Julian Leeser
Berowra · Liberal Party · Australia
“Third, the bill gives the minister unilateral power to impose conditions on higher education providers under the new section 36-65 of the HESA, which is introduced by this bill. The current version of section 36-65 of the HESA requires that there be an agreement in place with the provider. The new version does not.”
“Presumably, if you're a university and you get a bad decision, then your only recourse is judicial review, litigation or a constitutional writ. It's not a great option when the target of your litigation will be the minister who will make the future decisions that shape your ongoing financial viability.”
“This bill changes it from capped funding to capped places, but the places cost different amounts depending on the course. The Commonwealth contribution to a history degree is $1,316; agriculture costs $32,400. Could a university which typically teaches history be allocated 100 places and decide to convert them to agriculture?”
“I said very clearly that I understand the value of international students to Australia. I also said: We will want to make changes to the settings around international students, but I want the sector to know that we want to work closely with you to develop these policies and announce them in due course.”
“This so-called system steward, ATEC, can be bypassed at any time by a minister choosing to exercise this power. Again, this means universities are, under this bill, subject to extraordinary control by this minister or any future minister.”
“He said that Australian kids should be taught Australian values, which he defined as democracy, the rule of law, basic freedoms and a fair go.”
The complete record
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“It was my privilege to know a wise, generous, kind man who took an interest in the lives of others, a Jewish Australian patriot who wanted to create opportunities for others and whose generosity was inspired by his abiding love for his wife. Isaac is now reunited with his beloved Susan. May his memory be a blessing.”
“As Isaac said when the gift was announced: Australia is a great country and it's a good feeling to give something back. As a proud member of the Jewish community, Isaac was very disappointed by the antisemitism that was allowed to run rife at Sydney university, and he made his feelings known to Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott and called on him to take stronger action. Susan and Isaac supported the incredible work of the Sydney Jewish Museum's education programs and the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies. He was also a great supporter of the Liberal Party and especially supported and admired the leadership of Scott Morrison. Both Susan and Isaac were appointed officers of the Order of Australia in 2017. This is a sad time for the Wakil, Khedoori and Lipmann families.”
“Through the Susan and Isaac Wakil Foundation they touched tens of thousands of lives, supporting patients, students, artists, Aboriginal people and young people experiencing opera for the first time. When I sat on the council of the National Library, I approached Isaac about supporting the digitisation of performing arts materials, including Opera Australia productions that the Wakils had originally supported. He gave $1 million to make these materials accessible to all Australians. They made a $24 million gift to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the largest monetary gift in the gallery's history. They gave $35 million to the University of Sydney to establish a purpose-built health sciences facility that now bears Susan's name.”
“Susan and Isaac worked hard, invested wisely in property and became lifelong supporters of the arts, particularly Opera Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In the seventies and eighties, they were one of Sydney's glamour couples. I first met Susan and Isaac in 2017. They'd taken an interest in my career, and they were generous hosts and bons vivants. It was 10 o'clock in the morning, but Isaac said: 'Julian, you've come over. We must have champagne!' As Susan's health declined, they retreated from society. A decade ago, they began liquidating their property holdings and established one of the most significant charitable foundations in Australia's history.”
“I want to acknowledge the passing of a great Australian, Isaac Wakil AO, aged 104. Isaac's story is the great Australian story of a person born overseas, fleeing persecution, making his fortune and giving back in spades to the country he loved. Isaac Wakil was born in Baghdad in 1922. He was a survivor of the 1941 Farhud pogrom against Iraqi Jews. He came to Australia in 1949 and became a successful entrepreneur in the clothing industry. It was while working in fashion that he met his beloved wife, Susan, who he married in 1953. He was besotted by and absolutely devoted to her. They were married for 65 years until Susan's death in 2018. After her death, her life became the inspiration for the good works and opportunities he created for others. In business, they were extremely successful.”
“No-one in this place doesn't believe that we need to protect our children. But we on this side believe that we won't get a third go at this. We've got to get this right. We've got to demonstrate that there are proper safeguards in place. We've got to demonstrate that this law is absolutely right. And the way to do that and to put it beyond doubt is to have the parliamentary committee look at it properly.”
