Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment Bill 2014, which seeks to change the operation of TEQSA, Australia's national higher education regulator. I move:

That all the words after 'That' be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading the House notes that the:

(1) Government has failed to offer an adequate response to the Review of Higher Education Regulation;

(2) bill does not adequately demonstrate how the international reputation of the tertiary education sector will be protected; and

(3) Government has failed to provide appropriate time for consultation and consideration of the bill.

Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is there a seconder to the amendment?

Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the amendment and reserve my right to speak.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australia needs TEQSA. We need a genuine national regulator for our higher education sector. We need to preserve our international reputation as a higher education provider and we need to provide reassurance for all students. This is especially so since the government has indicated that it wishes to deregulate and expand private provision.

We need a regulator who is independent yet accountable. The public has a right to be assured that public moneys are well spent on universities, including through appropriate probity guarantees. Genuine quality assurance by universities, particularly given that they are self-accrediting institutions, needs to be verified through a regulator.

We recognise that there are different approaches in research and in teaching, just as we recognise the importance of institutional autonomy. It is important that we have a clear quality assurance framework in place that allows us to work in partnership with the higher education sector. The TEQSA Act should be part of that framework, but it is not in itself the answer.

I will firstly put the establishment and operation of TEQSA in its historical context. The last time those opposite were in office, a number of new entrants sought to operate in the higher education sector in Australia. The coalition sought to expand the sector but gave too little thought to protecting quality. Unsurprisingly, unscrupulous operators sought to make money without any concern or care for providing genuine, high-quality education. What followed were a series of scandals which were quite damaging to the sector. One example is the case of Greenwich University, which operated on Norfolk Island and marketed itself as an Australian university. Another was St Clements University which, it was later discovered, was run out of the same premises as a whisky wholesaler.

There were clearly real and emerging problems in the sector. Operators were misusing the names of reputable international institutions to establish degree factories and exploit immigration loopholes. Such institutions damaged the reputation of our sector as a whole. When Labor formed government, we determined that this was not only unacceptable but that strong action had to be taken. As a result, we established the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Authority to provide a robust regulatory framework.

When, after a period of operation, concerns of administrative overreach were raised, we responded by appointing two very capable and respected professors, Kwong Lee Dow and Valerie Braithwaite, to conduct a review of higher education regulation. When we were provided with the review last year, we welcomed it immediately. It was a considered and comprehensive piece of work. It reflected broad consultation and a deep understanding of the sector and the forces at play in the regulation of the sector. The report recommended changes to administrative practice and legislative interpretation. Some of those recommended changes are reflected in this bill. The emphasis, however, was on a change in culture. Quality had to be understood as a mutual goal—partnership was the key. This was the defining principle of the university compacts process Labor introduced and the review recognised it as the key to success. The review emphasised—indeed it emphasised it again and again throughout the report—the importance of building relationships in the sector. It emphasised the importance of data sharing and the importance of reducing duplication and aligning work, especially between TEQSA and ASQA.

These are just some of the areas where the government has fallen short with this bill. Two key questions remain: does the current bill genuinely respond to the findings of the review of higher education regulation and, just as importantly, how do we ensure the accountability of the new agency? There are red flags here from the start. This bill was rushed into parliament without any consultation with the reviewers, universities, other providers or students. As far as we can tell, the bill has been given very little consideration. It was also presented without an exposure draft and without any sensible policy responses to the review. It stands in isolation.

This very concern was raised in the review. It said:

It is easy to recommend apparently straightforward amendments to legislation which appear agreed by everyone. But this is worryingly simplistic, patching individual pieces of legislation can fix functional irritations, but will not necessarily change the way in which the legislation is being applied and why.

It is a shame that in response to such a considered piece of work, we have what appears to be a hasty piece of work, an impression heightened by the fact that the minister apparently did not foresee it just one month ago. Why do I say that? Just one month ago, the minister appointed a new commissioner to TEQSA.

I acknowledge that the minister gave directions to the chief commissioner late last year, but again these do not form a full policy response. Information passed between the commissioner and the minister does not form a public policy position that is open to scrutiny and to the input of the sector. Without time to consider, without consultation and without knowing what other actions are proposed in relation to this issue, it is very difficult to know the full ramifications of the changes proposed in this bill. For example, the review recommended that the government put in place a mechanism for TEQSA to consult with the sector and suggested an advisory committee. But where is that proposed advisory committee? The review also strongly recommended the government work to identify duplication both of activity and of legislation, particularly with respect to the Higher Education Support Act, the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Act, the Education Services for Overseas Students Act and the TEQSA Act. There is no evidence to suggest that the government has given this any consideration and the concern is that, perhaps ironically, we will see a patchwork of amendments and regulation down the track to address this omission.

Similarly, there is no evidence in this bill that the government has given consideration to aligning the activities of TEQSA with those of ASQA, the national vocational regulator, as recommended in the review. And the all-important issue of sharing data across the sector, and using existing processes, such as the higher education compacts, is nowhere to be found. While all of this cannot, and should not, be included in such a bill, the government's position should at least be clear. Just as TEQSA needs to fit with the broader architecture of the higher education system, this bill should form part of a broader response to the sector's concerns about red tape.

There are recommendations of the review that seem to align with sections of the bill. It recommended that TEQSA's function be reduced so that it can focus on its core activities as a regulator and it recommended that TEQSA be able to assign decision making to case managers and other TEQSA staff as appropriate. But again, without proper consideration and consultation with the universities, with higher education providers and with students, we cannot know what adverse consequences may arise from the way in which these are to be implemented. In particular, we need to fully explore the implications of being able to delegate such a broad suite of activities to any Commonwealth appointee. It is one thing to legislate more freedom to delegate, but we should also do our best to avoid perverse consequences from this legislation, and proper scrutiny through a parliamentary committee with input from universities would be the best way to do this.

That raises one of the greatest concerns about this bill: the precedent set by the removal of properly appointed government officials through legislation. You need to look back very far indeed to find a similar use of legislation, and that makes it very concerning, to say the least. And it leaves us to ask: who is safe? Where else will the government seek to use the parliament to depose properly appointed officials? This bill requires examination, because our higher education sector—our universities, our private providers—should continue to be places of excellence. This is particularly important not only for our domestic students but also for our international education sector, which is, as many in this place know, our fourth largest export industry. This sector sustains more than 100,000 jobs and generates some $15 billion in annual revenue. It is our largest export earner after the commodities of iron, coal and gold. Prospects for sustained growth are good. The OECD estimates that there could be three million more students worldwide by 2020 who will be seeking an offshore education. Asia will continue to be a source of growth in the years to come. But we face profound challenges to ensure and retain Australia's market share in international education. Competitors, especially in North America and Europe, are making up for a shortfall in revenue following the global financial crisis through a renewed and active emphasis on international students, conspicuously from Asia and our region. This competition will only increase in the foreseeable future.

Australia's reputation for quality must be preserved. It is one of our most precious resources and a great competitive advantage. At a minimum, there needs to be consultation, there needs to be a policy statement and there needs to be recognition of the principles that are at stake. Quality must not be sacrificed in a blind haste to cut red tape. That is why Labor will be moving that this matter be put under further scrutiny in the other place, with a view to amending the bill if necessary. TEQSA can, with the right changes, regain the confidence of the higher education sector. It can, with the right approach, become the trusted regulator Australia needs. The bill before us sits too much in isolation to do the job we are asking of it. This is our concern, and we feel that further consultation and consideration of its detail needs to occur, which is why I commend the amendment that the opposition is putting before the House to members and seek their support for that opportunity.

Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The original question was that the bill be read a second time. To this the honourable member for Cunningham has moved an amendment that all words after 'That' be omitted with a view to substituting other words. The question now is that the amendment be agreed to.

