Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Roberts. While I understand you prefer to ask these types of questions through the frame of migration, the matters you are asking about probably fit more within the responsibilities of the Minister for Skills and Training, Minister Giles, but I do represent him here, so I can still answer that question.

We are very proud of the fact that we have reformed the compliance measures around international education to weed out the shonks who had been running international education operations and proliferated under the former coalition government. The international training system that was left behind by the Murrison government was not just a joke; it was crooked. We had shonks and crooks unfortunately running these sorts of operations, exploiting international students who were here, taking money off them and providing them with dodgy qualifications that weren't fit for the kind of work they went on to do. So we are proud of those reforms.

As you say, Senator Roberts, it has resulted in thousands of qualifications being cancelled, as they should have been, because in some cases people were being awarded qualifications without doing any training or any study whatsoever; basically, you paid for a qualification and you got it. That's not how the system should work. It's how the system worked under the former coalition government, but it's not how the system works under this Labor government. Again, we make no apology for taking back the qualifications of people, so-called students, who have obtained qualifications through those means, and we make absolutely no apology for going after the shonks who were running those kinds of organisations. They have no place in our system. They actually tarnish Australia's reputation as a provider of international education, and we will continue to go after them.