November 17, 2025
IRU submission on the Education Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2025
The Innovative Research Universities (IRU) appreciates the opportunity to provide feedback on the proposed Education Legislation Amendment Bill 2025 (ELA Bill).
The IRU supports the uncapping of Commonwealth-supported medical places for all Indigenous students, to further enhance access and equity in our higher education system. We welcome ongoing government action to implement the recommendations from the Universities Accord Final Report to support Indigenous self-determination, and to increase the benefits of higher education for Indigenous students and communities.
The IRU also supports measures to further strengthen the integrity of the international education system, however we believe that some changes are needed to the proposed ELA Bill as drafted.
International education is an Australian success story, benefitting individual students and delivering significant social, cultural and economic benefits for communities across the nation. The Education Services for Overseas Students Act 2000 (ESOS Act) and the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) are critical components of the policy and regulatory framework that ensures the quality of Australian education and the protection of students.
The ELA Bill proposes amendments to the ESOS Act and TEQSA Act, some of which were previously proposed in the ESOS Amendment Bill 2024. The previous IRU submission in response to that Bill is available here.
We welcome continued government focus on quality and integrity in international education and the IRU supports many of the proposed measures in this new Bill. We acknowledge the work that has been done by government to update and refine integrity measures to ensure that they are proportionate and risk-based.
However there are still proposed measures in the ELA Bill that require further attention – some of these are issues from the ESOS Amendment Bill 2024 that have still not been addressed, despite extensive feedback at the time, and some are new issues that have been introduced in this Bill. We provide more detail here on specific areas of concern.
We recommend that the ELA Bill be amended before it is passed, and would be happy to speak with the Committee if we can provide additional information that would be useful in this process.