Jane Prentice (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on this bill, which gives effect to the government's decision to implement recommendations from the Review of Higher Education Regulation report by Professor Kwong Lee Dow and Professor Valerie Braithwaite. The coalition government is determined to implement an appropriate deregulatory agenda to support higher education providers to deliver the highest quality teaching, learning and research. The coalition has a vision for a high-quality sector which strives for excellence and is competitive nationally and internationally. We believe such a system is best managed within a framework where providers themselves are predominantly responsible for maintaining and enhancing quality and are supported in doing so. Our educational institutions on the whole comprise people at all levels committed to ensuring quality and striving for excellence for their students and in support of the Australian community more generally.

In an increasingly competitive and global education market, it is crucial that Australia continue to demonstrate and further develop the quality of its higher education sector. To ensure Australia's ongoing competitiveness, an effective regulator is a necessary and crucial component of the higher education regulatory architecture. To ensure that universities are able to focus their energies on what they do best and spend less time on compliance and reporting, the government has accepted all of the recommendations of the Review of higher education regulation report and is committed to deliberate action to remove red tape.

The Australian Council for Private Education and Training issued a statement saying that the introduction of the TEQSA Amendment Bill comes as very good news. I quote:

It shows a government clearly committed to lifting onerous and unnecessary regulation on high performing higher education institutions.

This bill will enable TEQSA to delegate its functions and powers to appropriate level staff within the organisation, which will speed up decision making and ensure faster processing of applications. The amendment will also ensure providers wishing to appeal a TEQSA decision will be able to access an internal review mechanism first rather than having to seek review through the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, currently the first step. This bill will also allow TEQSA to extend the period of registration and accreditation of providers, allowing for greater flexibility in TEQSA's regulatory response. The Australian universities industry has reacted positively to the government's plan to accept all 11 recommendations of the Review of higher education regulation report. This demonstrates that this coalition government is delivering when it comes to reducing red tape and the burden of regulation on industry.

Professor Kwong Lee Dow, co-author of the review, commented on this bill, saying that as it follows the recommendations of the review they had prepared for the previous government he is, not surprisingly, in agreement with the key elements of the bill. Professor Lee Dow noted that we need a single national regulator for higher education and went on to acknowledge that it is widely agreed that, as the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency we have now took 2½ years of policy formulation, drafting and reworking legislation to set up, there is no point in redoing all that work and expecting to commence in 2016. He said:

The most fundamental change is to shed the quality assessments, and thereby the broader quality assurance function, and so to focus on core regulation.

He noted that it is important to encourage continuous improvement and to keep quality assurance issues in front of institutions and their people, and he said:

That remains a top order issue, but it is not feasible for the regulator to do justice to it, given its other commitments, the timing required to discharge those commitments with proper dispatch, and the kind of staff needed to give confidence to institutions that quality assurance is understood by the regulator. Quality improvement and so assurance requires peer review, often at a course level, and a different approach to that required for hard edged regulatory decisions about whether institutions and their offerings meet minimal standards.

Since commencing its regulatory functions in January 2012, TEQSA has developed a significant backlog in provider re-registration applications and course accreditation and re-accreditation applications. This backlog has been caused in part by TEQSA's inability to delegate decision-making responsibilities to appropriate TEQSA staff.

The TEQSA Act requires the agency to establish and maintain a national register of higher education providers which is publicly available. The national register is the authoritative source of information on the status of registered higher education providers in Australia. Providers being assessed for re-registration are listed as 'registration pending' on the national register. The timely delivery of provider re-registration applications is crucial to give assurance to students who are considering enrolling or are currently enrolled with providers that are 'pending registration'. TEQSA also has a significant backlog of new course accreditation and renewal of course accreditation applications. To ensure Australia's higher education sector remains competitive in a dynamic, global environment, it is vital that providers can develop and offer courses in a timely fashion. Unnecessary delays in course accreditation applications may impact on the sector's competitiveness and may discourage innovation. The restriction on the delegation of a number of powers has contributed to delays in finalising provider applications.

Where decisions have been made at the highest levels within TEQSA, applications are prevented from accessing TEQSA's internal review mechanism. As a result, applicants seeking to appeal a TEQSA decision must request the review through the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. The amendments to be made by part 2 of schedule 1 would allow decisions to be delegated to a single commissioner. This would enable faster decision making and provide applicants with greatly improved access to internal review of TEQSA's reviewable decisions.

The review did say that the agency should concentrate on regulation of minimum standards, leaving broader quality assurance to universities, and that it could get by with fewer commissioners. The University of Melbourne's Richard James, pro vice-chancellor for equity and student engagement as well as a member of the Higher Education Standards Panel, said the bill was 'clearly a major shake-up of TEQSA, but one consistent with the thinking of the Lee Dow and Braithwaite review'.

This TEQSA Amendment Bill sets the stage for the next round of efforts to focus and streamline TEQSA's regulatory role. In line with TEQSA's refined functions and increased efficiency, the measures in this bill will provide the minister with greater flexibility to determine the number of commissioners to be appointed. It will remove the requirement to appoint a specific number of part-time and full-time commissioners and will separate the roles and responsibilities of the chief commissioner and the chief executive officer. It must be reiterated that all current individual TEQSA commissioners, including the chief commissioner, are eligible for reappointment if this bill is passed.

A significant recalibration of the relationship between the sector and the regulator lies ahead. Excellence in higher education is essential to Australia's competitiveness in the Asian century. There is an international consensus that the reach, quality and performance of a nation's higher education system are key determinants of its economic and social progress. Moreover, an effective, high-quality and streamlined regulatory approach is a fundamentally important component of a competitive higher education system.

The University of Queensland, one of Australia's leading research universities and a member of the Group of Eight, has its main campus in my electorate of Ryan. The University of Queensland is embracing the government's New Colombo Plan and currently attracts thousands of international students across all faculties. I look forward to seeing the University of Queensland achieve even more as the coalition government removes the strangle of red tape on the higher education industry. I commend this bill to the House.

Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is often said that good legislation, like sausages, should never be seen being made. The TEQSA Bill 2011 was never seen being made, but it is about as healthy for higher education as a plate of week-old snags. I commend the government and specifically the Minister for Education for bringing forward this TEQSA Amendment Bill with such deliberate haste. The Minister for Education knows only too well that the strength of our higher education and research sector is critical—critical to our high standard of living, critical to our competitiveness and critical to the sustainability of job creation and growth. However, after six years of Labor's myopic and misguided misrule, the higher education sector is in critical condition. This amendment bill is the first step in putting our country back on track. There is no reason why Australia cannot be the best country in the world for research and learning. I will speak to the specifics of the bill and later offer some of my own prescriptions for energising the research industry in Australia. I speak with the authority of being the only research scientist in this place and the authority of someone who has been involved in competitive research. Einstein once said, 'Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it'—hence why I am here.

Firstly, the TEQSA Amendment Bill is designed to improve efficiency. The coalition committed at the election to cut red tape, and this bill is proof of that promise in action.

The bill will limit the TEQSA authority to its core activities—that is, it will focus on provider registration and course accreditation. It is about time too, as I was stunned to read that currently there is no internal review of decisions. There is no right to appeal a TEQSA ruling to TEQSA. Instead, any review and any appeal is directed to the hugely expensive Administrative Appeals Tribunal. This is indicative of a lack of trust by the former government in the people they hired to head up their ideas. Not only did the former government not trust the people they picked to head up the institutions they set up; they did not trust their own ministers. If they did, why did the minister of the day not have the ability to give direction to TEQSA regarding its performance? Why did the minister not have the ability to query the fees TEQSA charge or even have a say? Labor have trust issues. The Labor Party never trusted the institutions they set up, they never trusted the people they appointed to them and they never trusted themselves. I am only too glad that the good people of Australia broke up with that Labor government.

This bill and this Liberal government are restoring hope, reward, opportunity and, most importantly, competition. TEQSA needs to justify its fees and be open to market forces. I support the move to give the Minister for Education oversight of the fees that may be charged. The Labor Party never got the big picture, and this TEQSA bill is indicative of that. The bill details specific numbers of commissioners and specific full-time and part-time commissioners. Where is the justification for these restrictions and requirements? Perhaps it was just another case of answering the union's call and giving jobs for the boys at the expense of the Australian education sector.