“Instead, we have an opportunity to get this right, and that's why we are sending these matters to a Senate committee. These amendments are a confession that Labor should have done the job right from the very beginning, not in the way that they did it, not in a way that was broadly criticised, not in a way where the minister, instead of focusing on the bill and on the detail, focused on selling the bill during her $100,000 New York trip. What we needed to do was to make sure that we focused on the very detail of the bill, and that's what this opportunity gives us. So it's sad today that we are having the matter of public importance on an issue in which there is broad agreement. There is agreement that we need to protect the safety of our children. We need to protect our children.”
“We want to make sure that we've actually got the right powers to take rapacious big tech on and to make the penalties stick. That's the important thing here. That's what we on this side of the House are trying to do by doing our job—our duty as parliamentarians—of subjecting the bill to the proper scrutiny, hearing from the stakeholders and hearing from people who are advising big tech about what they think of this bill in order that we can plug any loopholes that might be found and make the scheme safer. We don't want to be back here in six months, patching up the scheme again and again. We want to get this right this time. It's already failed once because we have a minister who fumbled this and a government that did not take these issues with all seriousness.”
“That's why we've been so strong over the years on things like banning mobile phones in the classrooms and reducing the use of technology in the classrooms. We know that this has a very negative effect on children and on their learning and their capacity. It's why we support the social media ban. But we are not going to wave things through carte blanche, given the record of this government and this minister and the failures of the first attempt here. The eSafety Commissioner herself called the original ban a 'very blunt force approach' thrown together 'very quickly' with 'very thin scaffolding' and with no 'potent powers'. In her words, taking on the world's biggest tech companies is not like 'sticking a pink parking ticket on a windshield'.”
“The social media ban is obviously important because it protects young, vulnerable children from the scourge of child sexual abusers and paedophiles and those people that would seek to prey on them. But, as the shadow education minister, I've another reason for supporting the social media ban. The challenges that the world faces today will require our children, the next generation, to use all the brain power they have available so they have strong concentration spans to ensure that they can address issues of global conflict, economic insecurity and AI. We're not going to be able to address that properly if we have young children addicted to social media, which ruins their concentration spans.”
“We need to hold big tech to account, but we need to make sure that the measures that are being proposed are actually the right ones. The eSafety Commissioner's own March 2026 compliance update finds that 70 per cent of children are still on social media. A landmark BMJ study has found that 85 per cent of under-16s are still logging in. Its verdict is that there's been limited implementation, incomplete compliance and substantial circumvention. It's in these circumstances that we cannot simply just wave a bill through; we need to use the processes of the parliament. We need to do our job as legislators and apply the ordinary scrutiny to these important bills—and scrutiny of legislation is what we are all paid to provide. I believe these bills are very important.”
“The 2024 ban passed with our support, because we'd been calling for it all along, but—and this is the issue—having seen Labor's social media ban in place, we've seen it not be effective. What Labor is asking us to do now is to not subject the bill to the ordinary parliamentary processes. For the first six years of my parliamentary career, I sat on the other side of the House. Again and again I heard Labor members stand on this side of the House and call on the then government to deal with legislation in the ordinary way and to subject it to ordinary parliamentary scrutiny. That is all that is proposed here. The reason it is necessary in this case is that the Labor Party fumbled the ball so badly in relation to the first tranche of this legislation. We need to have another go.”
“We support the social media ban. The social media ban was our idea. It was born of coalition conviction that childhood is worth protecting. I've mentioned my friend the member for Fisher. In several committees, he pursued these issues. I've mentioned the member for Flinders. It was Peter Dutton, when he was Leader of the Opposition, and it was David Coleman, as the shadow minister, who first suggested these ideas. In November 2023, a coalition private member's bill forced age verification onto the agenda. Labor knocked it back, then bowed to pressure and funded a trial in the 2024 budget. In June 2024, we pledged we would deliver an under-16 ban within a hundred days. Only then did the Albanese government try and play catch-up.”
