Brand Australia at Risk: Why Over-Regulating Agents Misses the Mark — and Provider Accountability Is the Fix

January 12, 2026 Sukh Sandhu

Australia’s international education sector is a national treasure. It fuels exports, builds soft power, strengthens migration pathways, and underwrites long-term diplomatic, research and commercial ties. The Education Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2025, together with related regulatory changes, rightly seeks to lift integrity and student protections. However, its current emphasis on agent-centric regulation and public disclosure of commercial arrangements threatens to weaken, not strengthen, Brand Australia.

This article argues that integrity is non-negotiable, but the regulatory lever is misapplied. Education agents act under the permission, contracts and policies of providers. Providers decide who can recruit, on what terms, and how the student experience is managed from offer to graduation. If there is misconduct in recruitment or churn in the system, providers have both the control and the financial incentive to prevent it — and therefore must carry the primary accountability.

A policy shift is necessary: de-emphasise intrusive and market-distorting obligations on agents (for example, commission publication and broad commercial disclosure) and re-centre accountability on providers through enforceable duties, tough penalties for non-compliance, outcomes-based transparency, and risk-based oversight that targets those with genuine control. Done well, this recalibration protects students, preserves the competitiveness of Australian providers, retains high-quality agent networks, and ultimately fortifies Brand Australia.

In brief

What’s at stake: National reputation, export earnings, regional diplomacy, long-term talent inflows and alumni networks.
Core concern: Agent-heavy regulation and forced disclosure of commercial terms will shrink market reach, deter reputable offshore partners, and concentrate risk — particularly for smaller and regional providers.
Better path: Provider-centric accountability with sharper penalties, outcomes-based data, targeted supervision, improved due diligence, and robust student protections.
Result: Integrity with competitiveness — sustained growth, diversity of markets, and a stronger Brand Australia.

1. What’s Really at Stake: Brand Australia, Not Just Enrolments

International education is more than a line item in the national accounts. It is a strategic asset that multiplies value across tourism, research, innovation, trade and diplomacy. Every international student who studies here becomes part of a lifelong network of alumni, entrepreneurs and leaders who carry a lived Australian experience back to their countries, companies and cabinets. This is the soft-power dividend of Brand Australia: credibility, trust and affinity that no advertising campaign can buy.

When policy settings signal unpredictability, excessive intrusiveness, or commercial risk, partners make rational decisions. Quality agents pivot to friendlier destinations. Students follow the path of least resistance. Providers lose diversification options and retreat to a narrower set of well-trodden markets. In the short term, a handful of large institutions might weather the storm. In the long term, the system hollows out: fewer markets, less diversity, higher prices, thinner student support, and weaker outcomes. This is how great brands erode — not suddenly, but incrementally and avoidably.

Integrity matters. Australia must be known as a destination that protects students and enforces standards. But integrity and competitiveness are not rivals; they are co-requisites. The question is not “whether” but “how” we regulate — and who we hold accountable.

2. A Global Market That Punishes Friction

International education sits inside a ruthless global marketplace. Students compare destinations on work rights, visa stability, cost of living, post-study opportunities, provider quality and — crucially — ease of navigation. Agents assess which countries treat them like partners rather than suspects. If we create frictions that others do not, Australia becomes relatively less attractive — even if our universities, TAFEs and RTOs remain world-class.

Agent-heavy regulation introduces three market frictions:

Disclosure friction: Mandating publication or wide disclosure of commission structures and commercial arrangements chills agency participation, raises legal risk across jurisdictions, and undermines competitive positioning for both providers and their reputable agents.
Compliance friction: Complex reporting and heightened surveillance obligations deter smaller or specialist agencies that help Australia diversify into emerging markets. Those agencies take their market knowledge elsewhere.
Relationship friction: Treating agents as a compliance problem rather than a professional channel sends a reputational signal that reverberates through international networks. People do business where they feel trusted, respected and valued.

The net effect is predictable: contraction of agent networks, higher cost-to-recruit, concentration in a few markets, and reduced choice for students. That is the opposite of what Brand Australia needs.

3. The Control Test: Why Provider Accountability Is the Logical Centre of Gravity

Agents cannot enrol a single student into an Australian course without a provider’s explicit consent, systems and contracts. Providers define admissions standards, eligibility, fees, refund rules, orientation, welfare services, complaint mechanisms and support during the student journey. They choose, vet and pay their agents. Providers hold the keys to quality.