As someone who is passionate about education I cannot stand idly by while there are ways of doing things better in our universities. While this bill is a good start, it is but a start. I want more because the people of Australia want and deserve more. The world demands more from our educational institutions, specifically of our scientific and research capacity. I have, through some toil, refined some recommendations I wish to share. They are in the spirit of this bill.

Our government must revise the funding regulation of universities, such that the material rewards for imposing higher standards on graduate learning outcomes are stronger than the material rewards for racing to the bottom. It is vital that the quality of graduates is more important than the number of graduates. I urge the minister to legislate against the use, in any form, of student feedback as a method or a metric of quality in teaching. The practice of using student satisfaction approval, instead of learning outcomes, as a measure of quality is demonstrably fraudulent and should be treated as such by law. It is essential that this is done in a fashion which cannot be circumvented by educational bureaucracies which originated and imposed this damaging practice. There needs to be a shift from central Commonwealth funded regulatory regimes to a simpler self-regulatory model. Current regulatory bureaucracies are expensive and have produced no useful outcomes in the last decade, only numerous detrimental outcomes. This will be a saving to the Commonwealth.

There is so much flotsam and jetsam left by Labor that just one repeal day is not enough. The Abbott axe is the tonic the ignored research sector needs. The industry wants to axe the ERA. The Excellence in Research in Australia policy has failed. The three most accurate ways to measure short- and medium-term research performance are: traditional expert peer review and research appraisals, professional society standing assessments or grades performed by internationally recognised subject matter experts, and the number of patents and disclosures that are produced. These should be the only methods of research performance measurement accepted in Australia.

Australia should return to a much more limited regulatory regime, akin to that predating the Dawkins era, and rely primarily on self-regulation of research by universities, which have a vested interest in maximising the quality, integrity and standing of their research. This bill demonstrates that there is the political will and ability to do such, and again I applaud the minister for such. It is a fact that research collaborations between science based industries, universities, CSIRO and DSTO have frequently suffered as a result of not only bureaucratic regulation but also bureaucratic interference typically motivated by the belief the industry collaborator should be exploited as a source of funding, free IP and free consultancy advice.

I further recommend that, in order to protect our vital national interest in defence and technology, the following be adopted as a matter of national priority. In relation to the Australian Research Council, the distribution of research funding must be biased more on high-risk and high-pay-off research than backfill research that does not yield a high pay-off in research outcomes. There must be the maintenance of a sufficient diversity in Australian research to ensure that there is sufficient breadth in Australia's research portfolio to support national policy development, national industry and national tertiary teaching demands. To achieve this I suggest allowing researchers to suggest three people with requisite backgrounds who agree to act as referees to determine the worthiness of proposals where Australia has inadequate depth to allow people within Australia to evaluate research. There must be fostered cross-disciplinary and multidisciplinary research. This offers potentially very high payoff in research outcomes but it has suffered from the current policy of rewarding research stove-piping. A suitable model would be an expanded ARC Centres of Excellence program.

Funded ARC projects must be funded fully. This may mean that fewer projects are funded, but it does mean that the researcher or research group will be fully accountable for achieving outcomes without the fallback of inadequate funding. Fund ARC bureaucracy to about five per cent instead of the current level of less than two per cent. This will remove the wasteful bureaucratic processes that researchers need to undertake with their research proposals. Allow initial research proposals from experienced researchers to be much abbreviated, removing bureaucratic burden. Effectively, this could be a plan on a page. If rejected, that would be the extent of it. If the ARC otherwise has the view that the idea is potentially worth funding, then it could ask for more detail. Remove any research priority on issues, such as climate change, that are politically hot. I know of researchers who are sceptical about the consensus position on climate change but still use key phrases to enhance the probability of winning a research grant.

The National Science Foundation in the US contracts with universities to apply a contingency allowance of around 50 per cent for grants, which allows for indirect costs associated with the project. The ARC should adopt a similar measure for funded projects. There is a need to have more than one round of ARC linkage grants per year and to create a grant for multidisciplinary research that can be funded by the ARC. We need to increase the proportion of fellowships granted compared with project grants. It is necessary to specify a minimum percentage of linkage grants that have to be new industry linkages as opposed to extant linkages. Finally, I believe my colleagues on both sides would do well to heed the advice from American zoologist Marston Bates, who said, 'Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.

I believe it to be imperative that our Liberal government remove the 30 per cent outside-funding requirement for CSIRO, using graduated steps. This requirement distorts the research undertaken. I know of research undertaken that is known to be 'BS', but the research is done simply in order to gain the funding. Make this a gradual process so that natural attrition will cover any potential loss of funding.

These recommendations are clear and consistent. Additionally, they are cheap to implement. The effects will be colossal should they be implemented quickly and fully. This TEQSA amendment bill points the way as to what is possible. What is important about this bill is not the size of the change but that there is change. It is not the speed of the movement but that there is movement, if only an inch.

As I said earlier, Einstein once said, 'Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it;' hence why I am here. It should not and does not have to be this way. Einstein also said, 'Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.' Let us do the right thing and let us do it now.

Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to make a few comments on the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment Bill 2014 and the amendment moved by the member for Cunningham. The one thing about this bill and the proposed amendment that struck me is quality. The bill focuses on the quality of our higher education sector. The quality of our higher education sector is the subject of a very important and timely debate because of what is occurring at the moment in our higher education, whether it be in our universities or our vocational sector.

This bill is a response to the review into higher education regulation and to sector concerns about regulatory overreach. It is true that, particularly within our international education sector, there have been a number of providers who have not lived up to the standard to which Australia markets itself. There has been some need for improvement and for the government to step in. The reputation of our higher education sector internationally is very important and it should be protected. Many times already in this sitting of parliament we have heard speakers talk about how higher education is becoming a large, if not the largest, exporter in our country. It is important for our local economy and for earning export dollars.

However, our universities and other higher education providers are self-accrediting, which demands a quality assurance process that can verify that accreditation. To do that we need a strong national tertiary education regulator. We needed to ensure that self-regulation is done in a way that produces the best results. A strong education sector is crucial to having a prosperous community and it is crucial to our economy.

This bill seeks to spill the positions of all five TEQSA commissioners, which is consistent with the recommendations of the review. But most of the proposals of this bill do not focus on the removal of the quality assessment function. There is that word quality again. If we are to have a strong education sector it is crucial that we focus on that word quality. I will highlight the quality aspect in relation to the university in my electorate, La Trobe Bendigo, which has, unfortunately, made the news in the past few days. They announced last Friday that they would be shedding 350 jobs from the campus. They are going through a restructure. Their strategic plan, Future Ready, is what they are talking to their staff about. As I speak, departments at the university are meeting with staff and are proceeding with restructuring plans.

You might ask why Latrobe are proceeding down this path right now? Losing 350 jobs from any organisation is significant. It represents 15 per cent of their workforce. At the moment, we do not know where the jobs are going to be lost. We do not know if they will be lost from my home campus of Bendigo, from Wodonga, from Shepparton or from Latrobe. The university is going through that assessment as we speak. They believe they are responding to a need to remain viable; they want to make sure they have a future. Like many universities, they had a quota for how many students they were trying to get through their international section. They thought that they would hit higher numbers of international students and when they did not it affected their projected budgets. They also thought that they would attract more domestic students through their demand-driven model. Whilst they have, they believe they are now getting close to a cap on how many students locally wish to obtain a university degree. This goes to our current higher education debate and how we choose to go forward.

When I met with the vice-chancellor of Latrobe University, just yesterday, we discussed what is going to happen at the campus in my electorate and what is going to happen across the board. One of the things he said to me that struck home was 'we do not want to compromise quality, we want to ensure that the students coming in our doors to study have a certain level of academic ability and we are not willing to sacrifice quality.' That represents a campus in a university that is trying to be proactive about ensuring their standards of quality. They may never need to be drawn before the TEQSA regulator. They are one of the organisations in the industry who care about their reputation and their quality. But there are a number of others who do not.

