It is hard to remember when and how a friendship starts. I am sure that Martand and I had rubbed shoulders over a number of years when both he and I were teaching at RMIT. It wasn't until I became Dean of International Programs that friendship blossomed.

International offices have in general a responsibility to internationalise the university in the widest sense. To do that they need to work closely with academics and in many circumstances to take the lead from academics. It is not an exact science, and what tends to happen is that international office staff are always on the lookout for that often very small percentage of academics that not only see internationalisation for their students as important but are willing to commit time and effort and passion to the endeavour. In most universities if you can find 8-10 of these people you are doing well. It's not true that everyone else doesn't care, or are obstructive. It is that 8-10 you need, who have the fire, passion and energy to make it happen.

Martand was one of these and we quickly became not only friends but my growing international office and the wider university dependent on him for wise counsel that vitally included but went well past his deep understanding and love of India. The key to us was his passion for the success of students, whether they be Indian, fifth generation Australians or Chinese. Martand was instrumental in assisting RMIT with its halting first steps in South Asia.

As often happens, I moved to Sydney and we lost contact. His memory though lives on in my heart and I know in the heart of many others who worked with him at RMIT and later at CQU.

I am honoured tonight to give this address in Martand Joshi's memory.

I have been in this industry a long time. I was not in that first wave of Australian international recruiters who around 1986 and 1987 spread out into South East Asia recruiting students. I was at my desk as the head of department of business computing at RMIT here in Melbourne, wondering what on earth I should be doing with the increasing numbers of baffling international applications piling up.

They were baffling not because they were written in bad English, but because the educational accomplishments and experiences of the applicants and more important what they meant, were incomprehensible to me and my fellow academics. So the piles of applications moved back and forth on the desk, from one too hard basket to another. From that point we all learnt fast because we had to.

We were working in unknown territory without a map or a rule book. In that situation, you either embrace the challenge or become bitter and angry about what ‘they oughta' have done. We largely embraced, but not without acrimony and fierce debate the challenge and created a massively successful export service industry.

The growth of the industry had its seeds in a Government decision, but wasn't driven by government. It was driven by the staff of entrepreneurial universities and later private and public English language and vocational colleges responding to a single legal requirement. Foreign students could no longer be cross subsidized by Commonwealth funds.

At places like RMIT we were used to dealing with students from South East Asia. In my classes I was used to having a sprinkling of very bright, generally ethnically Chinese students from Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Their English was excellent and they came through the state based tertiary entrance systems some of which were delivered overseas. They largely passed through the institution without touching the sides. The institution and its staff weren't in any substantial sense really aware of the presence of these students.

All of that changed in 1986 when the then Labor government made the perfectly rational decision that Australia could no longer afford to educate the middle classes of societies with comparable living standards to ours at largely the public expense. A debate that resonates 25 years later in Europe. In doing this, John Dawkins and his colleagues took international education from the region of the public good, to partly a commodity to be bought and sold. At the time, opponents and there were many, thought the world would end? It didn't, and the public good component that educated students from developing societies, then known as the Colombo Plan remains intact today as does Australia's public interest in playing a major part in the education of our neighbours whether rich or poor.

Although I cannot claim to have been at the pointy end of student recruiting in the late 80's, I was at the sharp end of an equally important endeavour, that of transnational education, the operation of Australian qualifications offshore. As a senior academic in the Faculty of Business at RMIT, I had taken part in a number of teams that implemented our business degrees in Malaysia and Singapore.

These were largely a result of happenchance and a penchant for entrepreneurialism that existed in the faculty, rather than any strategic intent.

In one development, with a couple of days notice I went to Singapore to negotiate a Masters of Information Technology. We didn't have a Masters of Information Technology, and we didn't really consider that a big problem. The university fast-tracked the design and approval of the program and we had it up and running in Singapore several months before we introduced it in Melbourne. To my memory it was advertised in Singapore months before it had final approval from the RMIT academic processes. Moreover, running it as a series of  teaching blocks rather than as semesters was how it had to be done in Singapore and we imported that to Melbourne.

Very little of that description would appear in any book of best practice in transnational programs.

In those early programs we didn't have a rule book or the best practice case studies we have today. We wrote contracts from a blank sheet of paper and invented faculty and institutional procedures for approval. It was messy, non strategic and would have failed as a business planning process in an MBA.

I can remember briefing the then RMIT Director Brian Smith about one of these programs (we weren't a university and didn't have a VC). We had coffee and biscuits in his office and he wished us luck. Apart from signing the agreement and asking the legal and finance offices to have a cursory look over the project there were really no other procedures. It wasn't until the Director and the chair of council, who we would now call the chancellor, attended our first graduation overseas and entered the ballroom of the Westin Hotel in Singapore to 800 parents and loved ones applauding and ceremonial pipers playing the theme from star wars that they knew something important was up.

