Submissions to the Senate inquiry into the government’s international student caps bill are now appearing online. The House of Representatives has also started debating the bill.

My submission

The online scanned pdf version of my submission is not a sharp copy, the Word version is here.

It expands on the arguments I made in my series of blog posts on the caps, starting with this one in May.

Government agency submissions – implementation and enforcement

Submissions from government agencies raise questions about what internal processes – or rather lack of internal processes – led to the bill being presented in its current form.

The Department of Home Affairs submission leaves its key point to the last two sentences:

“The Department notes that successful implementation will also be dependent on the interagency sharing of data across core systems which is likely to require significant development for both the Department and the Department of Education. The Department notes that additional processing systems changes will be required to give full effect to these amendments.”

“Significant development” is a bureaucratic euphemism signalling that they lack the capacity to implement this reform anytime soon. That’s good news for providers who will also be scrambling to devise new systems to prevent caps being exceeded.

Similarly, the Australian Skills Quality Authority worries that it does not have the capacity to enforce these rules:

“It would be very inefficient if manual monitoring was required by ASQA to maintain the caps across 979 providers and would result in the diversion of a significant number of resources away from activities addressing compliance and integrity risks in the sector.”

ASQA thinks it is essential that the caps be instead monitored through the PRISMS data system, which is run by the Department of Education but updated by the Department of Home Affairs with student visa and student entry to/exit from Australia data.

Unfortunately that process needs “significant development” to work, so ASQA might be stuck monitoring enrolment caps rather than weeding out the rogue operators that, er, are the targets of the other parts of the capping bill on education providers.

Government agency submissions – collateral damage to domestic students and within-cap international students

The ASQA submission says that the bill, if passed, could lead to the “potential closures” of vocational providers. It is concerned that this will also give it more work to do:

“This will require ASQA to work with the exiting provider to transfer out students to a new provider, collect student records; ensure data is provided to the National Centre for Vocational Education and Training (NCVER), and close out the providers’ registration. This will also require ASQA’s oversight of any changes of ownership.”

The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations submission shares these concerns. If provider collapses eventuate this would have a “significant impact on ASQA’s regulatory effort and this will need to be managed accordingly.”

Both ASQA and DEWR are concerned about the impact on students, both domestic and international.

ASQA points out that domestic students will be most vulnerable if this happens:

“While international students may be eligible to access some assistance from the Tuition Protection Service (TPS), the scheme is generally only available to domestic students with a VET Student Loan (VSL), and the potentially available assistance differs.”

While international students can get assistance, often that takes time and does not lead to satisfactory outcomes.

The VSL scheme has such strict rules that few students use it, with only 30,000 borrowers in 2022. Most domestic students in collapsed RTOs are at risk of losing fees paid.

Debate in Parliament

Parliament debated the second reading of the bill yesterday. One of the Labor MPs who spoke just used the speaking notes provided by the minister’s office. But the other Labor MP who spoke, Julian Hill, used to work in international education and made up his own mind on the bill’s merits. Even better, he agrees with something I said!:

“And it does create, as the previous speaker noted from Andrew Norton’s work, a market problem of underutilisation, an allocation problem and a lack of flexibility.”

“I do think personally—this is not government policy—that I’m not seeing the case being made, frankly, for course-level caps in the higher-ed sector.”

“For what it’s worth, I think that amendments are needed to the bill. I think they will be dealt with sensibly.”

The crossbench MPs were also critical, putting up amendments to delay enrolment limits, to remove course enrolment limits, to include sunset provisions, and to review the bill’s operation after it commences.

A rushed bill?

It’s always hard to know what is going on inside a government. From December 2023 the government has been trying to slow international student enrolments down, starting by announcing reduced migration incentives and rejecting visa applications. There has been a drip feed of new restrictions and disincentives since.

But was the capping decision already made last December, or is it more recent? If affected departments and agencies are going public with their concerns, were they even consulted in the first place? If not, was that because there was too little time?

Whatever the exact reason, there is a pattern here of poorly-developed ideas being presented publicly. It’s not just in international education. The first version of the support for students policy and the Accord implementation consultation plans read like there was nobody asking basic questions: Does this make sense? Is it practical for the providers to implement? Is it practical for the government to enforce? What consequences could it have other than those we intend?

Fortunately in this case the Senate might be able to protect the government itself, as well as education providers and their students, from the product of a flawed internal policymaking process.

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Update: The Department of Education submission, uploaded after I published this post, says that it “considered advice and regularly engaged with relevant Government agencies in the development of the Bill” but not with the sector to “avoid the risk of non-genuine providers seeking to circumvent future increased regulatory scrutiny ahead of changes being introduced.”

Update 11 July 2024: TEQSA adds its concerns about implementation and the risk of resources being diverted from more important activities.