In a previous role of mine working for United Voice as a union organiser I spoke to international students about their workplace rights. It was not too long before the conversation started to focus on the academic rights of students and their treatment in their place of study. We have all heard of the stories where students rocked up to places where there was a front door and a phone but no desks; people were squashed in like sardines; a promise that a course would be delivered for 13 weeks but then the program was only for four weeks; and a hospitality course which really involved going to work for the local fish and chip shop for free for 10 weeks—a manipulation of not just the education experience but also the workplace rights of students. There are some dodgy players out there who are bringing down our reputation overseas. That is why it is so important that in any discussion on higher education we focus on quality.

I also want to touch on the idea that international students are our largest export industry. At least in the state of Victoria that is becoming the case, and it is the fourth-largest export industry in the country—sustaining over 100,000 jobs and generating over $15 billion annually. It is a big industry and some might think its relative size came about by a bit of an accident—we have had a drop in manufacturing, we have had a drop in agriculture and we have had an explosion of international students coming to study here. Overnight—in the last decade—we have had this big industry. It does go to a broader problem that we have with how we as a nation are creating our future industries. Should we have a strong higher education sector with a large international component? Yes we should. But should it be our largest exporter? That is an area of debate we need to focus on. In another forum we need to discuss the future make-up of the industries in this country.

By 2020, over three million students worldwide will be seeking the offshore education experience, so we do have an opportunity to continue to attract students to our country. To play a significant role in that space we need to make sure we are delivering quality. That is why it is so important that we have an independent regulator with oversight of the area. To refer to the example of La Trobe again, with the staff cuts and restructuring going on—I fully understand why the university is taking this path—questions are being asked about the quality of courses. We need to make sure students receive a high quality product, that classes are not too big and that they have tutorials every week and not every second week. Even in a campus like La Trobe Bendigo, there are always questions being asked about quality and about making sure students get the best opportunity and experience.

Apart from the quality of courses and the experience of the students, job losses put pressure on remaining staff. If you have fewer staff delivering the same workload, the workload of each individual staff member increases. It could be an extra 15 per cent, if you want to use basic mathematics, or it could be the picking up of extra students or larger tutorial numbers.

One of the reasons why La Trobe Bendigo have flagged that they have to sack 350 people and need to move down a path of getting future-ready is that they are unsure about their future budget from this place—this House and this government. They do not know what their future budget will be. They do not know if they are going to get the same level of financial support from the government. They have raised concerns with me about some of the language they are hearing in the media that universities need to be self-sustaining, that universities need to stand on their own two feet and that the money going towards universities is unsustainable. 'Unsustainable' is the magic word which nobody can really define except as, 'We think we're putting too much money into this area and we want to spend it in other places.'

It is so important that, if we are serious about quality and the higher education industry continuing to be an industry that we can export, we continue in the basics of investing by making sure that our universities do have the resources that they need and are able to meet the international standard and reputation that all of us are talking about today.

As I have mentioned in my speech today, it is important for quality that we have a robust and strong regulator that is able to be independent and impartial and able to pull up those who are doing the wrong thing and hurting our reputation and, more importantly, delivering an inferior education experience for Australian students or international students. That is the first step, and that is the purpose of this bill. But the second step is for all of us to remember that we need to continue to invest in and not cut higher education because, if we see the cuts that are being foreshadowed come through in the budget, I fear it is not just going to be 350 jobs lost at La Trobe; it could be much more. La Trobe has started; where next?

The last thing we want to see happen in our higher education university sector are the redundancies we have seen happen in the Victorian TAFE sector week after week and month after month. There have been so many jobs lost in the Victorian TAFE sector that is hard to know today if vocational education is being delivered in Victoria. This is what happens when coalition governments get elected. They seek easy funding cuts, and higher education tends to be the first on the chopping block. But you cannot have it both ways. You cannot say that you want to have a robust and high-quality international export market for international students and education and at the same time cut the resources that help deliver that education. I commend the bill.

Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute to this debate on the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment Bill 2014. I see the member for Bendigo leaving the chamber. She must remember that in the last parliament the now opposition ripped $1.5 billion out of the higher education system. So that is just a small reminder to her about her last comments on the coalition. The purpose of the bill is to give effect to the government's decision to implement recommendations arising from the August 2013 independent review of higher education regulation undertaken by Professors Kwong Lee Dow and Valerie Braithwaite. The bill is focused on TEQSA in particular. After the previous six years, it is refreshing to see a government that is prepared to act swiftly on the recommendations of a review.

I can remember Kevin Rudd's fondness for reviews. After being elected in 2007, Mr Rudd commissioned dozens of reviews and studies but very rarely followed through. The Henry tax review was a case in point. The Rudd government commissioned a huge review into the nation's taxation system by their favoured economist, then Treasury secretary Ken Henry, and then decided to ignore the majority of the 138 recommendations and concentrate on just one. That one was the mining super profits tax. Even this was never properly implemented. By the time Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan had finished with the proposal, all that was left was a tax that did not raise any money. In fact, it the cost the taxpayer money in administrative costs, something only the Australian Labor Party could manage to pull off. Ken Henry must have thought, 'What a waste of time and effort,' and so must have the authors of so many other shelved reviews.

In this context, the enthusiasm with which Universities Australia has greeted this swift decision of the newly elected Minister for Education to accept fully the recommendations of the Lee Dow-Braithwaite review is perhaps not surprising. In a press release on 22 October 2013 entitled 'Government walks the talk on cutting red tape' Universities Australia states:

Today's announcement by the Minister for Education, Christopher Pyne, of a number of measures to reduce the regulatory and reporting burden on universities represents practical and early action by the Minister on a key government election commitment.

Chief executive Belinda Robinson goes on to say:

These commitments can take time to work through after an election but we are very pleased by the prompt attention the Minister is giving to this very important matter in accepting all eleven recommendations of the recent Review of Higher Education Regulation.

Today, a few short months after accepting the recommendations, this new government brings legislation before the House. Can you imagine how long it would have taken the Gillard-Rudd government to take action? They were too busy fighting each other and worrying about who would be the next leader. When the then minister, Kim Carr, tabled the Lee Dow-Braithwaite review on 4 August 2013, the government was in an absolute shambles. I will quote the previous minister, the Hon. Kim Carr, on his comments in regards to this review. He stated in his media release:

Over the weekend the government received the final report of a review of red tape in higher education. It makes for sobering but encouraging reading. I have decided to release it immediately, to give the sector plenty of time to consider it before a government response is formulated. This must be a partnership between us if it is to achieve its purpose.

The review was conducted by professor Kwong Lee Dow, a former vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, and professor Valerie Braithwaite, an expert on regulatory regimes from the Australian National University.

I believe they have delivered a fair, judicious and balanced appraisal of the challenges confronting higher education providers in Australia.

To be frank, they are formidable. The report speaks about the complexity of regulatory arrangements in multiple levels of government, and with multiple agencies within governments. It highlights the failure of many agencies to interact as parts of a regulatory ecosystem, choosing instead to impose requirements as though they were operating in isolation.

Importantly, professors Lee Dow and Braithwaite emphasise the pivotal role of autonomy and responsibility to the operation of our universities. These institutions are among the most trusted in our society, and yet at times the various regulatory players have been treating them as though they need to prove themselves worthy time and again.

I believe we ought to take this trust seriously, and promote the ability of universities to run their own show, in response to the needs of their own communities, industries and regions.

Far from compromising on quality, I take the view that freedom within reasonable bounds actually favours innovation, creativity and excellence.

He also went on to say that he welcomes this report on red tape, and said:

It is an informative, evidence-based response and it seeks to promote the sector's aspirations and interests, within the bounds of the public's expectations.

So, even former minister Kim Carr supports the changes that we see coming forward in this bill today.

This is a new government with a new approach. We said before the election we would cut red tape and that is what we are doing. It is as simple as that. Things have changed; we are carrying out our election commitments and getting things done. It is worth commenting on the key themes of the Lee Dow-Braithwaite Review of higher education regulation report. As stated in the review, the design of Australia's regulatory architecture in higher education ensures that only quality providers are able to enter and remain in the system and that having a qualifications framework, higher education standards and a national regulator encompasses best practice principles of regulation.