“We created the children's eSafety Commissioner, the first dedicated online safety regulator anywhere on earth. The world didn't lead us. We led the world, and other democracies are still copying the coalition's model. In 2017, we dealt with image based abuse. We built the world's first scheme to force platforms to take down intimate images shared without consent and hit perpetrators and non-compliant platforms with real financial penalties. In 2021, we introduced the Online Safety Act, the most comprehensive online safety regime in the nation's history. We codified the basic online safety expectations and created an adult cyberabuse takedown scheme and slashed the time platforms have to strip illegal and terrorist content from their feeds. That's not rhetoric; that's a record. That's the record of the coalition in government.”
“As shadow attorney-general in August last year, along with the then shadow minister for education, I called on the government to, within the year, implement a national working-with-children check because they had said, no, it would be implemented in a longer period of time than that, and it just didn't seem right. We're still waiting. The national working-with-children check has not been implemented. So we on this side of the House are not going to take a lecture from those on that side about child safety. It was our side of the House that devised the national centre for countering child exploitation. It is our side of the House that's been the leader in relation to online safety. We built the global model for it. Every major protection that Labor now relies on was legislated by the coalition. In 2015, we had a world first.”
“When I and the member for Fisher were in the role of shadow attorney-general—we were shadow attorneys-general in succession—we moved private members bills to increase the penalties for child sex abusers in the wake of scandals of paedophile rings in childcare centres and people getting off with too-light sentences for multiple child sex offences. We moved a bill to address that—to have mandatory minimums for first child sex offences—yet the government voted against bringing on that bill for debate. That was not because the government brought on a subsequent bill to protect children but because they didn't like the fact that it was us raising the issue.”
“I think about the experiences of the members for Wide Bay and La Trobe, who are sworn police officers, and hearing the stories of the member for Wide Bay, particularly, about going to child sex abuse cases and having to confront some of the worst people imaginable. I've repeatedly raised issues of child protection and child safety in this place. In the recent budgetary consideration in detail, I raised in the Federation Chamber, and not in a political way, a series of questions about whether, under the current implementation of the Hague Convention in this country, we are sending Australian children into harm's way to be abused—questions that the Attorney-General did not answer.”
“The first duty of a government is to protect its citizens and, in particular, its most vulnerable citizens, our children. In the course of my service in this place, I've met with people on the front lines of child protection work in various guises and sought to advance their work—people from the International Justice Mission and ICMEC. I've met former AFP officers who've had to spend day after day watching child sex abuse materials online. I think of colleagues like the member for Fisher and the member for Flinders, who've been at the forefront of debates about online child safety. I think as well about people like the member for Fairfax, who, with the member for Fisher, has supported Bruce and Denise Morcombe and the Daniel Morcombe Foundation.”
“The pathway forward is simple. We'll refer the bill. We will listen to the sector. We will think about the good of Australia and Australians and how the coalition would use these powers in the bill in the future, and we will make a decision in the best interests of the country. I thank the House.”
“This bill changes it from capped funding to capped places, but the places cost different amounts depending on the course. The Commonwealth contribution to a history degree is $1,316; agriculture costs $32,400. Could a university which typically teaches history be allocated 100 places and decide to convert them to agriculture? (Extension of time granted, on the motion of Mr Leeser ) And would this increase the financial risk to the Commonwealth? In theory, it's possible. Given the regulated nature of the industry, it seems unlikely, but it needs to be explored. Finally, because the needs-based funding grant guidelines are so dependent on the minister, they too appear to represent an unknown budgetary expense. That's something that should also be examined. All of these matters are things that we will consider through the committee stage.”
“If a university goes more than five per cent over their cap, they'll lose not only their Commonwealth contribution but also the student contribution. It's a de facto financial penalty. Why would we want to penalise universities for finding ways to educate more domestic students for the same amount of taxpayer money? And why would we want to deny students their first choice, to prop up competitor universities that they simply don't want to attend? How is this fair to students or their families? It's wrongheaded and inexplicable. A further issue is that there appear to be unqualified financial risks in this bill. Under the current arrangements, universities receive a maximum basic grant amount and their load planners determine the types of places they'll offer.”
