Implementing tougher laws

Updated on: Monday, September 07, 2009

With nearly 100,000 students from India enrolled in various courses in Australia, the assaults on Indian students caused an uproar in India. And after an Indian reporter working undercover for the Four Corners, an investigative programme on ABC, revealed an education and migration scam, the Australian government said it was bringing in tougher rules to protect students from dubious operators.

“The message to providers is, if you’re not providing your students with a quality education in a safe environment, clean up your act or risk being shut down,” The Age quoted Education Minister Julia Gillard as telling parliament. According to IANS reports, Gillard was introducing amendments to the law regulating schools that provide courses to the nearly half a million overseas students who come to Australia each year.

Gillard says that the education sector had grown so fast that there were insufficient checks and balances, “We need to weed out the ‘shonky’ (dubious) operators,” she said.

Now all institutions registered on the Commonwealth Register of Institutions and Courses for Overseas Students will have to re-register under tougher criteria by the end of next year and make the use of education agents “more transparent and accountable”, say IANS reports.

What is more, according to Gillard, it will be mandatory for all education providers to publish a list of the agents they use — in or outside Australia. Mean while according to IANS, the Australian government was also considering forcing providers to develop websites to allow students to make anonymous comments about the agents.

This, said Gillian, was the first important step in the cleaning up process

Implementing tougher laws

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