Education Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2025

Mr McCORMACK (Riverina) (12:52): Education is the great enabler. At the outset, I want to wish good luck and congratulations to the 79,712 New South Wales Higher School Certificate students. Of course, there will be students right across the country sitting for those year 12 exams, now and in coming weeks, so good luck to each and every one of them.

Just remember that your results don't define who you are. Yes, they may well be a pathway to future success, but, if you don't go as well as you would have hoped or expected, don't let the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank define what your future may well be. I've just come out of a meeting with the education minister and Community and Public Sector Union officials and universities.

They were putting their case to the government about concerns and issues of importance to them. I was pleased that Andrew Cox, the strategic projects officer for Charles Sturt University, at the campus at Wagga Wagga, was present at that meeting. I was able to get a one-on-one with the minister and Mr Cox.

I've known Mr Cox for many, many years. In the meeting, the predicament that Charles Sturt University finds itself in was put to the minister. I will go to that a little later in my remarks, but, at the start, I want to address the issues relating to the Education Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2025.

I want to—and this might sound a little odd—acknowledge the work that the member for Bruce, the assistant minister, has done. I know the member for Moreton talked about unscrupulous education agents. The work that the member for Bruce has done in this regard is to be acknowledged.

I've worked closely with him and Labor Senator for New South Wales Deb O'Neill on an inquiry into higher education. It had elements of tourism as well. But the member for Bruce certainly went out of his way to ensure that that particular issue, about education agents, was looked at, examined and investigated, and hopefully some of the results of those inquiries are borne out through this particular bill.

There are visa issues with students, and there will always be, unfortunately, agents in the education space and in the migration space per se who take advantage of subsidies and take advantage of vulnerable people who are coming in from other countries, in whatever regard. It's good that people are onto them and are making sure they don't succeed in their nefarious endeavours.

I know the member for Moreton mentioned the Nixon review. These are all important discussions, as far as this particular bill is concerned. I appreciate that there are some technical aspects to the bill.

I will just go through those. The provisions of part 1—education agents and commissions—bring in definitions of 'education agent' and 'education agent commission' and require mandatory reporting of commissions and benefits. As I say, this is the sort of work that we inquired into, as part of that joint select committee.

This is the sort of work that the member for Bruce made personal. And, again, it was a good deep dive that we participated in. Part 2—giving information to registered providers—expands the secretary's power to share information with providers about education agents, including in relation to student transfers and data about agent commissions.

Hopefully, this will lead to better transparency. Part 3—management of provider applications—introduces the novel power of the minister to suspend the processing or registration of new registrations, whereas previously the minister could only slow the processing. To that end—slowing the processing—we need ministers to be able to act according to what is happening in their portfolio areas.

We can't just have ministers procrastinating or only having the capacity to slow down a process; therefore, there's part 3. Having been a minister in many portfolios, I know how important it is for the minister to actually have that responsibility and carriage of that responsibility—not to always take advice and just rubber-stamp whatever the bureaucracy brings the minister, but to be able to have some real teeth in the game—and this does that.

Part 4—registration requirements—brings in a two-year domestic delivery requirement for new providers whereby a provider must have delivered courses to domestic students for 24 months before they can apply to deliver to overseas students, and that's going to stop, hopefully, these overnight operations which spring up and then expect to be able to deliver to overseas students.

They've got to have form. They've got to have skin in the game. They've got to be able to show and demonstrate that they can do the job before they get the job.

The provisions on automatic cancellation for dormancy—part 5—mean that provider registration is cancelled automatically, by force of law, where a provider 'does not provide any courses at any location to any overseas students'. You'd just think that that would be standard fare. You would think that that would be just a no-brainer, so to speak.

But, unfortunately, as the member for Moreton said—I don't always agree with the member for Moreton, but she nailed it on this occasion—you do have unscrupulous providers, and they are making big money out of vulnerable people. Often the overseas student then can't afford to finish the course. They've been ripped off.

They go overseas, back home, without that valuable piece of paper and with a bad experience from Australia. We want the students who are educated here to go home and share the good news and the good stories about Australian tertiary institutions. We want them not to be exploited as far as work or their tertiary degrees are concerned but to be given every opportunity to sit the course, to succeed in the course and to go and tell others about how good Australia is so that others can come and share that great experience too.