A few years later, as Dean of International Programs I was put in charge of sanitizing and bureaucratizing the approval processes for transnational programs. I understood why this needed to be done, but many times since I have regretted the dead hand of modern business planning that surrounds many of these projects today. The dead hand results from some institutions treating business planning as a way of stopping projects rather than as a way of facilitating good ones. It is a matter of perspective. Universities over time and with considerable assistance from our friends at AUQA and AEI have become too risk averse and we are all the losers.

The present PVC International at RMIT Stephen Connolly said earlier this week that he is in the process of re-negotiating some of those Singapore contracts possibly for the umpteenth time. It is amazing to think that Australian universities have agreements in Singapore and probably elsewhere that are more than a quarter of a century old. Stephen also notes that RMIT has more students studying in Singapore than there are Singaporean students in Australian universities here. We have real Australian university campuses in Singapore, East and West Malaysia, Vietnam, South Africa and Dubai. We must be doing something right.

They were different times. I recall sitting with RMIT's first VC David Beanland in a hotel somewhere in Asia and discussing some real or imagined international problems we were having. He stopped me in my tracks and said ‘but its fun isn't it', and it was.

In those early years of international education we invented a service industry. Unlike the US, Canada or Europe, our international offices were created to recruit students. We invented or at least professionalised; the use of education agents, pathway program models, purpose built recruitment and admissions teams, the idea of recruiting channels, the packaging of offers, electronic prospect management, targeted international student services, many of the transnational program models and possibly most importantly government intervention in and support of international education.

We also created a vibrant private sector in the English and pathway areas and many public private partnerships that rewrote the rule books for international education globally. And we created for ourselves the tools for a successful international recruiting endeavour; the benchmarking of university international office costs, high quality and up to date market information, and we researched what we did and the international education world we worked in.

To digress slightly, IDP, Australia's largest agent and once wholly owned by our universities as a ‘not for profit' was a global pioneer in research and benchmarking of international education. Its global student mobility predictions have led the world for some 16 years. Now a ‘for profit' half owned by Australia's universities it is the organisation we have not only been very dependent on for our students, but like all such organisations, one we have had a continuing love hate relationship with.

IDP is not only our largest agent, but the planets largest. Regrettably many in our industry have failed to grasp that in a globalised world, organisations that don't expand and adapt will probably die. It is incumbent on our universities to loosen their grip on IDP and allow it to expand to become a recruiter to the world. Incumbent on us to understand that if we don't loosen our grip on our child it will become one of the world's smallest agents and may disappear. We cannot allow that to happen.

Out of international offices designed for recruiting, we created a rich tapestry of student mobility, quality international student support, dynamic international linkages and leadership programs designed to prepare all of our students for life in the 21st century. Starting from a different position to US, Canadian and European institutions we developed our own best practice approaches in what they saw as the finer areas of international education untainted by commercialism.

What is perhaps most amazing is that Australian universities and in some states, notably Victoria, TAFE colleges, surely some of the most conservative institutions in the country developed a business mindset that if not complete and definitely not perfect has been highly successful.

Dennis Blight, formerly chief executive of IDP and one of the creators of international education in Australia observed and I quote

Words anathema in education such as client, market and product soon found common usage. Australia remains one of the few countries where Blight's words ring true and we can all be grateful for that.

Any export industry knows it has arrived when government starts to regulate it. More than a decade after it started, John Dawkins, the responsible minister and Ken McKinnon, the VC of Wollongong and the then AVCC president presented at a major conference on the creation of what we now call the international education industry.

They told of the cabinet panic that nearly killed it stone dead that followed the collapse of a number of colleges in Melbourne and Sydney. Angry students locked out of building were not a good look then and that remains today. The ESOS Act and its national code grew out of these experiences.

ESOS remains one of our real achievements and unique globally. When you dig into ESOS you understand that it is one very large and complex piece of consumer protection legislation. We were the first country to create such a systematic framework for international student protection and for the administration of student visas. We have been one of the first to explicitly use international education as a tool in national manpower policy. These national achievements have been far from perfect and at times have been disastrous, but overall we have been far better off with them than we would have been without them.

There is a tendency when you are in an industry like this to see the downsides only. As a director or PVC of international programs or as a head of international student support you get to spend a lot of time solving problems or dealing with some times tragic situations.