If a student receives misleading advice, experiences churn between courses, or arrives without adequate preparation, the provider has the power to prevent it. Provider-centric accountability, therefore, passes the common-sense control test:

Control of selection: Providers decide who can sell their courses and on what conditions.
Control of conduct: Providers train, monitor and can terminate agents who breach standards.
Control of journey: Providers control the educational pathway, support, welfare and progression.
Control of incentives: Providers set commissions, bursaries, conversion bonuses and transfer policies.

Because providers control the levers, they must own the liability. An effective regulatory regime rewards providers who run high-integrity recruitment and punishes those who knowingly benefit from poor practice. That is how you align incentives with the public interest.

4. Commission Publication: Transparency That Backfires

Transparency is a public good when it illuminates outcomes that matter to students — completion, progression, visa compliance, student support and graduate results. But mandatory publication of commercial-in-confidence terms (such as agent commissions) is not that kind of transparency.

It is market-distorting for three reasons:

Competitive harm: Commission tables are pricing strategies. Publishing them undermines bargaining positions, invites copy-cat bidding wars, and encourages volume-over-value recruitment — the very behaviour integrity reform is supposed to curb.
Legal exposure across borders: Many agents operate under jurisdictions with their own confidentiality and competition rules. Broad publication creates tangled cross-border risk that quality agents will simply avoid.
Perverse incentives: When commissions are the visible metric, actors optimise for the visible metric. High-quality counselling, careful placement, and ethically advising against unsuitable courses become harder to monetise in a published spreadsheet.

A smarter approach is to publish outcomes, not prices: show which providers deliver fair admissions, strong completion, low churn, adequate support, and responsible on-shore transfers — and hold providers to account for sub-standard performance.

5. The Collateral Damage: Small, Regional and Specialist Providers

Large metropolitan institutions can absorb new compliance overheads, renegotiate contracts and build in-house recruitment teams. Small, regional and specialist providers cannot. For them, agent networks are not optional — they are lifelines into diverse markets where brand recognition is lower, and travel budgets are thin.

Over-regulating agents produce a familiar pattern:

Shrinkage of viable partners willing to accept intrusive disclosures.
Higher per-student acquisition costs are passed on to learners through higher tuition.
Retreat from emerging markets that require culturally attuned, on-the-ground agencies.
Reduced international cohort diversity, which diminishes the educational experience for all students.

When regional providers lose international revenue, local communities suffer — fewer jobs, fewer services, less cultural vibrancy. The whole sector becomes narrower, older and less resilient. Brand Australia needs breadth and depth, not concentration.

6. Integrity Without Self-Harm: What Good Regulation Looks Like

Integrity reform should be proportionate, predictable and enabling:

Proportionate to risk, not one-size-fits-all.
Predictable enough for long-term planning and investment.
Enabling high-quality practice, not just punitive for non-compliance.

A provider-centred model meets these tests. It targets the actors with control, simplifies enforcement, and rewards excellence. It sidelines opportunists while welcoming reputable agents as partners in ethical recruitment.

Key features of good design:

Clear, codified provider duties in agent engagement, due diligence, training, monitoring and termination.
Outcomes-based transparency (completion, progression, on-shore transfer integrity, complaint resolution, welfare benchmarks) rather than raw commission tables.
Tiered sanctions that bite: civil penalties, enrolment caps, suspension of CRICOS courses, and (in egregious cases) deregistration.
Risk-weighted supervision focused on providers and markets with poor signals, not blanket burdens that punish the good with the bad.
Student-first safeguards that preserve access to genuine counselling and redress without making agents uninsurable or commercially unviable.

This is integrity with teeth, not integrity that handcuffs the market.

7. How Agents Add Value When We Let Them

Quality agents are cultural translators, risk screeners and pastoral bridges. They assess student readiness, explain realistic pathways, triage documentation, and help families understand fees, work rights and living costs. In many markets, agents are the only trustworthy local touchpoint for students who cannot navigate English-language websites or complex visa instructions. When agents are treated as allies, they lift the whole system:

A better fit between student and course reduces attrition and complaints.
Earlier risk detection (finance, housing, welfare) prevents later crises.
Market diversification expands beyond a handful of well-known source countries.
Reputation building becomes two-way: agents stake their own brand on Australia’s integrity.

Punish misconduct, absolutely. But do not dismantle the channel that brings Australia to the world and the world to Australia.

