Julian Hill, Labor’s federal member for Bruce, last year alleged that Australia’s international education industry has devolved into a “ponzi scheme” by enticing foreign students with easy work rights and permanent residency.
Hill argued that Australia’s generous work rights and the carrot of permanent residency were “being misused by agents in many parts of the world who are flogging our precious student visa as some kind of cheap, low rent work visa”.
“We know that the incentive of a permanent visa to Australia is like a golden ticket from Willy Wonka’s chocolate bar”, he said.
Hill’s view was backed up by Phil Honeywood, CEO of the International Education Association of Australia, the key lobbyist for the industry.
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Honeywood also the labelled the international education system a “ponzi scheme” and a “race to the bottom”.
This week, a Brisbane forum heard that the tidal wave of international students flooding into Australia was trashing education standards, with universities told to reduce their reliance on foreign student income.
Michael Wesley, deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne, said the sector had experienced “15 years of really quite unconstrained growth” fuelled by international recruitment.
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“This form of unconstrained growth just can’t continue”.
The pro vice-chancellor of the University of South Australia, Gabrielle Rolan, said there was no sign that the “tsunami” of overseas students to Australia will abate anytime soon.
She stated that her institution was seeing new types of recruits from established markets such as India and China, as well as burgeoning African markets.
However, she cautioned that “headline data” may not often reflect the true picture, citing Nepal as Australia’s leading source of international higher education students.
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Rolan claimed that more than half of them would not be enrolled in higher education the following semester, and “certainly not” at the institutions that had initially recruited them.
Onshore poaching, according to Rolan, is a “really complex issue to solve”, requiring government intervention to modify the conditions that allow it.
“There’s a lot of churn happening at the moment”, she said.
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Instead of clamping down on the sector and closing the “ponzi scheme”, the Albanese Government has instead doubled-down.
Over recent months, Labor has signed migration agreements with India that, among other things, will grant Indians automatic five year student visas and eight year post study work visas.
As a result, the “tsunami” of international students will swell, young Australians will be priced out of rental housing and jobs by Indians willing to work for considerably lower wages, and capital city infrastructure will strain under the weight of thousands more people.
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