But while the review found support for a regulator, it found issues with organisational structure and duplication and the red tape/regulatory reporting requirements of the current regulator, TEQSA. Both of these issues are broader priorities for the coalition, and part of the mandate the coalition achieved at the last election. The previous government introduced many regulations. In fact, statistics I have from May 2012 put that figure at over 18,000 regulations introduced by the Rudd-Gillard governments since 2007. At that point only 86 were being repealed. This, of course, was despite the promise by Labor that they would have a one-in, one-out approach to regulation, meaning that new regulations would be matched by repealing others.

This was another broken promise but one with serious consequences for the economy. The coalition is committed to reducing red tape and has an economy-wide deregulatory agenda, because we know that red tape distracts businesses, government agencies and task forces from their functions. In the covering letter to their report the professors say:

Like those who spoke to us during the review, we have a vision for a high quality sector which strives for excellence and is competitive nationally and internationally. We believe such a system is best managed within a framework where providers themselves are predominantly responsible for maintaining and enhancing quality and supported in doing so. This will allow providers to spend more time focussing on their core business - providing quality higher education that will benefit our nation for generations to come.

This is clearly the case across the economy. As I have said before, the coalition has a commitment on deregulation. Of course regulations are required, no-one would argue against that. But there is the straw that breaks the camel's back, and 18,000 new regulations to 2012 by the Labor government is a burden being carried by the economy. The coalition government will be holding a 'repeal day' to tackle this issue and this bill also certainly makes a contribution to that goal.

In terms of the issues of organisational structure, duplication and waste, the coalition made clear its approach before the election; its commitment was to improve efficiencies, rein in organisations, improve and streamline the functioning of organisations or, and in general, improve the results for the taxpayer. The government has already been active in this regard, and in my speech on Monday I spoke in detail about the foreign minister's decision to bring AusAID into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the benefits this would pass on to the taxpayer and the region. Again, this bill continues this new approach from the government and I will go on to explain this further in more detail.

This bill is perhaps best seen through the framework of regulatory changes and functional changes. This is indeed reflected in the provision to separate the role of CEO and chief commissioner so that the CEO focuses on management and administration and the chief commissioner will focus on the regulatory decisions. As noted in the review, when TEQSA was established it was done so in an already crowded regulatory environment, and that this broader regulatory system is multilayered and diffused. As a result, the review recommends a re-focusing of TEQSA's effort towards the delivery of its most important tasks of provider registration and, of course, accreditation, with a reduction in its functions in other areas.

The focus of TEQSA has come under scrutiny, not just by the review but by many in the wider community. TEQSA has become known for excessive and heavy-handed regulation without appropriate consultation with the higher education sector. I would now like to give an example from a school in my area that I recently wrote to the minister about. The letter read:

Dear Minister,

RE: Canning College

I am writing to you to with regard to a ruling by TEQSA that has affected an income stream to the Canning College in my electorate of Swan and resulted in the virtual closure of a higher education program that was running in full cooperation with UWA and Curtin University.

Canning College is an important source of top quality international students to UWA and Curtin University. The college ran a first year Diploma of Commerce course from which graduating students were accepted into the second year by the both the higher education universities previously mentioned.

The program ran from 1999 to 2011 and provided approximately 100 international students per annum to UWA and Curtin making it a very successful higher education program.

When TEQSA was established non-university institutions that required accreditation of their courses had to be a "trading corporation" but under the WA State Education Act Canning College is not a trading corporation and cannot be one. Canning College may have been the only institution offering higher education courses to be affected by the establishment of TEQSA in this manner.

When a variation application was made to TEQSA this was disallowed.

The only solution was to operate the program as a VET program through a local TAFE college but this affected the reputation of the course to overseas students and the sustainability of the program due to differing fee structures under the auspices of TAFE.

The reduction in enrolments and mid-year enrolments has meant the diploma course is no longer viable.

The college is seeking ways to be reaccredited as a provider of higher education. I am asking if you can offer advice as to a solution to this issue that will enable the college to once again enrol international and local students in this program which contributed to Australia's international education reputation.

I look forward to your response …

And I said that I was available to meet with the minister to discuss this issue as well.

It is the desire of the minister and of the higher education community in general that, by altering TEQSA's functions, higher education institutions be able to focus more on their core work of delivering high quality teaching and research, and less on unnecessary compliance activities and regulations. This will benefit the community and the economy. That Canning College example is perfect. As the Minister for Education outlined in the first reading, the bill will remove TEQSA's quality assessment function which previously enabled TEQSA to conduct sector-wide thematic reviews of institutions or courses of study. This will support TEQSA's focus on its core functions or core business.

This is a core recommendation of the Lee Dow Braithwaite review and it is felt that other processes that were initially envisaged for TEQSA can be used for thematic reviews. For example, where TEQSA was previously asked to review teacher education, this is now being done through the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group. Other means of thematic quality assessment include parliamentary and departmental committees or professional bodies.

Secondly, functional changes to enhance TEQSA's delegation powers enable the institution to implement more efficient decision-making processes and deliver more timely decisions on applications. This should improve the appeals processes as well, as those seeking to appeal against TEQSA's decisions currently have to go through the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

Thirdly, TEQSA will be able to extend the period of registration and accreditation on its own initiative to improve its ability to manage this process. In line with TEQSA's refined functions and increased efficiency, the bill also provides the minister with the flexibility to appoint fewer commissioners and removes the rigid requirements to appoint full-time and part-time commissioners. Improving the organisational structure and removing some functions from TEQSA will not only benefit TEQSA itself in delivering its core functions to the higher education sector but also assist the university sector itself in its reporting requirements. Universities Australia said that a typical university must report over 50 different datasets to the Department of Education, comprising 200 reporting instances per year, as well as over 50 datasets to other departments, and that this time and effort could be better spent on the key functions of the universities: teaching, scholarship and research. I commend the bill to the House.

Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I acknowledge the contributions of those people I have heard in this debate thus far. Three of them are from Western Australia. Those are the member for Swan, the member for Perth and the member for Tangney. And then there was also my friend the member for Bendigo. I will make some observations about their contributions a little later on.

I am very pleased to be able to participate in this debate. As has been expressed by others, we all know that the purpose of the bill is to amend the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Act 2011, the TEQSA Act, to give effect to the government's decision to implement recommendations arising from the independent review of higher education regulation. This was commissioned by the Labor government and conducted by professors Kwong Lee Dow and Valerie Braithwaite. The bill is broadly consistent with the review. The review was established by the former Labor government. The key recommendation of the Bradley review said, of the way forward:

We must increase the proportion of the population which has attained a higher education qualification. To do this we need to reach agreement on where we need to be; provide sufficient funds to support the numbers we agree should be participating; ensure that the benefits of higher education are genuinely available to all; establish arrangements which will assure us that the education provided is of high quality; and be confident that the national governance structures we have in place will assist us to meet these goals.

The Bradley review recommended the establishment of a national regulator to reduce complexity in accreditation processes and quality assurance in Australia's higher education system. The report stated:

There is a strong case for a comprehensive and independent national regulatory body to carry out accreditation and quality audit functions in the higher education sector.

Amongst the 46 recommendations made by the Bradley review was that, after consultation with the states and territories, the Australian government establish a national regulatory body by 2010. This was to be done after consultation with the states and territories. I make the observation that, in the lead-up to the introduction of this bill, there has been very little consultation with the states and territories or, indeed, anyone else.

The need for a national body was driven by a number of existing factors and future developments. The increasing complexity and diversity of the higher education system has resulted in the need to improve consumer protection and risk management and to maintain standards in order to protect Australia's reputation for quality provision. This bill addresses the 11 recommendations that the review made to reduce red tape. In October 2013, this current government committed to implementing the 11 recommendations commencing with the ministerial directions given to the chief executive officer of TEQSA and so on.

