National Student Ombudsman Levy Bill 2026

Mr LEESER (Berowra) (13:07): I rise to speak on the National Student Ombudsman Levy Bill 2026, and to also comment on the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment (National Student Ombudsman Levy) Bill 2026. Let me start by talking through the coalition's position on these bills. The coalition does not oppose them.

They are framework measures that establish the levy mechanism for the National Student Ombudsman. Before I get to the substance of the bills themselves, I want to spend a few moments on the framing. The context is important because the reason we're having this debate about a funding model for a student ombudsman is, quite frankly, the way the situation on campus has deteriorated over the last four years.

That's why we needed the ombudsman in the first place; that, and that alone, is the reason. It's fair to say that this is not the minister's preferred framework. The preferred approach on the government's side is to suggest that the ombudsman is the inevitable product of long years of advocacy and reform.

I read the minister's second reading speech with great interest. He spoke about the reasons he established the ombudsman: The National Student Ombudsman opened its doors in February last year. It has been a long time coming.

Students and advocates had been calling for one for decades. The universities accord recommended that we establish one. The Action Plan Addressing Gender-based Violence in Higher Education agreed by all Australian education Ministers called for it too.

And this government has acted. Let's check that, because the truth is messy and this government doesn't look as good as it would like to. It is true that there have been decades of calls for an ombudsman—not necessarily this ombudsman, but an ombudsman.

It's true that this government eventually legislated with bipartisan support. But this ombudsman is not the ombudsman that was called for decades ago, and, if we're being fair, Labor has been just as active in blocking ombudsman proposals as we have been, and as they have been, in calling for them. It's true that this ombudsman responds in part to the national action plan for gender based violence, but it also responds to the remarkable post-COVID deterioration in our universities, on our campuses and in our cost of living.

Indeed, the build of its powers and the overwhelming number of complaints relate to things unrelated to health and safety. That is what the ombudsman does, where it focuses its energy. The last annual report makes clear that of the 1,711 complaints the ombudsman had received, 95 per cent related to issues other than health and safety.

They related overwhelmingly to course administration, teaching and learning, unmet academic requirement or misconduct matters, and fees and financial matters. As I said, the remarkable post-COVID deterioration in our universities, on our campuses and in our cost of living. The truth is messy.

Let me spend a few minutes on this point. How did we get here? The history of advocacy on this point.

It is true that, before the Australian Universities Accord final report recommended the establishment of the National Student Ombudsman as one measure to 'improve the overall student experience', the coalition proposed an independent student ombudsman to investigate and resolve student complaints, whether it be concerning student safety, deficient courses or a lack of enforcement of university policies.

It's true that that recommendation was later included in the universities accord final report. But what about the response to the broader sweep of history the minister implied in his second reading speech? Do the calls go back decades?

Well, as I said, there have previously been calls for ombudsmen. In 2001, there was a bipartisan recommendation in this place for a national ombudsman, after consultation with the states and national representative bodies on higher education. That proposal was opposed by the New South Wales Labor government at the time.

And, in 2002, the proposal was also examined by Victorian Labor, who also opposed it. The Victorian review found no university supported the proposal, while all the student submissions supported it, and raised objections around duplication and other concerns. So much for that.

In 2004, the idea was revived. The National Union of Students called for an ombudsman, but the ombudsman it called for was specifically designed to be a measure to support international students. In 2009, they repeated that call and even sought to expand it to all tertiary students—but again with a focus on international students.

Let me read from the NUS proposal at the time. This is what the NUS said in 2009: … the NUS proposes that the ombudsman office be given authority to assist students with Student Visa Cancellation cases that are currently heard at DIAC and the Migration Review Tribunal with regard to breaches of academic progress and attendance (condition 8202), change of provider (condition 8206), satisfy visa requirements (condition 8516), notification of residential address (condition 8533), and the work limitation conditions of the student visa (condition 8501).

As most student visa cancellation cases are for breach of condition 8202, this office would play an important role in ensuring all cases are appropriately dealt with. Instead of being a complaint handling centre, the ombudsman that the NUS called for was an advocate for international students in administrative review tribunals, the very same students whose visa rejections the government is quite properly now dealing with on the papers after it completely botched the establishment of the Administrative Review Tribunal.

So is the government acting on those old NUS calls? Hardly. That is not the ombudsman we have now.

It's far from it. And it doesn't stop there. In 2009, under the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government, the national student grievances project expressly examined the calls for a national student ombudsman.

This is the Student Grievances and Discipline Matters Project final report to the Australian Learning and Teaching Council. That report was supported by Southern Cross University, University of Sydney and University of Technology Sydney. The report made no recommendations for or against a national student ombudsman.