8. What Actually Deters Misconduct: Incentives and Enforcement

Bad behaviour responds to incentives. If a provider can profit from high-volume, low-fit enrolments while shifting reputational risk onto agents, misconduct persists. The cure is straightforward: reverse the payoff.

Make provider penalties real. Where a provider repeatedly benefits from unethical recruitment or on-shore churn, apply escalating sanctions that exceed the gains: fines that sting, caps that limit, suspensions that hurt, and — if necessary — deregistration.
Publish provider outcomes, not their private contracts. Let the market see who delivers support, success and satisfaction — and who does not. Students and partners will choose accordingly.
Reward excellence. Providers with strong integrity records should enjoy lighter-touch supervision, faster approvals and pilot opportunities. This builds a race to the top.

Shift the calculus, and behaviour follows.

9. Scenarios That Show the Stakes

Scenario A: The Disclosure Spiral

A mid-tier provider in regional Australia relies on a network of three respected agencies in Southeast Asia and West Africa. New disclosure rules require publication of commission tiers and referral numbers. One agency, concerned about legal exposure at home and competitive harm, exits the Australian market. The provider’s pipeline from that region collapses within a year. To plug the gap, the provider increases marketing spend, raises tuition, and tightens scholarships. International diversity falls, domestic students pay more, and the local town loses a cohort that animated its main street. Everyone loses for a transparency gain that did not help a single student.

Scenario B: Outcomes Transparency, Provider Accountability

A national dashboard shows each provider’s completion rates, on-shore transfer integrity, student complaints resolution and early-support interventions. A provider with poor outcomes across two intakes faces an intensified supervision plan and a temporary cap. The provider terminates weak-performing agents, retrains admissions teams, and invests in student support. Within 12 months, indicators improve and the cap lifts. The market saw the problem, the regulator enforced consequences, and the provider corrected course — without publishing a single commission table.

Scenario C: Crushing Small Specialists

A niche ELICOS provider serving Latin America works with boutique agents in provincial cities. Those agents cannot accept blanket public disclosure without breaching local norms and risking poaching by competitors. They drop Australia, recommend other destinations, and the provider loses its pipeline. Once the boutique channel is gone, diversification shrinks. In its place: a handful of large, urban agencies, funnelling students into the same congested pathways. Quality did not rise. Concentration did.

10. The Diversification Mandate

Everyone agrees Australia must diversify beyond a few dominant markets. That requires local knowledge, language fluency, and on-the-ground networks — precisely what reputable small and mid-sized agents provide. Burdens that only the largest global aggregators can absorb flatten the ecosystem and lock out the very partners who help Australia reach new learners. If we are serious about diversification, we must design for it: proportionate obligations, template contracts, targeted analytics, and collaborative training that lift standards without closing doors.

11. Data That Matters: Measuring What We Intend to Improve

Publishing commission rates tells a student nothing about whether they will be welcomed, taught well, supported and able to succeed. Publishing outcomes tells them everything.

An outcomes-first transparency framework could include:

Admissions integrity indicators: proportion of offers accepted with complete documentation; prevalence of conditional offers converted without risk flags.
Early-support activation: time-to-intervention for students with attendance or assessment risk.
Progression and completion rates disaggregated by course level and cohort.
On-shore transfer integrity: share of transfers flagged for commercial drivers vs. academic/compassionate grounds, with provider remediation where patterns emerge.
Student voice: structured measures of safety, fairness, and responsiveness, with independent auditing to deter gaming.
Graduate outcomes are robust and comparable.

This is the sunlight that disinfects — outcomes, not offers; results, not rates.

12. A Provider-Centric Integrity Model (Practical Blueprint)

A. Entry, Fitness and Scope
Require providers to demonstrate domestic delivery competence, genuine governance and adequate student support before recruiting overseas. Limit scope creep: no sudden expansion into offshore markets without evidence of system maturity.

B. Agent Engagement Duties
Impose on providers a non-delegable duty to conduct due diligence on agents, including checks for conflicts, cross-ownership and history of complaints. Contractual minimums: training obligations, truth-in-advertising clauses, document retention, audit rights and swift termination pathways.

C. Outcomes-Based Supervision
Publish provider-level outcomes (see section 11). Apply graduated regulatory intensity: low-risk providers enjoy streamlined reporting; high-risk providers face remedial plans, caps or suspensions.