The bill seeks to change the way TEQSA operates by: spilling the positions of all five commissioners; changing the minimum number of commissioners to two, including the chief commissioner; allowing any commissioner to be part-time; separating the role of CEO and chief commissioner; removing TEQSA's quality assessment function so it can focus on its core duties; allowing TEQSA to extend registration periods of higher education providers and accreditation periods for courses; changing the nature of directions that the minister can give to TEQSA, removing the requirement that they be 'necessary to protect the integrity of the higher education sector'; and extending the range of activities which TEQSA may delegate within and outside its organisation. This is an important piece of legislation that goes to addressing what is a very important question for all Australians: what should our higher education system look like? As the Bradley review said in its overview statement, The way forward:

We must increase the proportion of the population which has attained a higher education qualification.

In doing so, we must make sure that we maintain and, indeed, improve the standards that are applied across the higher education sector so that within the university system we can guarantee that every student who goes through the doors of the university will come out with a qualification which has got national and international recognition and we will know that each student who goes through the doors of a higher education institution will come out with the best possible education available to them.

That is important. It is important for a whole range of reasons. We know the difficulties that many Australians are confronting in finding work. This is particularly true for young Australians. Having a degree is no guarantee of a job so we should not confuse the objective here. We do need to make sure that we increase the number of Australians getting a higher education outcome but we need also to appreciate that there is a lot more to do to make sure that every Australian who achieves a higher education actually gets a job. Obviously, whilst there are shortages in particular areas like maths and engineering—and I do not know why but we seem to find it very difficult in this country to get young Australians to study the physical sciences—and I think that it is important we try to increase that number, we do need to get those people into the research areas referred to by the member for Tangney in his contribution. It is extremely important. If we want to get the doctors, lawyers, engineers, town planners, optometrists, ophthalmologists—and there is one here, sitting in the chamber, Dr Laming, and I am pleased to see him arrive and I am sure he will make a great contribution—it is just as important to make sure that we have got good teachers, good social workers, good youth workers, good people involved in mental health, the sorts of things that make our community go around. But getting a qualification, as I said, is not a guarantee of a job and we need to do a great deal more work in that space to make sure that young graduates understand the nature of the job market whilst they are at university and have them provided with some extra advice on career paths and opportunities that may exist. I know from firsthand experience from my own family the difficulties that young Australians are confronting once they finish university. There is a limited number of jobs and it seems to me that the job market is shrinking for them.

I do want to make an observation about the contributions made by the member for Tangney and the member for Perth particularly in relation to the importance of university research and research funding. I noted the observations made by the member for Tangney around the Australian Research Council and the need for it to look at the way in which it allocates the resources and make sure that we get some more high-risk investments. In that regard I do agree with him—and I do not think that I agree with the member for Tangney on much. I think that there is an important role for the Australian Research Council to be more adventurous in the way in which it allocates research funding. I also think that we need to be looking at what our national priorities are and tying those priorities to the ARC's research funding allocations. We need to make sure that government has a role in talking to the research sector about its priorities.

I had the great privilege in the previous government of being the minister responsible for DSTO, the Defence Science and Technology Organisation. It is second only to the CSIRO in terms of government-funded research in this country. It is a very, very important organisation. Indeed, the member for Tangney was a former employee of the DSTO. It is a very important organisation which provides cutting-edge research and it interfaces not only with foreign governments and the university sectors here and overseas but also with industry. If you look at the way in which DSTO and the CSIRO work, the interface with universities and industry is extremely important in making sure we maximise the outcome for all Australians. So I say to the member for Tangney: I am in broad agreement with some of what you said, but I do not agree with other aspects of what you said.

The member for Perth made the very good observation about the need for us to extend and to try to get more resources into research. It is very important that we do that. It does not matter whether it is the ANU or the University of Western Australia or Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory, we should have the objective of trying to put more resources into research in this country. There needs to be greater thought given to how we set those research priorities.

I want to make some observations now about the importance of universities in regional Australia. Whilst this bill is what it is, we need to comprehend the importance of making sure that we get a greater proportion of people into universities, as the Bradley review said. But most important, in my view, is to give greater opportunity to people who live in regional Australia to get access to universities.

In my own case, I live in the town of Alice Springs, a very small town in the national scheme of things with around 28,000 or 29,000 people. It has a campus of Charles Darwin University, and Charles Darwin University of itself, based in the Northern Territory out of Darwin, is not a big university. It only has around 7,000 or so students and around the equivalent of 15½ thousand students altogether, including VET students, as I understand it. That is not a large number but it is crucial that we maintain the integrity of that university and make sure that it has the standards that attract students from the Northern Territory, and indeed elsewhere, into its courses. It works closely with the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education which is a very important organisation of itself. It is an Aboriginal-run organisation providing courses in and around, about and for Aboriginal people primarily, in the past, around health and education.

We know the government's mantra about the importance of education and it is one which we all accept. But if we want to get good educational outcomes for our students, we have to make sure we get good educational outcomes for the teachers. Good educational outcomes for the teachers require additional resources. In the case of Batchelor, it has a remit of providing courses for Aboriginal students to become teachers. I want to make sure it understands that that remit requires it to produce students of the highest possible calibre, because only then will we continue to make sure we get the best possible outcomes for the students they are going to teach. That applies across the spectrum.

Having experience of a number of university campuses, we are privileged in this country with what we have got and we should acknowledge what we have got. We have to do all we possibly can to reinforce the strength of the university system and make sure that we maintain the integrity of the standards which we are so proud of in the university system. We also have to make sure that universities are accountable for what they produce. That is why I think this piece of legislation is quite important. We do know that they are big organisations; in most cases, they are big businesses. Smaller regional universities require a lot more care.

Whatever the government might be planning in the context of funding, I ask them to ensure that they provide the resources required to make sure universities like Charles Darwin University are able to function and provide the broadest range of courses for their students. If they do not then what will happen is what has happened with students in Alice Springs—they have to leave the town. When students leave the town, they will go to Melbourne, Sydney or Adelaide, or they may go to Darwin, but you can bet your bottom dollar most of them will not return to Alice Springs. In that situation, you are pulling the intellectual resources out of that community that we need for the future of that community. It is very important that we provide opportunities for people in regional Australia.

Finally, I ask the government to commit itself to funding Flinders University to provide medical students with the opportunity to do their full medical degree out of Alice Springs. It is a proposal that has been on the books for some time, something which we were looking at in government, something which I was unsuccessful in achieving in the last budget but something I was looking forward to achieving in the next budget. Unfortunately, I am no longer in government so I cannot make that happen. I am sure that Dr Laming will put the case that medical students should have the opportunity to do their full degree out of Alice Springs through Flinders University. I commend the bill to the House.

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

I rise to proudly support the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment Bill 2014 and the important restructuring of TEQSA. I also commend the coalition on its fine record in tertiary education which stands in stark contrast to the last six years of Labor, where they began to find cuts to higher education to make up for significant budget deficits. We saw an end to the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Scheme. We saw Future Fellowships disappearing. In a whole range of areas, we saw nips and tucks to tertiary education that certainly did not increase efficiency but did save a few dollars for a disastrous and deteriorating budget bottom line.

Today, we meet to discuss the role of TEQSA, to support the move by the Minister for Education to strongly take up the recommendations of Professor Lee Dow from the University of Melbourne and Professor Valerie Braithwaite from the ANU who looked to focus the role of TEQSA on accreditation and building Australia's international reputation, which clearly lies at the heart of attracting international scholars to study in Australia. There is strong support from the coalition but there is also strong support right across the university sector for our reforms. For that, I thank our great universities around the country and our ministry for bringing this legislation forward so promptly.

TEQSA was a creation of the former government and understanding its role was a particular challenge for me when I had some experience with the University of Queensland's handling of medical student admissions back in 2010. At the time, we understood that TEQSA was not set up to be purely an ombudsman to receive complaints. Despite extensive communication with TEQSA, my personal experience was that I had to go to other authorities in order to fully elucidate what was happening at the University of Queensland. That information is now public but not terribly well publicly known and my objective today in sticking very close to the heart of this legislation about the restructuring of TEQSA is to throw a little light on my experiences working with them in an attempt to better understand the actions of the University of Queensland between 2010 and 2012. I want to start, and finish really, on a personal note.