It expressly said there was 'less enthusiasm for a national student ombudsman among staff interviewees'. One of the recurring themes the national student grievances report listed in its findings was: … while internal university ombudsmen were generally supported, there was little enthusiasm for a national student ombudsman, particularly given the existing regime of state and territory ombudsmen.

The general feeling was that that more effort should be put into improving internal processes. The report goes on to identify areas for further research and specifically states as follows: The third area relates to the idea of a national university ombudsman. In our conclusions, we did not express support one way or another, but our research does reveal that feelings about such a role are mixed.

The main concerns expressed are that it will add yet another layer to the plethora of forums that already exist, both at Commonwealth and state or territory level. In fact, it wasn't until the Baird review a year later, led by former Liberal minister Bruce Baird, father of the distinguished former New South Wales premier Mike Baird, that we saw the institutional precursor to the ombudsman we have in place today.

The design there was specifically intended to avoid overlap. The state ombudsman would perform a role for domestic students, with a national body overseeing international issues. The Baird review was the trigger that saw the shift to an idea of a national student ombudsman using the Commonwealth Ombudsman as its institutional home, exactly as is the case today.

In fairness to my friends on the other side, the Gillard government backed in the Bruce Baird report. In 2017, it was the coalition that established the other institutional precursor, the VET Student Loans Ombudsman. So, when Labor implies it's responding to decades of advocacy by establishing this National Student Ombudsman, the problem is that they actually aren't.

They're not implementing the old NUS proposal. In fact, they're building on a coalition legacy. Let me turn then to the issues of sexual violence on campus.

We started to see this issue in response to student experience surveys starting in 2016 and then specifically the survey in 2021. These specifically raised widespread concerns. Those campaigns contributed to the push for better handling of complaints in the university sector.

They continued to the establishment of this ombudsman. But, if we're being honest, that isn't the main focus of this ombudsman. Being fair to the government, gender based violence on campus is the focus of an entirely separate regulator, the Higher Education Gender-Based Violence Regulator, which sits within the Department of Education.

But, as I said, if you look at the full suite of this ombudsman's powers and the way it spends its time, it is not focused on gender based violence. That brings me to the post-COVID period, because the real push for the National Student Ombudsman as we know it—a body with broad powers to deal with general complaints about universities—only really began in earnest in late 2022 and 2023 under the years of the Albanese government.

The National Student Ombudsman that was legislated in 2024 doesn't exist because the government is acting on years of advocacy. That advocacy called for something different. The National Student Ombudsman doesn't exist wholly and solely because of the gender based violence concerns.

That's part of it, but it's not the focus. As I said, health and safety make up around five per cent of the ombudsman's work on gendered violence, accounting for 28 of the 1,711 complaints made in the last annual report. Indeed, the gender based violence regulator, an entirely separate entity, is specifically focused on these issues.

The National Student Ombudsman does not exist because of decades of Labor support. State Labor opposed it when the idea was first put forward on a bipartisan basis, and the institutional precursors come from Liberal leaders, not Labor internals. Instead, if Labor were being honest, the form and focus of the current National Student Ombudsman is a structural response to the remarkable post-COVID deterioration we've seen in our universities, on our campuses and in relation to the cost of living.

The truth is messy. It doesn't fit the government's preferred narrative, but then these days it seems very few things actually do. Let me put some figures out around the post-COVID deterioration on our campuses.

They are illuminating. The list is long, and there's no joy in it. It helps illustrate why we are seeing so many complaints, why there's a need for a body like the National Student Ombudsman.

First, domestic enrolments have been falling. In 2022, there were 1.103 million domestic students at university. According to the most recent data, that number has fallen since Labor came to office.

When Labor came to office, there were 1,102,757 domestic students enrolled in higher education. The last complete official data shows 1,086,789. It's the lowest number since 2019.

Second, as we learned in the committee inquiry, the government cut funding for Commonwealth supported places by more than $1 billion in 2025 and 2026. They hid this in estimates variations. It didn't feature in their budget.

Third, according to the Department of Education, since 2022, the student-to-teacher ratio has deteriorated. Meanwhile, administrative, technical and operational staff are growing rapidly in our universities. Between 2022 and 2025, the 'other staff' category—predominantly professional, administrative, technical and operational staff—grew by nearly 15 per cent.

Teaching and research staff—the frontline of universities—grew by only around seven per cent. The university administrators are growing at twice the rate of the lecturers and researchers. This means taxpayers are paying for more bureaucracy and students are having to deal with bigger classes.

Fourth, the 2025 Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching Graduate Outcomes Survey recorded low graduate satisfaction of just 74.9 per cent. Undergraduate ratings for student support and services were just 71.2 per cent in both 2023 and 2024—the lowest on record since 2015. Fifth, polling from the universities themselves conducted by the Australian National University reveals that the proportion of Australians with 'quite a lot' or 'a great deal' of confidence in Australia's universities has fallen from 68.1 per cent in April 2023 to 62.1 per cent—a very significant collapse in public confidence in our universities.

