As each day passes, Labor’s international student caps debacle keeps going from bad to worse to disastrous. After promising so much to the higher education sector, including the Australian Universities Accord, the Albanese government’s hapless Minister for Education, Mr Clare, has managed to plunge this sector into turmoil. It is not as if he was not doing enough damage: record-high student debt driven by Labor’s homegrown inflation, shocking campus antisemitism that does not mean different things to different people, declining completion rates made worse by Labor’s abolition of the 50 per cent pass rule and the nonsensical start-up loan scheme where students are forced to pay full price for courses they could previously do for free.
Then came Labor’s immigration mess, with the Albanese government opening the floodgates to record levels of international students, which is fuelling the housing crisis and causing unprecedented chaos in the international education sector. I want to reiterate how serious this is. In inner-city Sydney, in suburbs like Glebe, rentals have gone up 17 per cent in 12 months. And let’s not forget that at the University of Sydney there are now more than 50 per cent of students who are foreign students—more than 35,000—clocking over that 50 per cent mark, giving rise to serious concerns that universities like the University of Sydney have lost their social licence to bring foreign students to Australia. The bottom line is that the educational outcomes for all students matter. That’s why I have called for our public universities to go back to basics, including to focus on the educational outcomes for domestic students, which is their fundamental job.
The doubling in the number of foreign students studying in Australia went from 336,000 in March 2022 to now more than 800,000, a mess of Labor’s own making. Every country has a responsibility to manage its migration program in the national interest, but Labor has botched this fundamental obligation and Australians are paying the price. Then came ministerial direction 107, implemented by the former Minister for Home Affairs, who was so bad at her job that she was sacked by the Prime Minister. The decision was made to prioritise visa processing at our nation’s most prestigious universities, the group of eight, whilst smashing regional and smaller universities and private higher education providers. So Labor was looking after the big end of town while treating the regions and the private sector with contempt. This resulted this year in 83,000 student visas for the group of eight and just 8,900 visas for regional universities.
Now Labor is covertly, behind closed doors, allocating individual student caps to higher education and VET providers, using a flawed methodology which still looks after the prestigious universities while punishing many others. We have heard in a number of Senate inquiry hearings that great universities like Western Sydney, which plays a vital role in educating foreign nurses who then go on to fill the gaps in the nursing workforce shortages—there’s a workforce shortage of 10,000 nurses just in Western Sydney—have been absolutely squeezed, as I say, while others haven’t. If you look across the sector—and we are really concerned about the numbers we are seeing—the university allocation has gone back by only one per cent while the allocation to private providers has gone back by 28 per cent. And some private providers have been left with zero new students, like Nova Anglia, which was offering bachelor degrees in EV technology and has been left high and dry. So this is an absolute mess and we are not satisfied with what we are hearing or seeing from this government. It is appalling the way the government is implementing these caps and this minister should be ashamed of himself.