational training visas studying diploma courses. Our student visa population is made up of students from more than 197 countries. Students from China and India, our top source countries, make up about a third of the students here on visas. The majority of students choose to study mainly in New South Wales, my home state, or in Victoria.

In the decade leading to 2009-10 the student visa program grew at an average of 15 per cent per year. Australia's share of the international student market increased from 5.1 per cent in 2000 to seven per cent in 2009, making Australia the largest provider of international education services in 2009 behind the United States, at 18 per cent, and the United Kingdom, at 10 per cent. A recent paper on the student visa industry last year by the Bureau of Statistics observed that, considering the relative size of Australia's population, such high representation in the international student market was indicative of the ongoing importance of this sector to Australia, both economically and for communities. We certainly do punch above our weight when it comes to competing in the space of international education. Following a series of government measures between 2008 and 2011, along with other factors such as the strong dollar, more competition for students overseas and the damage done to Australia's reputation following attacks on Indian students, enrolments fell by between 10 and 30 per cent. A large number of colleges that were aimed at providing courses purely for migration purposes collapsed as a result.

In 2009-10 student visa applications dropped by 19 per cent, making that the first year of negative growth in total applications. The negative growth continued in 2010-11, when international education activity contributed $16 billion to our economy and there were just 141,600 applications lodged offshore—a drop of 20 per cent on the previous program year.

According to the ABS, declines in student visa applications have been most prominent in the VET sector, despite 150 per cent growth in that sector between 2006-07 and 2008-09. The number of student visa holders in Australia dropped by 13 per cent between June 2010 and June 2011.

Given the significant contribution the international student sector makes to our economy, and not only to that economy but also to our society more broadly, protecting the future success of this industry and enabling it to remain competitive is, and should be, an ongoing priority for all members of this place. It is therefore extremely concerning that the Auditor-General found last year that management of this critical industry and of the visa program was not sufficiently robust to effectively meet the challenges involved in achieving the government's objective for the student visa program of balancing industry growth and program integrity. The ANAO found that more than 350,000 non-compliance notices issued to students had not been acted upon, prompting fears that the backlog could obscure serious cases of non-compliance. The Auditor-General's report in May 2011 also found the department was unable to effectively monitor the 20-hour work restriction on student visas or to enforce compliance, because of the lack of an appropriate regulatory regime.

In June 2011 Michael Knight, a former Labor minister in New South Wales, presented his review of the student visa program to the government with 41 recommendations, which included measures to introduce a more targeted, strategic analysis of non-compliance. On 22 September last year, Ministers Evans and Bowen announced the government's response and accepted all of the 41 recommendations made in that report. On 22 March this year, this bill was introduced into the House to enact recommendation 24—that is, to remove the blanket automatic cancellation regime currently in place for student visa holders who breach the academic progress or attendance requirement, and replace it with a more targeted strategic analysis of non-compliance.

While the government has agreed to adopt the recommendations of the Knight review—and we believe this will go some way towards addressing these issues in relation to Australian universities—the coalition awaits with interest a second report in mid-2012 to tackle these issues across the international education sector more broadly—something that has so far been ignored. It is necessary to ensure that Australia's reputation in the provision of excellence in education is not compromised by linking those outcomes with migration outcomes. We are in the business of selling world-class education; we are not in the business of selling education visas as a pathway to permanent residence.

We will look carefully at the legislative and regulatory changes when they are introduced into parliament to ensure that the proposed changes address the issues and do not create more unintended consequences. With that in mind, the coalition does not, in principle, oppose this bill as we believe that, on the face of it, the bill seeks to streamline and better target resources towards migration fraud and non-compliance in the student visa sector. This is important because the Australian public has to have confidence in the integrity of our immigration program. When they lose that confidence, then any opportunities for us to continue to advance the immigration program—which has been what has brought luck to the lucky country in so many respects—are lost.

We already know of the serious and significant failures of the government in other areas of the immigration program, particularly in relation to the illegal entry of boats to Australia and the chaos that has been created there, which I will not dwell on this evening. Australians have lost confidence in this government's ability to run an immigration program effectively, securely and successfully. In this area it is important that we ensure integrity measures are in place. The coalition will always support measures that improve the integrity of the immigration program.

Further clarification is going to be required as to the thresholds, the definitions and the trigger points that would accompany the new compliance regime. In particular, we need to be clear about the resource requirements that this new regime will demand. The coalition awaits with great interest the final report from the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee that is due on 18 June this year.

This bill will serve as an eraser to the embarrassing administrative backlog of the government's own creation, wiping out the administrative backlog of over 350,000 non-compliance notices created by Labor's mismanagement of this scheme. If the department could not handle these mandatory notices, it is hard to see how it will find the resources to manage a discretionary regime with the kind of integrity that Australian taxpayers and Australian citizens would expect, given the pressures that are placed upon the Department of Immigration and Citizenship as a result of the government's policy failures, particularly on our borders. The rationale for introducing a mandatory cancellation regime was to ensure that basic threshold requirements, such as actually attending an educational institution and passing a course of study, were met as an absolute requirement of holding a student visa—no exceptions. After all, if you are not attending your classes and you are not passing your course, you obviously have no need of a student visa and one has to wonder what your purpose is in being here in the first place.

