The numbers are grim for Australia’s 2.7 million small businesses. In no sector is this more the case than tertiary education. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) reports that rising costs are now the biggest challenge for 63% of small business owners and that small business exits are up 37% year on year.
This is all familiar to tertiary education providers. Just last week, two separate RTOs contacted ITECA to let us know they were closing their doors by the end of October as a direct result of government policy decisions.
These policy decisions have far-reaching implications. International education earned almost $55 billion in 2025, and $30.4 billion of that was spent on rent, groceries, transport and coffee. Supporting local jobs and communities. The Federal Government has carelessly taken a hatchet to those jobs and to the communities that support them through education, hospitality and retail, sectors that can least afford to lose them.
Small business is the hardest hit; these aren’t businesses looking for a bailout like some sectors have received. But we’d like governments to get off our backs and to stop making every day harder than the one before. In 2025, the Prime Minister said we need to secure “…the progress we have made together. Delivering the rewards your hard work has won. Creating the opportunities you and your children deserve.”
The independent tertiary education sector is feeling that reward for hard work is being taken by a malign set of forces that does not respect business endeavour and instead rewards the mentality of the rent-seeker.
The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency has released a consultation paper on updated fees and charges that will take effect from 1 January 2027. Consultation goes for 5 days. This is the same Agency that tells anyone wanting to open a new higher education provider to allow at least 35 months before teaching their first student. That’s three years of rent, salaries and compliance costs before any revenue comes in.
In international education, recent changes have huge implications across the tertiary sector and the economy more broadly. The Department of Home Affairs now refuses about one in three offshore higher education visa applications, and this will be the only avenue to a student visa for the vast majority of international students.
Implementation of the Government’s policies increases the risk artificially contracting Australia’s fourth-largest export sector, with the result being a further slowing of Australia’s GDP and the resultant drag on our living standards. Further, these policies are likely to result in the choking of Australia’s long-term skills pipeline, particularly in fields such as nursing and the care sector, engineering and mining, hospitality, construction and agriculture.
The Australian Skills Quality Authority has been steadily proactive in seeking to take action against non-genuine providers. This is welcome and ITECA supports this work. ITECA looks forward to seeing a proactive – or responsive – approach being taken to all institutions that have breached legislative obligations, often flagrantly, given the obligation on all institutions to be doing to right thing.
Integrity matters. As we have seen, when some are not doing the right thing, everyone suffers as regulators are undermined and under-resourced, and the scale of their work becomes overwhelming. The result is not that governments seek a better system, rather, they seek a smaller one. That means fewer choices, and dimmer prospects for the leaners of the future and for our economies and communities.
Independent tertiary education doesn’t need a lifeline. Neither do our students. We need to foster ambition, not cut it off at the knees.
Felix Pirie is the Chief Executive Officer of ITECA.
The Koala thanks Felix and ITECA for permission to publish this piece, which first appeared in the ITECA Newsletter (13/10/26).
