International Education Roundtable

18 Jun 2015 Transcipt

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

International Education Roundtable, Parliament House

Thursday 18 June 2016

SUBJECT: Opening of International Education Roundtable

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Thank you very much Robert and to you but particularly to my ministerial colleagues who've already been acknowledged so I won't acknowledge them all individually or in fact all the other members of the new coordinating council. We have a glittering array of participants today made even more glittering by the presence of Bridget McKenzie from the Senate who's also the chair of the Coalition Education Committee and of course my former colleague Senator Robert Hill who is the most glittering of all of the participants here and we're very pleased to have him back here looking after us.

And thank you all very much for coming and making the time to be here as part of this international education roundtable. We have participants from international students, the higher education sector, the VET sector, from the school sector including both non-government and government schools, academics and researchers and other experts who specialise in international education and research collaboration, all the peak bodies in the sector are here, organisations that represent the broader interests of the community including leaders from local government, individuals who help drive the international education industry and groups and individuals who share the Government's vision for expanding international education even further and every state and territory is also represented here today.

And it's been a great week for international education, made even greater by the actions of the Assistant Minister for Immigration, Senator Michaelia Cash who's done a fantastic job this week with the new simplified student visa framework, the SSVF which runs neatly off the tongue for those who like acronyms. And we also have new figures announced only yesterday of record numbers of students across all the sectors in international education for the last quarter. The Government also yesterday signed the landmark China/Australia free trade agreement which will have a huge boom for the services sector, particularly education as well as health and then we're finishing the week with this roundtable to finalise the Draft National Strategy on International Education.

Being the best in the world in international education will require intense and diverse partnerships between educational institutions of many kinds plus business, the community and government and that's why we are bringing all of the different participants here today to have that whole of nation, whole of sector approach. And our job today is to finalise the Draft National Strategy on International Education which many of you have been working on over the past few months providing excellent submissions and today we will wrap that up having heard from everyone who's participating.

And we'll have another roundtable in August just to finalise the direction that we're heading in and pick up any new ideas that might emerge over the course of today's discussions.

This industry- this international education industry - is under recognised in the community at large. It always shocks people when I tell them that international education is our third largest export industry. Nobody considers that it could be such an important economic boom after iron ore and coal. And of course in South Australia and Victoria it is the number one export industry so it is vitally important. International students contribute a great deal to our national prosperity, to the students and the global workforce, to the cultural diversity of our campuses, communities, and business, to the internationalisation of research in all aspects of education, to our economy both national and local, and to our relationships across the world, which I'm sure Julie Bishop will talk particularly about when she speaks to us very soon.

Our aspirations for ongoing cultural enrichment and economic growth can't be separated from our engagement with the world in education and training. At the moment international education is worth about $17 billion, but is rising all the time. As you would know our international students add dramatically to economies through accommodation, restaurants, retail, tourism, bringing their parents and family and friends to Australia to see where they're working and where they are studying, and Deloitte's Access Economics estimates that for every two international students they create an extra job.

So we are very pleased with our international education as an industry, but it's also a two-way street, and every time I talk to education ministers when I'm travelling overseas and when they're visiting here and I meet with them I emphasise that Australia sees international education not as a source of income for us, but actually an opportunity to engage with their countries in an equal and bipartisan way to ensure that we add value to their economies, and they add value to ours, and I think that's very important that they understand we respect the contribution that we are making to them and that they are making to us. And one of the areas that we want to expand is Latin America, and I'm sure that you would share that aspiration. We have great markets in China and India and Vietnam and we want to expand further into Latin America.

So today I'm announcing that the Government is going to commission a review of whether we are capturing all the economic and employment benefits of international education, and understand fully the impact that international education has in the cities, and states, and regional areas in a region-by-region breakdown. That study will be a rigorous analysis of the impact of international education in our economy, and I think will help us form a basis to have that conversation with the Australian people about why international education is so important, and why in fact rather than taking Australians' positions at university, they are creating those positions at university because of the revenue that flows to our sector.

I also of course have appointed a coordinating council for international education. This is the first one that the Government has ever appointed at the national level. It includes all the ministers as we can see, all today - other than Andrew Robb who's very disappointed not to be able to be here because he is a great enthusiast for international education, and talks about it a great deal as one of the drivers of our economy - but all the ministers here today will be part of that international education coordinating council, plus six representatives from the sector; Sue Blundell, Kate Carnell, Phil Honeywood, Belinda Robinson, Bill Spurr, and Malcolm White, who we think represent the broad cross-section of interests from tourism right through to VET and higher education and business. And they will be responsible, with these six ministers, for overseeing the implementation of the National Strategy for International Education.

So thank you very much for joining us today. I'm looking forward to hearing the deliberations and then getting a full report later in the day when I return, and I'm happy to introduce my good friend and colleague Julie Bishop, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, who will talk from her perspective about international education.

[ends]