Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to make a few comments about this bill and then a few comments about higher education more broadly. I can say that nothing illustrates more fully how lost the coalition is on these issues than the obscurantism of Senator Molan's most recent comments on this issue. Labor will support the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment (Prohibiting Academic Cheating Services) Bill 2019. Labor will support the bill because academic cheating is a blight on the Australian university sector. We'll support the bill because of the potential damage that cheating can do to individual university institutions and the overall global reputation of Australian higher education. The government had no concern with the global reputation of Australian higher education over the course of the last six months, but we will support the bill on those bases.

Labor did have some concerns about the design of some aspects of the offences set out in the bill. A person prosecuted for publishing an advertisement for an academic cheating service operating for a commercial purpose could face a potential jail term, even if they are receiving no personal gain. We, on this side, were concerned that that could capture vulnerable students who simply forward an advertisement to their friends, even if they didn't understand the implications of the advertisement or were unaware of exactly what they were sharing. The government has made changes by way of an addendum to the explanatory memorandum that does, fundamentally, deal with that issue. Cheating services target the most vulnerable students. They often target students who are here—international students—who are at their most vulnerable and lonely and are away from family and friends and home. That is the cheating services' business model.

The reputation of Australia's education sector is absolutely crucial. Over the last few months, enormous damage has been done to the reputation of Australia's university sector. We had a good global reputation as a provider of higher education services with universities that had deep research capability and the capacity to collaborate with international researchers in areas of great benefit to this country and great benefit to the globe. The Morrison government's failure to deliver a higher education package and to support international students who have been stranded here has done not just enormous damage to the reputation of Australia's universities but great damage to the reputation of Australia itself. I was walking through Haymarket some weeks ago and there was a food queue some hundreds of students deep—a food queue of international students in one of our great capital cities. Apparently people in the Morrison government think that that's okay. These students were Thai students—destitute, hungry and unable to provide for themselves because this lot over here are more committed to the sort of obscurantist student politics that Senator Molan was going through than actually delivering for Australia's universities and looking after these kids. I shouldn't call them kids; they're young adults. But their parents and the universities—and, in fact, their parents and the country—have entered into a solemn contract. Our universities get paid an enormous amount of money by international students, and the contract we should have with their parents and their families is, 'Yes, we will educate them, but also we will look after them.' What we've done as a country is a disgrace, and it's caused enormous damage to our international reputation.

More broadly, when most Australians saw the impact that the coronavirus crisis was having upon the teaching and research capabilities of our universities, they saw it is a crisis. But what people in the far Right of the Liberal Party or in the National Party saw was an opportunity—an opportunity to square off with their student political opponents and an opportunity to denigrate people: to denigrate the capability and denigrate the hard work of tens of thousands of university lecturers and researchers. They saw an opportunity to wreck these institutions that are so vital to our national progress and our prosperity. What did we see happen? We saw an enormous effort to ensure that Australian university staff, particularly casual staff, would be unable to access the JobKeeper provisions that were offered by the government to many millions of Australian workers. Why was it that Australian universities were specifically excluded by this government? As a consequence of that decision, many thousands of casual academics are destitute and it will be harder for Australian universities to sustain their staff and to sustain their research and education capability through the crisis.

Just when we need our universities the most, the Morrison government is in there trashing the Australian university system. Beyond the JobKeeper package, you would think that a government that had the remotest care or concern for this vital set of national institutions and their research and teaching capability would deliver a package to secure the future of those universities. There is no package. In fact, there has been a determined refusal to deliver a package that can support the sector. There will be many tens of thousands of academics, casual staff and university support staff who will lose their jobs, but the damage to Australia will be well beyond the economic effect and the effect on people's families of those job losses.

I look across the state of New South Wales and see the regional universities that have already started to announce many thousands of job cuts—Southern Cross University in the North Coast electorate of Page, the University of New England in Mr Joyce's seat and Charles Sturt University, largely located in the seat of Calare, currently occupied by Mr Gee. When these universities started to work their way through hundreds of staff cuts, thousands of lost student places and deep cuts to their research capability, I was quite surprised by the response of what passes for the modern National Party. Mr Joyce supported the cuts. He thought that the cuts were a very good thing indeed, and a rational response by the universities. Most people, when a local big employer makes cuts in their electorates, are opposed to them. Mr Joyce had a short career in Armidale—that's what he tells everybody, anyway—as a bouncer at the Wicklow Hotel, and he supports cuts to the University of New England there. Mr Gee, who apparently has some ministerial responsibility for education, is against cuts to Charles Sturt University. His own government is delivering the cuts and he is against them. On the Southern Cross University, largely located in Lismore, with some campuses spread across the North Coast, nobody knows what poor old Mr Hogan, the member for Page, thinks. They rarely ever do. So there is a confused position in the National Party, which should be standing up for regional universities.

When you look at the research capability of these universities and you look at what they actually engage their capacity in, it is in issues like plant and animal breeding, water security, improvements to rural education, economics, particularly agricultural economics, and community resilience in country towns. Mr Joyce has no regard for any of these things. Cut, cut, cut—that's all Mr Joyce understands, and it is all that the coalition understand. They have truly lost their way in the way that they regard higher education institutions.

There is a sort of unrestrained dopiness about the coalition's approach to all of these issues. The idea that, instead of adopting a funding approach to universities that is all about the cost of delivery of courses, the coalition would interfere in the process of how students are billed their higher education fees in a Venezuelan-North Korean way to try to shape the choices that young school leavers make is too dopey for words. The idea that young people who want to study arts or social sciences at university when confronted with an increase in their fees will choose to be dentists or scientists is too silly for words. But it weaved its way through the cabinet and it weaved its way through the coalition party room, and what we are now left with is universities that deliver science courses suddenly having to work out how many staff they have to cut. Universities that deliver engineering courses are working out how many fewer courses in engineering they are going to deliver because the cuts on that side are going to make it harder for them to deliver the very courses that they say they're interested in more Australians studying. It is too dopey for words.

As we've turned our televisions on over the last six months and as the television stations have turned to experts to explain to the community what's going on with the COVID-19 pandemic, how the search for a new vaccine works and what things they need to do to keep themselves, their families and their communities safe, who has been on the television? University academics—public health economists in our universities. The community has leant on the universities' capability at this time of crisis, but all Senator Molan can talk about—and I think Senator Molan accurately reflects the unrestrained dopiness that I talked about on these issues in the coalition party room—is a gleeful excitement that universities are somehow losing support in the Australian community. What a witless, dopey thing to say!

Our higher education system is a key national institution, but these guys are obsessed with student politics. Maybe they were denigrated while they were student politicians by other student politicians. Most of us got over it. Most of us forgot about it. But these people bear a grudge from 1969 or whenever it was that they were last on a university campus. There is no censorship. There is no censorship on Australian university campuses. The only example that poor old Senator Molan could drag out was that people were upset by what Geoffrey Blainey had to say in the 1980s, and they should have been upset because Geoffrey Blainey was campaigning against Asian migration to Australia. Does anybody seriously defend that? I think Geoffrey Blainey is a fine Australian historian, but he was dead wrong on that issue. He will always be dead wrong on that issue, and many thousands of university students demonstrated against him. That's good; it's spirited debate. But, if your conservative views have so corrupted your thinking, if your resentment over your university experiences have so damaged your thinking about this important national institution, if you can't get yourself beyond the bitterness and weird obscurantism of the approach espoused by people opposite, you are going to continue to do enormous damage to these absolutely vital institutions and enormous damage to the Australian national interest.