At the end of 2010, the Auditor-General found there were more than 250,000 students who had failed to comply with one or the other of these requirements and had been issued with non-compliance notices. None of these notices had been dealt with. In the first three months of 2011 alone, more than 30,000 new non-compliance notices were issued every month. The Knight review found that around 35 per cent of these—over one-third—fell into the high risk categories. The fact that this important compliance regime fell apart under this government is not surprising. Enforcing compliance and upholding the integrity and robustness of Australia's immigration program is, though, in the vanguard of what the coalition believes should be the approach to immigration, including Australia's student visa program.

I note with some concern that last week there were reports of serious allegations of fraud and non-compliance in other areas of the migration program. They concerned applications coming through our post in Islamabad. As yet there has been no explanation from the government. There has been no announcement of how many cases have been referred to the Australian Federal Police, of how many prosecutions are pending, of how many visas have been potentially compromised or of how many investigations have been launched into cases referred to the Migration Review Tribunal which could have been connected to what those whistleblowers in-post were suggesting might have been fraudulent activity. All of these matters have gone completely unaddressed despite the fact that, in the same report on 7.30, the department's own spokesperson acknowledged that there had been a problem—and there was a problem. All of these matters remain unaddressed and dismissed. These matters of integrity are incredibly important, and I accept that the government is with this bill seeking to address them. But there will be questions about how effective the measures in the bill are, and, as we go through the Senate committee process, we hope to learn more about how they are going to be addressed.

So the coalition will be watching very closely to ensure that this new regime is properly resourced to deliver compliance and integrity in our student visa program. It is important that everyone seeking to game this system be identified, that their visas be cancelled and that they be promptly removed. The Senate committee report should go some way to providing clarification on the new regime, the practice of which will also need to be scrutinised.

I note that the government has as usual failed to manage its legislative program in this place in such a way as to ensure that the Senate's report is completed and made available to the parliament prior to its being brought before this House for a decision. I hoped that we would have had the opportunity for the measures in the bill to be looked at further before it is brought to a decision and to make any amendments that may be required as a result of the interrogation of the bill. In good faith the coalition is not going to oppose this bill in this place. It will come under scrutiny in the other place, and we will consider the matter in closer detail once there has been the opportunity for a review. I hope that, once the review is concluded, any concerns—if indeed there are any—can be resolved.

I go now to some of the more technical points about the bill. The bill seeks to amend two items of legislation: the Migration Act and the Education Services for Overseas Students Act 2000. This legislation sets out the consequences of non-compliance for student visa holders who fail to meet mandatory course attendance and participation requirements. Currently, students who fail to meet either of these are, as I noted before, subject to the automatic cancellation of their visa.

Under the ESOS Act, education providers are required to monitor course progress and attendance of international students and must at minimum intervene where an international student has failed more than 50 per cent of the units attempted in any one study period or is at risk of failing to attend between 70 per cent and 80 per cent of total course contact hours. Where achievement or attendance has not been satisfactory, the education provider must report the 8202 breach to the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science, Research and Tertiary Education.

Currently, under section 137J of the Migration Act, the automatic cancellation of a student visa is triggered when the student receives a notice of breach under section 20 of the ESOS Act. The student then has 28 days to comply with the notice or to attend a departmental office to make submissions about the breach and circumstances leading to the breach; otherwise, the visa is cancelled and the student is excluded from applying for further visas for up to three years. Any family-dependent visa holders would also have their visas cancelled.

This blanket non-compliance regime would be replaced under this bill by a system in which information conveyed by student course variations is used as an input into a more targeted and strategic analysis of non-compliance, and for the assessment of the individual circumstances of student visa holders. This bill would prevent registered providers from sending those notices under section 20 to a student visa holder who breaches a prescribed condition of their visa, effectively repealing the automatic cancellation under the Migration Act. This bill proposes that, rather than blanket cancellation rules being applied, cases of non-compliance be examined in the context of the minister's discretionary powers under section 116 of the Migration Act to allow infringements to be investigated and prioritised according to risk, taking into account individual or extenuating circumstances.

What is important here from our perspective is that we know what the threshold tests are going to be and that we understand how they are going to screen, identify, target and then act upon those cases of non-compliance that warrant action. This is a difficult task. I welcome the more risk-oriented approach rather than the blanket approach. We do not want to create a bureaucratic merry-go-round and a paper trail and a paper chase in this area simply for the sake of it; we need to target.

I think that these areas will require very close attention when dealing with the genuine and very real cases of potential fraud and of non-compliance within our immigration program. What is necessary is a clear understanding of the resources, of the processes, of the intentions, of the transparency and of the opportunity to further ensure that we are targeting areas of risk. Whether it is student visas, work visas, holiday visas, protection visas—any element of our visa program—it is absolutely critical that we uphold the integrity of our program at every single stage of the process because when you fail to uphold the integrity of either the construction of the program or its administration you are at great risk of allowing this program to fall victim to a lack of confidence from the Australian community.

The coalition is committed to the integrity of our immigration program. We believe strongly in our immigration program. We want to see it succeed and to see it welcomed, appreciated and supported in the Australian community. In that spirit we welcome the measures that are put forward in this bill and we look forward to further scrutiny of them in the other place.