Swinburne University of Technology’s Vice-Chancellor and President, Professor Pascale Quester, has urged the Federal Government to restore fairness, stability and trust in Australia’s education system, as international students are being deterred from coming to Australia by government policy decisions.
Professor Quester used her keynote address at last week’s International Education Association of Australia’s (IEAA) 2025 National Symposium, to raise concerns about policies such as Ministerial Direction 107 and Ministerial Direction 111, which she called, at best, “knee jerk and ill-informed”.
The replacement of MD107 with MD111 in December was characterised in the speech as one arbitrary practice replacing another and “instability and uncertainty still remain”, which is discouraging students from choosing Australia as a study destination.
Another concern raised by Quester is what she called a “national crisis in the pipeline of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) skills”. Domestic student enrolments in STEM have been in decline since 2021 and will leave Australia facing critical skills gaps.
“These restrictive policies are deterring the talented international students who are vital to securing Australia’s economic and technological future,” she said.
Quester also took the opportunity to showcase the success and importance of international students in Australia. This included Swinburne alum Fazil Mohammed, who was awarded Victoria’s International Alumni of the Year Award in 2024.
“Our community is so much more vibrant, enjoyable and rich because of our diversity, our international students, and our global engagement”, she said.
Friday’s keynote address was not the first time that Quester has been publicly critical of the Government’s international education policy decisions. She referred to MD107 in 2024 as “punitive”, saying that it “directly hampers our ability to ability to recruit international students into critical STEM courses such as engineering, advanced manufacturing and IT”.
She also called the Government’s decision to pause the biannual review of Evidence Level changes in October 2024, “another blow for the sector and will fracture us even further, creating more uncertainty for prospective students in an anti-competitive landscape of ‘haves and have-nots'”.
Professor Quester’s speech is available in full here.