When you are dealing with the parents who sent their only child to Australia, only to see that child die, you are in a space that no one should have to inhabit and you struggle to comprehend the grief that the parents feel. For my part standing in a police station in Ballina, going through a dead girls belongings and deciding what should be sent back to mum and dad in the US was a moment for me that can't be forgotten or comprehended.

It's not until you step back and reflect on the excited parents and loved ones at a graduation or run across an international graduate in an airport lounge in a far off place that you begin to get the perspective right.

Such has been the excitement at many offshore graduations that I have been to, that we have had to create barriers to prevent over exuberant parents and loved ones rushing the stage in their enthusiasm and delight.

We spend too much time reading the writings of the naysayers and the downright dangerous on the fringes of our industry, and the sloppy work of journalists who pick up indiscriminately on their latest press releases. We don't spend enough time celebrating the achievements of the dedicated and skilled staff who make up our endeavour or the international students who have or will make their marks in the professions in Australia and globally.

We don't spend enough time celebrating that the world is beating a way to our door to find out how we did it and how they can make it work for them.

I was once asked ‘off the cuff' to say what international education was about. My immediate response was that we ‘sell dreams'. That is the closest that I can come to as a description of what my colleagues and I have done for over a quarter of a century. Those dreams are from ‘real people' and we must not forget that. We must continue to strive to ensure they are realizable dreams and not our ‘flights of fancy' being inflicted on them or uncaring governments reversing policy on the run.

The buyers of dreams, the parents and the students who come to Australia, or do an Australian degree overseas do so for a variety of reasons. You wouldn't know it from the press reports of the last year, that most return home or to a third country to pursue their own dreams.

Part of the dream relates to the Australian lifestyle. Our educational brand whether we like it or not, is very much a lifestyle brand.

Why do international students come to Australia? Educational institutions, in particular universities are only part of the story. We are blessed with a system which has created public institutions of good quality that do not have the yarning gaps between the most prestigious and the least that is the case in the UK and the US. We are blessed with institutions that for the most part care for their students unlike the big public universities of Europe and Latin America. We are blessed with universities that have staff who do not have to spend most of their time outside of the university to make a meagre living as do many staff in universities in parts of Asia. We are blessed with English being the lingua franca of global business and for degrees and diplomas that are globally valued.

Apart from those things, students come here for a lifestyle that we all value. On any day in Swanston St you only have to watch the international students walking hand in hand, or in our holiday resorts buying fish and chips or fishing on the pier to know it is true.

Our lifestyle and those things that we have had a major part in inventing; agent networks, private-public pathways and the like have helped define who comes here. It is unlikely that we will ever attract the best students in the world, but since there is good evidence that international students perform as well as domestic students and are more likely to graduate than domestic students we can claim that we are attracting students who will succeed.

Changing our brand to be seen as the world's leading universities, or the clever country is fraught. Our brand will always contain elements of these things, but substantially our brand is who we are. To be selling what we are not is very dangerous as a marketing strategy.

That is not to say we don't get or should not do our utmost to attract the crème of the top students, it simply says that top students are not in the main what we are about.

Within any dream lies the possibility of nightmares. For many years, in meetings of the international education profession we have sought ways to get government attention. Attention that goes beyond the compliance and generic marketing support we know and sometimes love to hate.

It is clearly a case of being careful of what you wish for. In 2009 we collectively achieved our dream of gaining this attention.

In typical fashion, state and federal politicians scrambled to repair the damage in India that they or their predecessors had been significantly responsible for creating. Our educational relationship with India is at rock bottom and that is largely because we as a nation put all the steps in place for it to be an inevitable outcome.

The roots of our problems lie in a number of different and unrelated places.

Our two largest states have ignored for a quarter of a century the presence and importance of international students. The negligence of the Victorian and NSW governments over this period is palpable. The refusal over this time to grant transport concessions is symptomatic of a larger malaise and a lack of concern for and respect of the endeavour.

When NSW VC's collectively sought support for the development of the industry from Bob Carr, he famously stated he had given them the Olympics and wasn't that enough. Well no Bob, and by the way you didn't give us the Olympics either. In Victoria a task force set up some years ago is the major part of a quarter of a century's inactions.

For as long as I can recall, the ESOS act has had real teeth. Yet the state and federal authorities over more than a decade have failed to close down or reform the errant providers.

The changes to skilled migration which saw annual growths in vocational education visas by over 70% pa was the catalyst that brought it all together. When I said a couple of years ago in a newspaper column that this was unsustainable I was well and truly howled down and derided as not supporting vocational education. In truth, I didn't predict the extent or depth of what was to follow.

