The Coalition’s plan for Australia’s international university education sector is the wrong policy at the wrong time. In the current global environment this is not the time to turn our backs on our regional partners.
The Coalition’s policy demonstrates a concerning lack of understanding of the complex global dynamics currently underway and how this will impact Australia’s national interests across trade, geopolitics, the economy and our international relations.
At a time when the global order is under threat, when a world recession is a genuine possibility, when Australia’s global and regional partnerships are critical to our successful navigation of the most challenging set of circumstances we may have faced in our lifetimes, the Coalition policy represents a slap in the face to our critical regional partnerships.
The Group of Eight (Go8), comprising Australia’s leading research-intensive universities, have just returned from a successful delegation to Singapore and Japan, key strategic partners in our region, who both expressed significant interest in increasing ties with Australia as a stable, welcoming and reliable partner.
The message they’ve just received loud and clear from the Coalition is that international students are not welcome and should they choose to study at one of Australia’s global top 100 universities, it will come at a premium.
Australia already has the highest student visa fees in the world so the decision to hike it even further and triple the non-refundable fee to $5000 for prospective Go8 students makes no sense.
It beggars belief that the Coalition would single out the Go8 for this extra burden – Australia’s top research intensive universities – that attract the best and brightest minds from our region and around the world.
It’s a policy with no discernable benefit other than to deter those very top-quality students that the Go8 has a track record in attracting.
Almost two thirds of all Go8 international students are post graduate students, 10 percent are Higher Degree by Research (HDR) students studying in disciplines where Australia has the highest skills need – engineering, IT, science, health agriculture and environment.
These are precisely the international students Australia needs to attract and retain to find solutions to the pressing challenges we face as a society and to build a sustainable workforce.
Not since Scott Morrison’s edict that sent international students home during the COVID pandemic have we seen a more negative signal sent to the international education market.
The easy politics of scapegoating international students must come to an end. To suggest international students are responsible for Australia’s housing crisis is wrong – the evidence shows it is a supply side issue.
The economic consequences of targeting Australia’s $51 billion international education sector have been called out by the Business Council of Australia, the Property Council of Australia and others. The NAB identified the international student market as contributing 0.8 percentage points to GDP in 2023, over half the recorded 1.5 per cent economic growth. The RBA noted as recently as February that students are already preferring to apply to other countries given higher uncertainty about Australia.
Net overseas migration is tapering off and the visa applications are below that of 2022. Playing politics with our most successful services export will not fix the housing crisis or ease cost of living.
We are witnessing in real time the impact of what can happen when a government chooses to enact populist policy on the fly. It would be foolish in the extreme to seek to replicate this chaos in Australia.
The Go8 has been very clear that we agree it is time to review our international student market and have a detailed and evidence-based review of the best policy settings to ensure Australia is set up for a changing future. We are up for that discussion and the Coalition has indicated it will consult should they win Government. That is what proper policy development looks like.
Ms Vicki Thomson is the Chief Executive and Director of the Group of Eight.