Thousands of Australian families like millions of aspirational families around the world dream of getting their kids into university. For many of us in this chamber, it just happens naturally. It starts by going to a great school, by applying to a public university and by getting a great tertiary education. But in fact for many of us here, it is a massive struggle. It was a struggle for my mum and dad. I do know that politicians tend to clutch at stories to emphasise just how tough their upbringing was. My dad moved to Papua New Guinea to take up better paying work than working as a wool classer and, as a result, my mum had to give up her job as a stenographer in the Supreme Court, in the hope of raising enough money to buy a home outside of Tasmania and send me to a 'good school', as it was referred to in those days. In the end, we did not have the money. I got a small scholarship. It was not enough and we had to, effectively, haggle with the headmaster of what is now the Anglican Church Grammar School to get a full scholarship so I could attend. For five years of my life, I felt that I owed everything to the school that paid for me to go through. The only objective going through a school like that was to get a start and to get into university.

So I do feel that I know firsthand just how important the role of an organisation like TEQSA is and just how important it is for many aspiring parents to know that hard work, diligence and rewarding merit are so important. Few things are more important to us than that gateway, so the next generation can hopefully live a little more comfortably than the current working generation. We expect very much from our universities and in particular my home University of Queensland, which receives around $1 billion of public funds every year.

There are a couple of ways of getting into the Degree of Medicine in Queensland. One is a school leaving two-year accelerated program which guarantees you entry if you are a high-flyer. There is a second route where you have to have an exceptionally high GPA from a previous course and then sit the much-feared GAMSAT test. Obviously, the former path for many is preferred. It is a two-year accelerated program with guaranteed entry. Competition for that is fierce and the structure of enrolment and entry is relatively unique to the University of Queensland.

Missing out should not be the end of the world. We have great universities all around this country. If you cannot get into one university, you should be able to have a crack at another. You should be able to consider another course. You should be able to defer for a year, build up your entry scores, perform in other courses and transfer across. Missing out on entry to medicine should not be the end of the world. But for someone, missing out did matter and this became the focus of a significant investigation, run predominantly by the Courier Mail, our local newspaper. Only after repeated requests by a number of people did the CMC pick up this cause and decide to appoint a six-person panel to investigate the events at the University of Queensland a year after the fact—and justice delayed, really, in my belief, was a case of justice denied. Missing out should not be something for which you can turn to first-degree relatives to fix, but as the official suspected misconduct report conducted by the CMC points out, that is precisely what happened.

I rise today because we went directly to TEQSA in the hope that they could help with elucidating these events and that did not occur. I appreciate that it was very difficult for TEQSA. Today I will table the correspondence that I wrote to TEQSA in an effort to get to the bottom of the events. I take this opportunity to very briefly seek your indulgence, Deputy Speaker, to quickly have recorded in Hansard the particular events in late 2010, on Christmas Eve, when they began to precipitate. At the time, it was clear that the vice-chancellor's daughter had not received the required score. This set off a series and sequence of events, pulling otherwise innocent people into something that was quite obviously wrong. This was of great concern to me. It was something I had raised with TEQSA. I also attempted to raise it with the university. My correspondence was not responded to by the Dean of Medicine. The correspondence was sent to an operations manager and I received a very summary response, which was, effectively, a refusal to engage in any form of clarification or correspondence about the matter. Let us make sure today that the truth is never lost and that, if we do set up to reform TEQSA, we make sure these kinds of arrangements are covered by both this and future reforms to the bill.

It is important that today, when we talk about reforming TEQSA and changing its structure, focusing it more on the areas that really matter, we also learn from past events. Back in 2010 of course, TEQSA was a relatively new entity. It did have a much broader remit and you can understand why people like me, or others in the general public, would go to TEQSA to seek assistance, and we know that they did their very best to do that. The reforms that we make today with this bill are important because it further focuses on TEQSA, not on some of the broader roles with which it was initially commissioned. They have removed some of the elements of quality assessment and we are allowing the agency now to no longer be focused on sector-wide and thematic reviews. That is part of this legislation today, which I commend. Instead, it will be able to focus more on the registering of providers and the accrediting of courses.

Back in 2010, that was not the case. We now have details on record of phone conversations between senior officials of the University of Queensland, discussing the particular academic scores of one individual who was a first-degree relative. This then led to a second series of communications between not just the vice-chancellors but also the dean of medicine, the acting vice-chancellor, none of whom I name today. What concerns me was then how this forced admission occurred. At these sorts of levels, we want to make sure that risk management is a key role of TEQSA. That is part of their job. The risk to Australia's reputation is significant if instances like these do occur. What we do know is that there were SMSs sent between these individuals which were not raised in the initial investigation performed by Carmody, and the report was both privileged and not released. At this point, we were at least 12 months down the track and it was virtually impossible to achieve a just outcome. We know that there were conversations within the family about whether the individual concerned should remain at university and in the course, but they elected to stay in the course.

My other concern, and this will also be of interest if we are looking at risk management and the role of TEQSA, is that then subsequently innocent people were pulled into this process—again, I do not name them but they include the OPSSSE director and other individuals—who, as they say, were aware of the forced offer to the V-C's daughter, knew that it sounded dodgy, and that it had come from much higher up and that they did not have any alternative other than to concede and to proceed as they were directed. There was evidence of emails between these officers and vice-chancellors, including an email which said, 'There has been no discussion by me with the vice-chancellor and my decision with respect to all of these cases has been taken in my role as an acting vice-chancellor.' Again, that is a blatant mistruth compared to what had happened on previous days. We know there were subsequent conversations between the acting registrar and the OPSSSE director, where the latter was urged not to do anything about it because it would force him into a position where he may have to acknowledge that the action he had authorised was wrong and inferred it would be a career-limiting move. She urged me to proceed with the arrangement of the forced offer.

This is obviously a compelling reading that I do not have time to place into Hansard, but there must be lessons from it. The lessons have to be more than simply saying, 'We are putting in risk management procedures for the future.' There has to be more accountability from the senate of these universities and the members of the senate. This needs to be a concern for TEQSA whenever we are reviewing its functionalities.

In the end, this admission could not be defended by academic merit. To me that is a great tragedy. I know that there are at least 334 people more worthy of studying this great course than the forced admission. To everyone of those families we owe an apology, not a delay, and certainly not the burying of these reports which have been, from my assessment, what the university has done up until now.

I rise obviously because I love my university. I rise because I love the Department of Medicine, where I studied for six years of my life. I rise because it was impossible to use the very important federal functionalities to get to the bottom of this event. I rise because the people of Queensland expect far better of their public institutions.

I do know, although I cannot fully substantiate it, that a sixth-year Queensland university medical student doing a Northern Territory medical term suffered considerable emotional trauma because she attempted to uncover what happened at this university. I heard from that supervisor interstate that he received a phone call from the university attempting to cancel her placement and write an unfavourable review of her performance while in the Northern Territory. If this treatment of a medical student was simply because she wanted to expose the truth, then to both her and her family—if this is substantiated—I also want to apologise.

Lastly, a number of people have paid incredible prices within the University of Queensland, which will never be made public and I will not be making it public today. There were people who worked in the audit department absolutely clear that this kind of thing, were it to become known to bodies like TEQSA or to the general public, would be of enormous concern. I understand there has been a restructure of that unit within the University of Queensland and that the prime whistleblower—if I can use that term—lost his job in that process and became unemployed. I think it is utterly repugnant that a person who attempts to uncover what is a basic truth should be handled in such a way. While I cannot confirm it, that is my understanding of what occurred.