Nevertheless the signs were there. An overheated rental market, new institutions and businesses created to fill the void and to perhaps exploit the students, overstretched institutional resources, a global economic crisis making casual work harder to get and sudden changes to the ethnic compositions of parts of Melbourne and Sydney in particular, were all amongst some very explosive ingredients.

I don't know and perhaps never will the actual extent of the issue of Indian students being physically preyed upon. I don't know to what extent if at all, seemingly self appointed spokesmen for the Indian community exaggerated or inflamed the situation, or whether Police underestimated racial elements of the attacks. I do not know if the procession of Australian ministers visiting India and the Indian journalists touring Australia caused more damage than not, or whether they laid the basis for long term recovery.

I do know that if similar things happened to Australians oversees then I am sure that the Australian press would have been every bit as vitriolic and sensational as the Indian press seemed to be. Truth is always the loser in these situations.

It is easy to stereotype the latest groups to come to Australia. Although not refugees, like many groups before them, students and graduates particularly those that are young, without adequate private means and forced to work to support themselves remain very vulnerable.

We see them as taxi drivers and petrol station cash register jockeys and we fail to learn from our experience as a country of migrants. As a metaphor for the inclusion that occurs, the taxi drivers come to own the taxis and the petrol jockeys to own the petrol stations. It takes time, but it happens as it always has.

Sadly, Australia changed when the Tampa was refused permission to land its human cargo. That politicisation of refugees and its continuation has made Australia a more intolerant place. This intolerance is a backdrop to community views in the present crisis.

The good news is that the relationship will recover and will be stronger and Indian students will still seek out Australian institutions in large numbers. Some years ago Australia was part of setting up the University Mobility in the Indian Ocean Region, a scheme it did not support with student travel scholarships. Here was an opportunity lost and one that should be regained. The smart players amongst our universities will be thinking about how to build or deepen academic linkages in India in sustainable ways.

When something like the present crisis happens, governments feel the need to rush around and do things, launch enquiries, visit the stricken, etc. Out of all of this movement, amongst other things we have been handed down the Baird report. If all of the changes suggested by Bruce Baird were made, ESOS to use his words, might be stronger, simpler and smarter. Will it though prevent a future disaster of this magnitude?

Baird recommended that more attention be paid to compliance within a stronger framework. He cannot mandate that this compliance occurs. It hasn't in the past.

Skilled migration was largely outside of his brief. Currently Canberra has attempted to step back from the link between skilled migration and international education. A Future policy if as crude and blunt as previous policy has been, could easily visit a further crisis upon us.

In my mind's eye I see skilled migration as a dashboard with switches to turn things on and off and dials to provide fine tuning and stability via negative feedback loops. Negative feedback is good, it keeps the system stable. What we are getting is the positive feedback, the screech that occurs when you place a microphone too close to a loud speaker and the system becomes unstable. Our skilled migration system went out of control and became unstable. To mix the metaphors, none of this is rocket science.

What then does the future hold for Australian international education? I am an optimist and see a bright future. The ESOS outcomes will benefit us something like a dose of medicine used by our mums to benefit us as children, a benefit, even if mildly unpleasant.

We are in a different competitive environment to what we were a few years ago. What distinguished the world of international education then was that broadly the world fell into senders of students, the importers of education, and receivers like us, the exporters. The world was simple, Singapore sent us students and we received them. Now that has changed. If you like, the gamekeepers have turned into poachers and vice versa.

Many of the countries in our region now see themselves as exporters. Singapore claims to have 100,000 international students. If you look at the websites of the major public and private institutions there, they are beginning to look like Australian university web sites in their dealing with international students. We of course are playing our part in this. Australian universities in countries like Singapore are now contributing by enrolling international students into our campuses and other transnational programs there. Indeed the Singapore government is mandating this.

The opportunity for a student say in China or India to receive an Australian degree in an Asian society is one that many parents will find an attractive option.

International student hubs are being created in Asia and the Middle East. Often government funded they are about attracting the world's top universities to their region to create an export industry that in the main will be regionally focussed. Students able to go overseas to study but still remain in a similar culture.

Europe, where by enlarge higher education has been free for the locals and international students, is now beginning to charge fees and establish infrastructures to handle international students. The Netherlands, Denmark and now Sweden are the best examples. The debate about education as being for the public good is raging there as it did in Australia in the 80's. In the end, tax payers won't cop educating middle class students from elsewhere at taxpayer expense. And it is true that you get what you pay for.

In this changing environment three of our major competitors are going through major transitions. In the US and UK, declining government funding has meant that universities are becoming more aggressive in the market. In Australia, over 20% of our university students are international. In the UK it is about 12% and in the US about 8%. They both have ample capacity to increase numbers at our expense, particularly as many universities in Australia have begun to cap numbers. In the US, universities are also beginning to look at structuring themselves for more efficient recruitment and a debate rages on the use of agents. Many US institutions regard the use of agents as some form of supping with the devil. The agent side in my view seems to be slowly winning. Those things we believe we invented like electronic prospect management and pathway programs are now part of their tools of trade.

