Criticism mounts as Australian Senate committee hears it is “wrong to go ahead” with ESOS amendments bill as is

The Australian government remains committed to passing into law a cap – intended to take effect as early as January 2025 – on the number of new international students coming into Australia. First, it must push through the controversial proposed legislation known informally as the ESOS amendments bill and formally as the Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment (Quality and Integrity) Bill 2024.

The international education sector continues to voice strong objections to the bill in its current form, which has been referred to the Senate Standing Committees on Education and Employment for study. The Senate has added hearings due to the magnitude of the impact the bill would have – and the controversy around:

• The methodology informing the cap limit of 270,000 “new student commencements” for 2025;
• The fact that the responsibility for the setting of the cap, and its annual review, rests solely with the Minister of Education.

The Senate held an additional, fourth day of hearings yesterday, after which English Australia issued this statement on LinkedIn:

"English Australia reaffirms its position that it does not support the Bill in its current form. We again urge the government to pause the Bill’s progress, meaningfully consult with the sector, and ensure that amendments to the ESOS Framework and their implementation genuinely support quality, integrity and sustainability of the international education sector and the 250,000 jobs and thousands of Australian businesses the sector enables.”

During the hearing, committee member Senator Mehreen Faruqi raised a number of questions as to why the bill was going ahead.

“Is the bill to address the housing crisis or to address integrity issues? It’s a bill, apparently, to address critical work shortages, but the formula developed to put those caps on [colleges and universities] address none of those issues,” the Senator said. “I don’t know if I’m living in a parallel universe here, but this bill doesn’t do anything that it is purported to do…Why are we discussing this bill? We have no modelling as to how many jobs will be lost, and universities are telling us there will be thousands. Private providers are telling us that they will lose their livelihoods. There has been no research done on that, nothing on the impact. Why has this bill been brought forward?...Every single thing that we have heard is that this is a terrible, reckless bill”.

The Senate committee will report on the conclusions of its review on 8 October. Australia’s House of Representatives will only sit for these dates between now and Christmas, meaning that there is little time remaining to pass the ESOS amendments bill before the end of the calendar year.

• 8 to 10 October
• 4 to 7 November
• 18 to 21 November
• 25 to 28 November

Still, there is widespread expectation that the cap will be set for January 2025, despite the many international students planning to arrive in Australia to begin studies in January and February of 2025.

If this occurs, there is an understanding in the sector that programme and staffing cuts are inevitable, and that outright closure of colleges would not be surprising. This is especially the case for private institutions and schools concerned with vocational and skills training.

What’s wrong with the cap?

One of the most persuasive arguments against the cap has been made by independent consultant Claire Field, who has been examining the cap allocations carefully and pointing out a wide number of problems in the methodology.

In the Senate hearing yesterday, Ms Field noted that there has been no consistency – even within sectors (other than TAFE) – applied to the cap allocation across institutions. She noted that given that the government claims a pursuit of “integrity” is at the heart of the ESOS bill, it is not in keeping that some highly ethical institutions are receiving meagre allocations while others being investigated for unethical practices are receiving more.

She asked the Standing Committee to consider a supplementary submission from Western Sydney University that called for:

• Parliamentary review of the cap distribution
• Clear criteria for how caps have been applied
• Greater transparency
• A focus on integrity
• Consultation with providers
• The need for a public registry

That submission can be downloaded here.

When asked about the finding of her research, Ms Field provided a summary of odd allocations, including those given to 12 institutions under ASQA sanctions. When asked if the ESOS bill should be scrapped, Ms Field responded diplomatically: “It would be wrong to go ahead as is.”

Ms Field looked more specifically at the way in which private vocational providers will be hardest hit by the cap in a guest post on ICEF Monitor a few weeks ago.

Outside of the Senate hearings process, Australia’s international education community has launched a petition against the ESOS amendments bill, and there is some speculation that there may be collective legal action against the government at some point in the future.

For now, the Senate will review all its submissions and testimony from the four days of hearings on the ESOS amendments and is expected to file its report with Parliament on 8 October 2024.

For additional background, please see:

• “Australia: Private VET providers receive ‘devastating’ enrolment cap allocations for 2025”
• “Australia: Peak bodies lobby strongly against pending legislation during Senate hearing”