This issue was very difficult to raise with other individuals or with TEQSA directly. So I will table the letter that I wrote to TEQSA. The content of it is almost identical to what was raised directly with the University of Queensland. At the time, retirements of those responsible were announced and that was a completely unsatisfactory response. The dates were of their own choosing and they took all of their entitlements with them. Their salaries were between half a million and a million dollars a year. That was patently inadequate. Only when forced by the CMC were those dates changed. The good staff at the University of Queensland never knew what had occurred. When these retirements were announced, there was no reason given other than people were 'turning 65'.

We can do so much better than this by making sure it can never happen again, not for the reasons mentioned around just how important getting fair entry into a university is, but for the particular and sometimes irrational attachment that many families place on getting into medicine, which made this one an extremely sensitive matter. I cannot overstate just what this has done to the reputation of my university. We rely upon TEQSA to maximise our international reputation. If that is undermined in our own city then that is a great tragedy. It became almost impossible for the people in the know to say or do anything. I am convinced that there were unconscionable delays in this process and that the thorough internal report that was commissioned by the Senate was never released on the most spurious of grounds—that people who contributed to the report were told that it would not be made public. There were many opportunities to make the findings of that report public without releasing any of their contributions. Let us hope it never happens again. We have the assurance that it will not. I wish the University of Queensland the best. I thank Des Houghton from the Courier Mail. I wish the new Vice Chancellor every success.

Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the member seeking leave to have the document tabled?

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

Yes, I am.

Leave granted.

I thank the House.

Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to rise to speak on the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment Bill 2014, an important bill which will give effect to some clear policy priorities of the Abbott government including to reduce some unnecessary regulation in the higher education sector.

In the time available to me today I want to make three points: firstly, higher education, the tertiary education sector in particular, is critical to our national competitiveness especially in the areas of research, development and innovation; secondly, there was extensive criticism from within the university sector about the way in which TEQSA was formerly operating; thirdly, I want to highlight the fact that the legislation today will bring about a more efficient approach to the way the tax operates.

I turn to the first proposition, that higher education is critical to our national competitiveness. Several years ago Universities Australia made a submission to the Bradley inquiry and, while the numbers are now a little out of date, the broad dimensions remain valid and worth citing. At the time of that submission, Universities Australia pointed out that the sector was worth in excess of $15 billion. There were at that time around one million students and around 100,000 employees. The education sector was at that time and remains a very substantial generator of export earnings.

The sector is important not only in its own right but in the way it underpins research, development and innovation, which is vital across the entire economy. There are many Australian companies which have succeeded in developing markets based on innovation. One of the most impressive examples is Cochlear, which is a world leader in the hearing implant devices sector based on the commercialisation of technology developed in Australia. That company now has a revenue in the order of $800 million to $900 million a year and is privately funding R&D now in the order of $100 million a year.

In another sector, the communications sector, critical technology underpinning Wi-Fi, very widely used around the globe, was developed by CSIRO—part of the research sector if not necessarily the university sector. But the fundamental point remains that research activities carried out in Australian institutions are of enormous economic importance not just to the institutions in which they are carried out but more broadly across the economy. Indeed one can cite many critical industries in the Australian economy where scientific and technical research is of vital importance, be it agriculture, be it mining, be it manufacturing.

One of the key points here as to why higher education and the research universities are of such importance is the way that the economy is transforming, not just in Australia but globally. It is common, indeed it is trite, to speak of a knowledge economy. But I think the real point is that the entire economy is now a knowledge economy. It is therefore increasingly important that in Australia we are world competitive in the quality of our thinking, in the quality of our innovation and in the quality of our research.

Indeed, for a nation like Australia to remain successful, we need to be a knowledge economy if we are to survive and prosper. We cannot expect to compete on the basis of low-cost jobs and that would not be a prudent or viable strategy. We, therefore, need to survive and prosper in the world based upon our capacity for innovation and for clever thinking, and the university sector is critical and central to that.

If we want to be able to earn in the competitive world economy the high wages that Australians are used to, then we need to be able to justify that premium and we need to be able to compete in areas of relative strength, including areas such as research and higher education.

As to the scale of the economic importance of the tertiary education sector—and these numbers are slightly outdated but they remain absolutely valid in their broad direction—in 2010-11 coal and iron ore were the two largest generators of export revenue for Australia, as is well known; but the third-largest generator of export earnings in that year was education, earning almost $16 billion. So our major research universities are vital national assets, and it is critical that we encourage them to be active, innovative and internationally competitive.

It is also worth making the point that the university sector has a tremendous impact on the careers and the career stages of individuals who pass through the system, be that education at the bachelor degree level for those just starting out on their careers, research work carried out by postgraduate scholars, or research and teaching work done by full-time academics. Therefore, the role of the university sector is absolutely critical in building a highly skilled population and in underpinning an economy which prospers, based on innovation.

I think it is instructive to look at a nation that is admired around the world for the excellence and distinctiveness of its higher education system, and I refer of course to the United States, a country widely recognised as having the best research universities in the world. I want to quote from a very interesting book written by Jonathan Cole, the former Provost of Columbia University, The Great American University: Its Rise To Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected. I think there are some important points in this book which are relevant to higher education policy in Australia. In his book, Dr Cole notes that 40 of the 50 top universities in the world are in the United States, according to a research-based assessment from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Since the 1930s, roughly 60 per cent of all Nobel prizes have gone to Americans, and a very high proportion of leading new industries in the United States—perhaps as many as 80 per cent—are derived from discoveries at US universities. So Cole has this to say about the American university sector:

These universities have evolved into creative machines unlike any other that we have known in our history—cranking out information and discoveries in a society increasingly dependent on knowledge as the source for its growth.

I think there are some important lessons for the Australian education sector—and the higher education sector in particular—in the observations made in that book, in the importance of our higher education sector to our national competitiveness.

My views in this area have only been confirmed—or my convictions have only been increased—by the benefit of a recent visit to Silicon Valley, where, amongst other things, I had the opportunity to attend a presentation by Coursera—the well-known, although relatively new, company established by two Stanford computer science professors—which is now allowing millions of students to take courses online from well-known academics at Stanford and other prestigious universities around the world, including Melbourne University, University of New South Wales and University of Western Australia. These are exciting developments for these universities but they mean that every university, including those that may be less well-known internationally, needs to think very carefully about its competitiveness, its position in the market and how it sustains that position.

Against that backdrop, let me now turn to the question of the way that TEQSA was operating under the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government. It is no exaggeration to say that TEQSA created enormous frustration in the tertiary sector in the way it was operating, with an extraordinary degree of bureaucratic interventionism. I was alerted to this in a particular week in 2012 when I happened to meet on two separate occasions with vice chancellors of two universities, both of whom protested in extremely vociferous terms about the inefficiencies, the cost burdens and the compliance burdens that TEQSA was imposing on their institutions; and diverting resources away from the core missions of those universities.

Let me quote from something that was said on the record by the then Dean of UNSW Law, David Dixon, who was reported in The Australian in 2012, describing TEQSA as 'overreaching, excessive and ill-informed'. He went on to say that 'invaluable time and energy is being diverted into worthless compliance exercises'. So there was a clear degree of concern in the tertiary sector in Australia about the degree of close supervision which was being imposed on the sector by TEQSA, and of course enthusiastically following the political direction it was given by its political masters in the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government—unqualified enthusiasts for regulatory overreach in every aspect of the operations of the economy.

One example that Professor Dixon quoted was that TEQSA was seeking to impose specific requirements on law schools; if they were to award an honours degree, they would need to require an extra year of study. Professor Dixon made the point that this imposed a burden on Australian universities seeking to compete in the international marketplace for postgraduate students, and the requirement to add an extra year made the Australian degree less attractive compared to the degrees offered by competitor institutions in other jurisdictions.

The evidence is very clear that the operation of TEQSA under the previous government imposed excessive regulatory burdens on universities—this absolutely critical sector of our economy—and in doing so diverted focus and resources from the priorities of those universities, which are of the highest national importance to our competitiveness.

The third point I want to come to is the solution, which, by means of the bill before the House this afternoon, the Abbott government and in particular the Minister for Education are putting in place to address these well-understood and well-complained-of problems in relation to the operation of TEQSA.

Debate interrupted.