Canada another major competitor has been a sleeper in the market. It has also explicitly linked skilled migration with recruitment. I hope for their sake they are learning lessons from us. Whether or not they have, they will increase numbers rapidly.

Australia has for many years maintained a market share of 6.5% of the global share of the higher education market. IDP research into global mobility also suggests a growing pie of about 4% pa through to 2025. This is probably conservative.

On the downside, with more than 20% of our university students being international there is decreasing capacity in our system. In the wake of voluntary student unionism many of the services that international students value need to be rebuilt and VC's need to understand that there is a relationship between investment, quality of services and success.

The fallout from India will continue to roll on and be used against us in many other markets by our detractors and there will need to be a new alignment between recruitment and skilled migration. We are as dependent on skilled migration for our future as we were a year ago.

Of these issues, the decreasing capacity for growth is potentially the most troubling. However nature abhors vacuums and if the demand is there, supply will be created. Capacity will come from the increasing number of private providers, many of which will be public-private partnerships and some will be overseas institutions. The CQU international campuses, Think with its iconic Billy and William Blue brands, the Macquarie and Curtin Navitas run downtown Sydney campuses and Carnegie Mellon in Adelaide are prototypes for the future. The purists may argue that this is a far cry from the traditional values of higher education.

They forget that higher education domestically and globally is a mass market and that domestic students come to campus for classes and to visit the library and head off to work at Coles or McDonalds. The traditional experience for most has long gone.

As I said at the beginning of my presentation, we have also been great innovators. There is a truism in product development that this generation's innovator is next generation's feather duster.

Information Technology gives us great examples. Who remembers; Control Data, Atari, or Netscape, that IBM was the world's largest hardware manufacturer or that Xerox invented the Mac and Microsoft screen interfaces that we all use every day. All were great innovators in their time. Only Apple defies the trend of multiple generations of innovation and many of the others don't exist. Is it in any different in international education? I don't think so. We were the innovators, of the 90's, and the first decade of this century. If others are learning from our experience it is likely that many on the way through will bring their own innovations.

We may be left in the backwash. You might say, ‘Well we invented best practise in international recruitment, what else is there to invent'. Control Data, Atari and Netscape management, probably said the same thing.

Apple's most enduring secret is not their technology, but the culture of innovation that they have nurtured for a quarter of a century. I suspect that the increasing baggage that the international education industry carries through ESOS, AUQA and the like, encourages a homogenised vanilla approach that is the enemy of innovation. I  personally hope not. If we don't have dreams and we don't have innovation it won't be fun anymore, and we will be in the backwater.

In conclusion, it can be said we are going through a bad patch. We have survived bad patches before. International education has proved to be very resilient over the past three decades. We should celebrate where we have got to, be confident about our future, ensure that our academic, service and compliance settings are appropriate and in place, and most of all, celebrate innovation.

What I have said tonight I take responsibility for, yet it doesn't come from a vacuum. Over the years there have been many people who have contributed to my thinking on international education, too many to be thanked here, although I will make a start. The two great VC's I worked for, David Beanland and Di Yerbury gave me space to ‘do stuff'. Sandra Harding at JCU, Ian Young at Swinburne, Jeanette Hackett at Curtin and CQU's Scott Bowman in an earlier life contributed to my thinking. Other senior staff at universities and elsewhere also contributed; Andy Vann at JCU, David Rich at Tasmania, David Harrington at Hobsons, Dean Forbes at Flinders, Stephen Connelly now at RMIT, Jeffrey Smart at Swinburne, Edi Mazzoleni at Universitá Cattolica in Milan and David Pilsbury at Coventry have all provided intellectual challenge and space to do stuff, as of course did my friend Martand Joshi.

My friends and colleagues in consulting; Melissa Banks, Alan Olsen and Rob Lawrence challenge me as I hope I challenge them and the giants of internationalisation Hans deWit, Jane Knight and John Hudzik have always been up for a good argument over a glass of red.

In that I have achieved and hope will continue to achieve anything in this industry it is on the shoulders of those who worked for and with me. I have been smart enough to realise that you always try and employ people smarter than you. John Molony now at QS in London and Debra Langton at Swinburne are the tip of a very long list of talented individuals who have innovated, innovated and innovated. Finally, Pauline my wife, best friend and business partner plays a greater role than she can ever imagine.

Thank you