Immigration cuts ‘wipe out Australia’s advantage’

Australia’s latest international education policy upheaval will erase the country’s market advantage over its key competitors, according to the head of the sector’s representative body.

Phil Honeywood said Australia’s main selling point over its “big four” anglophone education destination rivals – its reputation as the “least-worst” of the quartet – would disappear after long-anticipated migration reforms were revealed by immigration minister Tony Burke.

“The most worrying issue is really the death by a thousand cuts that the sector’s been faced with,” said Honeywood, CEO of the International Education Industry of Australia. “[Our] continuing lack of policy transparency has many education agents walking away from us as a reliable study destination country.

“It’s just been…policy after policy after policy. Clearly, this A$55 billion [£29 billion] a year industry has no political friends.”

As expected, Burke announced that secondary visas would no longer be issued to family members of students and temporary graduates. PhD students, Pacific islanders and South-east Asians will be exempted from the new approach, which will only apply to future applicants. “We’re not going to be breaking up families onshore,” he told the National Press Club.

He said Australian citizens waited years for visas to bring their non-citizen partners into the country. “At the moment, if you’re an international student and you want to come here with your partner, you get them right from the start.” 

Students will also be banned from “visa hopping” to lower-level courses. “We’ll be…setting a very simple rule,” Burke said. “You can [only] go up the qualification scale.”

The minister also announced a raft of changes to working holiday visas, visitor visas, visa processing prioritisation, the skilled migration points test and the treatment of visa overstayers, designed to reduce net overseas migration from around 292,000 a year now to 225,000 by 2028.

The UK’s 2024 ban on most foreign students’ dependants fuelled a sharp decline in overseas enrolments. Honeywood said Canberra’s copycat policy would have a similar effect, particularly on demand from India and Nepal, Australia’s second and third top source markets.

“Students with families will now look elsewhere,” he said. “Many of these students borrow heavily from Indian and Nepalese banks for the full cost of their tuition fees, and need to repay those student loans as soon as possible. Having your partner able to work while you study has been a longstanding rite of passage in the student journey in Australia, and a great deal of our gig economy is heavily reliant on international student partners.”

Monash University higher education policy expert Andrew Norton said the changes risked serious financial damage to universities with substantial South Asian enrolments. “[They are] already being hit by all sorts of other policies. This will be another major blow.”

He said many South Asian students were only able to “make the financial maths add up” by bringing working partners with them. Cultural factors, such as a tendency to marry early and disquiet about women travelling abroad on their own, could also contribute to the relatively high share of students from the subcontinent with accompanying family members.

Norton said that while he was “sympathetic” to students’ desire to be with their partners, secondary visas were a natural target for a government intent on reducing migration numbers. Many students’ dependants arrived intending to stay in Australia as long as possible, he said. “The temporary graduate visa is the next step and…after that expires [they] look for something else.

“If you’re trying to deal with [this] long-term temporary population, this [seems] one of the more obvious ways [to] bring the numbers down. The surprising thing is that it’s taken until now.”

But Norton said it was unethical to deny secondary graduate visas to students’ family members who were already onshore. “[We] induced people to come to Australia based on the temporary graduate visa,” he said. “It’s wrong to change the rules midway through.”

He said a “massive surge” in secondary visas after the coronavirus pandemic had been fuelled by the coalition government’s removal of restrictions on foreign students’ working hours, and the Labor government’s short-lived extensions to post-study work visas. “These two things were…absolute magnets for people to migrate to Australia. In some ways they are the core of our problem.”

Burke said media speculation about other intended changes, such as a denial of work rights to some categories of temporary migrants, had been incorrect. He said the government’s changes would not contravene provisions in free trade agreements, such as the additional post-study work rights granted to Indian graduates.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com