“The billions of dollars in cuts to research funding limit the ability to rely on alternative sources of funding. A further undesirable aspect of the bill is the strange rejection of efficiency and productivity in the sector, which is demonstrated by its antipathy to overenrolment. A university's fees are made up of two components: Commonwealth contributions and student contributions. Under the current system, if a university enrols more students than they're funded for, they don't receive the Commonwealth contribution, but they may still receive the student contribution. This allows universities to innovate and find economies of scale that allow them to educate more students for the same amount of taxpayer dollars. This is referred to as overenrolment. However, this bill significantly disincentivises overenrolment.”
“Competition means universities are incentivised to improve what they're offering to students. What the minister is saying is he wants to end that incentive. It's bizarre, because it puts the interests of students second to the interests of institutions. I understand the point that there are megauniversities which are rapacious, and the viability of the smaller players is under threat. But that's an argument about market power and relative size of the big institutions. The answer to a misuse of market power is to address that conduct, not to end competition altogether. Another concern is that this bill strips institutional autonomy and independence from our universities. Higher education providers under the managed growth regime become highly reliant on the largesse of the minister and are subject to a range of intrusive powers.”
“For those who've read The Hunger Games or watched the movies, we know the idea of The Hunger Games is that different districts are made to compete by selecting champions who then fight to the death to win food for their home towns. It's a sloppy metaphor when we're talking about universities. It only makes sense if the students are the food. In marketplaces, competition is the friend of the consumer. In a competitive marketplace, you win consumers by offering a higher-quality product at a better price. The winner is the customer. That's the whole purpose of competition policy. In higher education, universities compete to attract students. They compete on academic prestige and research output, on student experience and on career outcomes. A university attracts students because they have a stronger offering.”
“Let me again say to the vice-chancellors: is this what you really want? Those things aside, there are also clearly reasons to oppose this bill. This bill is not the way that we, on this side of the chamber, would approach university reform. We believe in competition and deregulation as formidable tools to drive innovation. That philosophy is not found anywhere in this bill. In fact, this bill ends competition between institutions and brings them under the heel of the minister and his ATEC. I want to say a few words about that. Bizarrely, this bill appears to be premised on the idea that competition between universities is a bad thing. Indeed, the minister made this his centrepiece; 'The hunger games are over,' he said.”
“This could be done by any of the following: giving directions to ATEC, under section 71 of the ATEC act, to prioritise student growth in those areas; determining that specified courses are not higher education courses in the hands of ATEC but are instead demand driven, which allows domestic places to be allocated directly by the minister; or directing ATEC to prioritise the allocation of international students to outer suburban or regional campuses under the new section 46B of the ESOS Act. This gives a future minister the ability to respond much more flexibly to the economic and future workforce needs of our vital regions in the suburbs and the bush. In short, the powerful tools in this bill provide a pathway for a future coalition government to respond to broad societal changes in the national interest.”
“You never hear about them teaching our students to be ashamed of Australia. Why shouldn't we take some of the taxpayer funding that goes to public universities and give it to much better private bodies? My fourth point is on economic opportunities in the outer suburbs and regions. A former leader of the National Party is sitting next to me at the table today. The suite of powers in this bill would allow a future minister to prioritise economic growth in these key areas by directing our student load and international cohort where it's needed, which is out of our CBDs and into the regions and the bush.”
“This is a new notion which replaces the much less flexible notion of a national priority that's in the existing legislation. New sections 30.35 and 30.40 of the HESA make clear that the minister can easily list a particular course as a priority for the specified non-table A provider and thus open a gateway to CSPs. The pathway is much simpler and gives the minister a much more granular level of control than is currently the case. The minister simply needs to amend the Commonwealth Grant Scheme Guidelines. For effective and efficient private providers who do the right thing, why should they not play a part in educating our future students? You never hear about the socialist alternative taking over the campus of a private provider. You never hear about them having a problem with antisemitism.”