Part 6, investigation powers—these provisions allow education services for overseas students, ESOS, agencies to take into account, when deciding whether a person is a fit and proper person to be registered, whether a person is under investigation for offences specified in the legislation or by instrument. Again, you'd just think that would be part and parcel of it, but it's not, so it has to be written into the legislation and passed through the House of Representatives and, of course, the Senate.

While the government maintains that this is a data collection project intended only to inform future policy development work as a matter of principle, the compulsory sharing of pricing information and the publication of aggregated information could send, worryingly, disturbingly, strong market signals to families. That is a concern; that is an issue. Hopefully, that can be addressed as this legislation goes through.

If it goes before the Senate education and employment committee, perhaps that particular body could look at that aspect of it and maybe mould it such that it is of fit and proper purpose going forward. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission conducted a 12-month inquiry into the childcare market, concluding early last year, and to some extent these provisions overlap with that work.

The government's position is that this project complements that work rather than overlapping with it—you'd probably appreciate the government would say that. I know this legislation is introducing a range of measures, including in the higher education, childcare and schools sectors. As far as the childcare sector is concerned, I again say that I do believe we should have a royal commission into child care.

Again, what we saw on Monday night on the ABC's Four Corners exposed some terrible things in that sector. As a father and a grandfather, you do worry about the children placed in the care of people who should be doing everything they can to treat those children as if they were their own. Unfortunately, we have got some very bad actors in that space, some very bad people, and it's time we had a full and thorough investigation into how they're allowed into the childcare sector and, certainly, what the federal government can do, what the Commonwealth can do, where the state governments are failing.

They are failing our children, and this cannot be allowed to continue. Now, I did say that I would talk more about the situation with Charles Sturt University. I was pleased that I had a good meeting with the Minister for Education.

It was his meeting; he allowed me in. I do appreciate the minister is a good fellow and endeavours, where he can, to work in a bipartisan way. I respect that; I acknowledge that.

He talked to me about the full funding, as part of the provisions of this bill, of Aboriginal students who want to be doctors. Given the low number of Indigenous students studying medicine, we have to do everything we can as a Commonwealth to lift that number. The member for Moreton gave the statistics—very low numbers of Aboriginal students, well below one per cent.

Of course, the Aboriginal population accounts for three per cent. We need to get those Indigenous students trained, with their diplomas, not necessarily so that they can go to capital cities but certainly so that they can go to where they're perhaps most needed, and that is in rural, regional and, especially, remote Australia, where Aboriginal populations are in want of doctors.

There are not that many doctors there and there are certainly not that many Indigenous doctors. The ability to fund for those Aboriginal students to become doctors and to then be able to treat their own people, as it were, has got to be seen as being a good thing. Charles Sturt University is providing medical places through its Murray-Darling medical school at Orange.

I funded that when I was the deputy prime minister. UNSW is about to open a big four-storey campus at Wagga Wagga, right next door to the Wagga Wagga Base Hospital. That is a good thing because they are producing the students who will be doctors in the not-too-distant future.

Indeed we know that as many as three-quarters of those doctors who study regionally will stay regionally. Even if they come from capital cities, they'll fall in love with the regions that they're practising and training in, or they'll fall in love with somebody from those regions and they'll stay in those regions. That has got to be seen as a good thing.

Charles Sturt University is in trouble; it's $35 million in the red. I've had discussions with the vice-chancellor, Renee Leon PSM. The minister knows full well what my thoughts are in this regard.

It is not just CSU which is haemorrhaging money; it's right across the tertiary board. I know the minister has some ideas and some plans to alleviate that. I know that more international students, who do help pay the universities' way, are coming on board.

I know there was a difficult situation during COVID-19. That is being eased now. I appreciate that Charles Sturt University, which does rely on those international students too to help its finances, is getting more of those students.

But indeed it is troubling when their number of those overseas students has fallen markedly. They're doing their very best not only to attract more but to retain them and to help their financial shortfall. The problem that I have and the worry that is indeed right throughout Wagga Wagga—and the other campuses that CSU has at Albury-Wodonga, at Bathurst and elsewhere—is that frontline staff will need to be cut.

The problem—and we all know this—is that, generally, when big organisations start to cut staff, they cut the wrong staff. It's the frontline people, who do the grunt of the work, who are going to be the ones who will probably lose their jobs. Sometimes those who, perhaps in times of largesse, could be let go are not going to be.

It's one of those things. The number of migrants coming into the country is not helping with this situation. There are a lot of things to be unpacked in the tertiary education space.

Again, I say good luck to all those year 12 students. This is an important piece of legislation.