Sixth, this government has ripped the guts out of research at our universities—the same research that drives productivity. This includes cutting more than $2.3 billion out of university research through cuts to Australia's economic accelerator and abolishing the Trailblazers Universities Program, a program which saw co-investment by government and industry into research that reached more than $1.02 billion.

It slashed our research capacity program by more than $920 million from when the coalition was in office. The effect of that cut is massively magnified in real terms because of the government's runaway inflation. On the government's own numbers, research spending in this country is projected to reach a 10-year low by 2029.

Seventh, since Labor came to office, complaints by students and staff to TEQSA have almost quadrupled. There were 237 complaints in 2022 when the coalition left office. That increased to 386 in 2023, 718 complaints in 2024 and 942 complaints last year—increasing exponentially every year.

Keep in mind that these are complaints to TEQSA, not the ombudsman. The safety data in those complaints is very bad. In 2022, there were 16 TEQSA complaints in relation to both gender based violence and other wellbeing and safety.

The most recent figure is 76 complaints in relation to gender based violence, up from 16. Again, that's complaints to TEQSA, which are separate and in addition to the National Student Ombudsman. Eighth, we have had the spectacle of week after week of encampments and hate filled activity across our country, against our country and against Jewish Australians.

This has led to extraordinary levels of racist abuse and hatred on campus, as measured by the Racism@Uni survey. This was, above all, against Jewish students but was also against other groups and stems from the basic failure of university leaders—a failure that they continue to marinate in, a failure to respond properly to the antisemitic hatred that has occurred since October 2023.

When you don't step in and stop encampments targeting one group, you send a message that it's okay to target other groups. When you don't adopt a definition of antisemitism, you say it's okay to target other groups. When you fail to take leadership and properly investigate the levels of antisemitism going on in your classrooms, in your courses and against the students, you send a terrible message.

This is how university leaders have failed. Ninth, more than half of Australia's universities dropped in world rankings in June of this year. Australia is on a downward slide in relation to school performance.

Australia is on a downward slide in relation to university performance too. Tenth, we now have the burden of a massively overregulated university sector. Universities themselves are complaining about having to comply with more than 300 pieces of legislation and regulation.

Based on a submission by TEQSA itself, there are now at least 15 different regulators and oversight bodies that the universities report to. Professor George Williams, Vice-Chancellor of Western Sydney University, has described it as a Frankenstein system with a thicket of regulation. That's Labor's record on universities.

That's Labor's record on student opportunity—more red tape, more violence, more dissatisfaction, drops in rankings, drops in performance. And that's before we get to the ongoing scandals about overseas tutoring factories, the sector-wide failure to come to grips with AI and the way it threatens not only the integrity but the value of every degree. If one artificial intelligence agent can write the assessment and another artificial intelligence agent marks it, what exactly is the degree certifying?

To come back to the Ombudsman with these factors in mind, is it any wonder that students want to complain? Under this government, they have lots and lots to complain about. Let me finish by addressing the substance of the bills before us.

The first bill, the National Student Ombudsman Levy Bill 2026, establishes a levy on higher education providers to recover the operating costs of the National Student Ombudsman. The second bill, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment (National Student Ombudsman Levy) Bill 2026, which amends the TEQSA act, establishes the machinery for collecting that levy and makes payment a condition of registration.

The bill leaves in regulations the amount, the calculation, the methodology, the indexation and exemptions to be prescribed. The guardrail in the legislation is that the minister must be satisfied that the effect of those regulations will be to recover no more than the Commonwealth's likely costs. This means that this framework legislation itself provides little clarity on how the levy will operate in practice.

Detailed provider impacts will depend heavily on the regulations established by the levy formula rather than these bills. The justification is that this flexibility is required because costs will change over time, and that's fair enough. If the government produces a levy formula that is arbitrary, disproportionate or unfair to particular institutions, there are parliamentary disallowance mechanisms available to challenge it.

We will scrutinise those regulations as appropriate when the time comes, and presumably there will also be grounds for administrative law challenges if the minister makes a decision that is unsound or disproportionate. The more salient point is about the shifting of the cost burden. In effect, these bills move the ombudsman from direct taxpayer funding to a cost-recovery model.

Its ongoing operating costs of around $11 million a year would be funded by the higher education sector. It moves the burden from the taxpayer to the sector, and we will support it on that basis. This is an appropriate legislative change.

But the broader point here is that there is a clear need for the ombudsman, and this parliament shouldn't forget that context, because there's no joy in that conclusion. I thank the House. Debate adjourned.