“My colleague and friend Senator Bridget McKenzie recently gave a speech where she outlined concerns about the state of the sector, concerns that I know are shared by many parents, many students and my coalition colleagues about students spending years being grounded in woke ideology and even antisemitism and those ideas being passed on to the broader society. This bill empowers the minister to turn back the tide. Third, on private higher education and sector reform, this bill allows the minister to prioritise growth both for Commonwealth supported places and international students outside the public universities. It envisages Commonwealth supported places going to private sector institutions for priority classes of courses.”
“It could be used to require the teaching of Australian values, as defined by the minister of the day, rather than a divisive, progressive agenda. The control that the minister can exert over international students could no doubt have the same effect indirectly, if not in name. To any who object, I say state your case. Why should our universities not teach pride in our country? Why should a minister not have the power to enforce that? Why would a responsible minister allocate international students that allowed Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Socialist Alternative to run encampments and take over the student representative councils? Why would we want to export our problems to the world by exposing international students to the worst aspects of woke ideology that have run amok on our campuses?”
“He said that Australian kids should be taught Australian values, which he defined as democracy, the rule of law, basic freedoms and a fair go. This bill would give a future minister the power to ensure that universities teach national pride in Australian values, as defined by the minister, as a funding condition for receiving a Commonwealth supported place. This should not be controversial. It is what the minister should do, and it's what any coalition minister would do. The new condition-making power in section 36-65 of HESA allows the minister to impose conditions unilaterally on providers. As a condition of being allocated Commonwealth supported places, this power could be used to require a recalcitrant university or higher education provider to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism.”
“It is not required to consult with private providers. In any event, it must comply with the matters specified by the minister. The minister doesn't have to consult. In short, this is a powerful tool to bring down the NOM in the way we've outlined. Second, on social cohesion, Blind Freddy could tell you that the universities have been one of the key sources of socially destructive trends, particularly around antisemitism in the progressive left but also in relation to the broader adherence to Australia and its values. In February this year, I commend the minister for saying this, he rightly called for schools to teach students that Australia is, 'the best country in the world'. You will never hear that in our universities.”
“I said very clearly that I understand the value of international students to Australia. I also said: We will want to make changes to the settings around international students, but I want the sector to know that we want to work closely with you to develop these policies and announce them in due course. This bill provides a powerful pathway to bring down the NOM. In effect, it transitions the international student temporary migration program from a capped to an uncapped system, without needing to engage with the complexities of the Migration Act or the visa system. To get a student visa, you need a confirmation of enrolment. Unless a university is allocated international student places, they will not be able to issue that confirmation. The ATEC must consult with public universities before making an international student allocation.”
“The suite of powers in this bill provides a pathway to fix many of them, and it provides a pathway to address some broader societal challenges as well. First, on migration, when I spoke at the Universities Australia conference earlier this year, I said: Australia's migration program must be designed to restore our standard of living and protect our way of life. Our migration settings must be appropriately balanced against the capacity of our housing, our infrastructure and other services. Currently, the pressure on infrastructure, services and housing—particularly in our cities—is being felt acutely across the board. International students make up the largest component of Net Overseas Migration. In any attempt to address the NOM, international students will play a part.”
“You cannot remove it through keyhole surgery. If you do not like it and do not want to accept it, you will need to persuade both the coalition and the Greens that the bill should be opposed. That's the lay down on the bill. This bill is quite extraordinary in the amount of power it confirms on the current minister and indeed any future minister. But let's be honest. From this side of the chamber or, indeed, any part of the chamber, I doubt there's a politician in this place who would say that all is well with the sector. From concerns about quality to how universities are grappling with the challenges of artificial intelligence, the shocking failures in relation to antisemitism, the problems around international students and a general slide in rankings, the problems of our higher education providers are manifold.”
“Presumably, if you're a university and you get a bad decision, then your only recourse is judicial review, litigation or a constitutional writ. It's not a great option when the target of your litigation will be the minister who will make the future decisions that shape your ongoing financial viability. Again, I say to the university vice-chancellors that called for and welcome this bill: I'm surprised you signed up to this. I'm surprised you welcomed this legislation. These are matters that go directly to your institutional independence and autonomy. This is apparently what you wanted, though. Let me say this clearly: if it's not what you wanted, I do not think degradation of your independence and institutional autonomy can be fixed through piecemeal amendments. Ministerial control over the sector is embedded in every part of this bill.”