D. Penalties That Deter
Set penalties above commercial gain from poor practice. Repeat offenders face progressive sanctions culminating in CRICOS suspension or cancellation. Directors who preside over systemic breaches face fit-and-proper consequences.

E. Student Safeguards
Ring-fence entitlements: transparent refunds, complaint escalation, conflict-free counselling and prohibition on on-shore incentive-driven poaching. Empower students with plain-English rights.

F. Partnership, Not Policing, with Quality Agents
Offer recognition pathways for agents that meet training and ethics benchmarks and demonstrate positive student outcomes. Encourage providers to prefer recognised agents while retaining room for niche specialists to join and grow.

G. Transitional Supports
For small and regional providers, provide templates, shared training hubs, pooled analytics, and reasonable phase-ins. We want better behaviour, not fewer participants.

13. Costs and Benefits: Choosing the Right Trade-Offs

No integrity reform is cost-free. The correct trade-off is one where modest compliance overheads buy large reputational and student-welfare dividends without degrading competitiveness. Publishing commercial contracts and commission tiers fails this test: it imposes high costs for low public benefit and creates risks that land on providers least able to bear them.

By contrast, a provider-centric model with outcomes transparency:

Raises value for students (clearer signals of success and safety).
Aligns incentives for providers (do better or face credible sanctions).
Keeps reputable agents in the tent (partnered on standards, not punished for competing).
Protects Brand Australia as a high-integrity, high-opportunity destination.

That is a trade-off Australia can afford — and cannot afford to ignore.

14. Optics and Signals: What the World Hears When We Regulate

Policy is not only rules; it is storytelling. When Australia centres accountability on those who control quality and outcomes, we tell the world: we welcome students, demand excellence, and back our providers to rise to the standard. When we fixate on agent disclosures and public contracts, the story sounds different: Australia is hard to deal with, commercially intrusive, and suspicious of its own partners. In a market where perception steers choice, signals matter. Let ours be the right ones.

15. The Way Forward: A Policy Recalibration That Strengthens Everyone

Reform is needed. Students deserve it. The sector benefits from it. But the lever must be repositioned. Shift the regulatory fulcrum to provider accountability, measure what matters, and enforce with clarity and courage. Invite agents to be part of the solution by setting standards, not traps. Support small and regional providers so that diversification remains more than a slogan. Preserve commercial-in-confidence where it protects legitimate competition while shedding real light on outcomes that matter to learners and families.

Do this, and Australia will not merely survive the next cycle of global competition — it will lead.

Summary Page: Key Messages for Decision-Makers

Brand Australia is strategic capital. Protect it with integrity settings that do not degrade competitiveness.
Agents act under provider control. Make providers carry legal accountability for recruitment quality and student outcomes.
Transparency must be meaningful. Publish outcomes, not commission tables. Sunlight where it matters; privacy where competition is legitimate.
Don’t punish diversification. Avoid rules that push out boutique, regional and specialist agents who open new markets for Australia.
Penalise where control resides. Escalating sanctions for providers with repeated poor outcomes change behaviour faster than agent-heavy disclosure.
Build a race to the top. Reward high-integrity providers with lighter-touch oversight; recognise agents who meet clear standards.
Support the edges of the system. Templates, shared tools and phased transitions keep small and regional providers in the game.
Tell the right story. Regulation should say: high standards, open arms, predictable rules. That is the Brand Australia the world will choose.

Conclusion: Integrity With Competitiveness — or Integrity Against Competitiveness?

Australia stands at a fork in the road. One path prioritises symbolic transparency over practical outcomes, places heavy burdens on the very networks that diversify our markets, and gradually erodes the value of Brand Australia by making us harder to partner with. The other path chooses accountability where control lives — with providers — and transparency where it counts — in the outcomes students experience. It invites reputable agents to help Australia reach the world, enforces standards that protect learners, and ensures that the dividends of international education continue to flow to our campuses, communities and economy.

The difference between these paths is not philosophical; it is operational and measurable. If we calibrate the Bill to focus on provider duties, outcomes transparency, risk-based supervision and credible sanctions, we will lift integrity without sacrificing competitiveness. We will continue to attract the best students and the best partners. We will maintain the breadth of markets that insulates us from shocks. And we will carry forward a Brand Australia that stands for both excellence and welcome.

Over-regulating agents will not deliver that future. Holding providers to account will.