“The minister's decisions about international allocation pools are not disallowable, as I mentioned. The minister's decisions about the allocation of places for demand driven higher education courses are not legislative instruments and therefore not disallowable. A determination by the minister to impose a condition on the specified higher education provider is not a legislative instrument and is therefore not disallowable and is not subject to merits review. Conditions opposed by the minister in relation to needs based funding grants are also not legislative instruments and therefore not disallowable. ATEC decisions about core student load, additional growth allocation, transitional places and a range of other things are not subject to merits review by the Administrative Review Tribunal.”
“The legislation sets a base amount, but this is multiplied by an equity modifier amount. The equity modifier amount is again specified in the needs based funding grant guidelines. Presumably, in theory, any future minister could simply determine that the equity modifier amount is zero. A similar arrangement applies for the regional component. In short, the amount of equity and regional funding you will receive under the needs based funding grant guidelines are within the control of the minister. The ATEC is not involved. To the vice-chancellors, I say: this is how you will be funded into the future. It's worth noting a few points about oversight and review of the decisions made under this bill. In this bill, the minister's decisions about domestic student pools are not disallowable.”
“This so-called system steward, ATEC, can be bypassed at any time by a minister choosing to exercise this power. Again, this means universities are, under this bill, subject to extraordinary control by this minister or any future minister. Fourth, the ATEC is not involved in decisions about needs based funding, which instead is controlled by the minister. Under the new section 39-15 of the HESA, institutions receive needs based funding grants that comprise two components: the total equity component and the total regional component. The coverage of the equity component is unclear. It covers international students, but whether or not a person is otherwise eligible depends on whether they can satisfy criteria under the needs based funding grant guidelines, which are to be issued by the minister. It's unclear how much they'll be paid.”
“Third, the bill gives the minister unilateral power to impose conditions on higher education providers under the new section 36-65 of the HESA, which is introduced by this bill. The current version of section 36-65 of the HESA requires that there be an agreement in place with the provider. The new version does not. It appears the minister can at any time for any provider in relation to any matter whatsoever impose a condition on that provider for the purpose of a Commonwealth grant, which they are required by law to comply with if they take the Commonwealth supported places in that year. This power appears to be limited only perhaps by the Australian Constitution or administrative law statutory interpretation constraints as to the scope of the primary legislation. There's no requirement to consult. There's no requirement to involve AAT.”
“He can control how they're distributed. He can do that by making an international allocation pool determination and then giving directions to ATEC under the new section 46B of the ESOS Act. It's worth saying that, as a matter of drafting, it appears likely that the minister has the power to make course-level caps. This is either because the drafting refers to the minister's power to make allocations in relation to 'a course of education' or because his power to stipulate matters the ATEC must comply with when it allocates students is completely unconstrained, doesn't require consultation and is not disallowable. This means the minister has huge flexibility to determine the quantum, the location and the field of study for any future international student growth.”
“He can pause any growth in that pool. He can then ensure any future growth in student numbers comes from demand driven places which he controls. In theory, he has the power to exercise total control over future domestic student growth. Of course, like all good regulatory tools, it's likely he would never need to exercise those powers. But their mere existence—the threat of an adverse ministerial decision—would almost always be sufficient to bring a recalcitrant sector into line. But the power is there, just in case. That is just one of the powers the minister would acquire under this bill. A future minister would have those powers too. The second area in which the minister can bypass ATEC independence is in relation to decisions about international students. The minister decides the number of students available.”
“More to the point, this bill allows the minister to bypass the ATEC in a number of significant respects, effectively making it irrelevant. He can do this in a number of ways. First, he can decide to directly allocate places to institutions. This is because the minister has the power to allocate demand driven higher education places under the new section 30-55 of the HESA. He can allocate those places in specific courses to specific institutions. He also has the power to decide under section 30-60 whether a course is a demand driven higher education course. The ATEC does not have the power to allocate demand driven higher education course places. This means the minister can take places out of the hands of the ATEC and allocate them himself. Of course, the minister also has the power to determine the total allocation pool.”
“Just in case those caveats turn out to be a little too constricting, this bill introduces a new special power for the minister to stipulate 'matters the ATEC must comply with' in relation to the allocation of international students. I'll come back to that. To drive the point home, the words 'independent' or 'independence' only appear five times in the ATEC Act. Two of those occurrences describe statutory reviews that must take place after two and five years. The other three occurrences relate to a requirement for commissioners to be independent of tertiary education providers. None of them describes any requirement for the ATEC or its commissioners to be independent of government. The coalition did not support the establishment of ATEC. We thought it was a wasteful, unnecessary and duplicative bureaucracy—bad in principle.”
“Section 24 of the ATEC Act says that this must be done by the secretary on behalf of the Commonwealth on terms and conditions that the secretary determines in writing. This means that ATEC commissioners are completely dependent on resourcing allocated to them by the minister and the secretary to perform their functions. That's not independence. As for freedom from direction, there's no such thing. ATEC commissioners are explicitly instructed by statute to take account of the minister's short- and long-term priorities, which are set out under section 15 of the ATEC Act. The ATEC is also directly subject to ministerial direction about how they carry out their functions, with a couple of minor caveats under section 71 of the ATEC Act.”
“What constitutes unsatisfactory performance and a significant period of time are not defined. That's not independence. As for remuneration and resourcing, the remuneration of ATEC commissioners is, of course, determined by the Remuneration Tribunal, but the resourcing of ATEC is highly dependent on the minister. The ATEC Act makes it clear there is no ability for the ATEC to employ its own staff. Instead, the ATEC Act specifically stipulates in section 22: The staff assisting the ATEC are to be APS employees in the Department whose services are made available to the ATEC by the Secretary … Indeed, other staff are able to assist the ATEC only where the relevant agency head agrees, and the ATEC cannot even engage its own contractors or consultants.”
“On the theme of independence, those in the sector who are watching or who are on the crossbench of this parliament may have been told that many of the decisions about funding will be the domain of ATEC and that's okay because ATEC is independent. Let me say a few words about that. Independence is when you can't be sacked, when your funding can't be taken away and when you're not subject to direction. That's how we've guaranteed the independence of judges since at least the Act of Settlement 1701. But that's not how the ATEC is set up. ATEC commissioners are subject to termination at the satisfaction of the minister under section 67 of the ATEC act. All that's required is for the minister, whoever he or she may be, to be satisfied that the commissioners performance has been 'unsatisfactory for a significant period of time'.”
“There has been a $2.2 billion cut to research from the Economic Accelerator, a $925 million reduction in the research capacity program compared to when the coalition left office, the end of hundreds of millions of dollars in research investment through trailblazer universities and myriad other cuts. The government has slashed the sector's other sources of income, reducing income diversification and concentrating reliance on allocated student places, which will now be determined by government. Deputy Speaker, through you, I want to speak to all the university vice chancellors who are either watching this or will be reading this later. I'm surprised you signed up for this. You told us you wanted managed growth. I'm surprised you don't also want your independence.”
“The minister, for all intents and purposes, not only will have the power to set an overall cap on international student numbers across all institutions but also can control how they're allocated. The minister controls needs based funding grants through the needs based funding grants guidelines that he will write, which will, in substance, determine how much funding will be delivered and to whom. In effect, this bill ensures the minister controls student fees and Commonwealth contributions, which are the financial lifeblood that allows our institutions to keep operating. It's worth noting aside that the minister has increased reliance on that lifeblood by cutting research funding elsewhere.”
“So, in examining this bill, it's appropriate to put any budgetary decisions to one side. They can and should be examined on their own terms. Instead, let's look at the statutory mechanisms that are introduced by this legislation. Let me be very clear, as I was a few moments ago: this bill is about centralising power in the hands of the minister, because under this bill nearly every aspect of the future financial viability of our higher education institutions will be in the hands of the current minister and every future minister. The minister, whomever he or she happens to be at the time, will control the size of the domestic student load and will control how it's allocated both indirectly and directly.”