Employers urged to stick up for post-study work rights

Perceived threats to post-study work rights could hasten the demise of Australia’s beleaguered international education industry, but an outcry by employers could prove its saviour, a Sydney forum has heard.

Monash University policy expert Andrew Norton said the Labor government had maintained the availability of temporary graduate visas despite making dozens of changes to immigration settings over the past three years. Norton said that in international education policy terms, this was the “single biggest difference” between Labor and its competitors.

The opposition has vowed to eliminate post-study work rights, and replace them with much more restrictive “post-study transitional visas”, if it wins the 2028 election. One Nation, which is riding high in the opinion polls, says it will cap graduate visas at about 20,000 a year – down from roughly 135,000 at present.

Norton said the temporary graduate visa, known as subclass 485, was “critical” to overseas students’ ability to finance their Australian studies. With the visa’s future now in doubt, students could avoid Australia altogether.

“If they can’t get the 485, they won’t come,” Norton told the Australian International Education Conference. “With an election less than two years away, if you’re thinking of starting in ’27 or ’28 and you might finish two or three years down the track, do you believe the temporary graduate visa will still be there? Is it a credible promise on which to base a significant financial investment?”

He said students might decide otherwise, even if Labor retained its current policy and won the forthcoming election. “We have an issue here with the credibility of any promise…the Australian government makes,” he said. “They might change the rules later, before you actually get to take advantage of it.”

International education advocate Phil Honeywood said Australia had seen an “upsurge” in South Asian student numbers after it “borrowed the Brits’ idea” of temporary graduate visas. Australia stole a march on its UK rivals in 2025 when the Westminster government announced that it would reduce the duration of the post-study visa from two years to 18 months.

However, the UK government now intends to retain two-year visas for graduates of “high-performing” universities. “International students…want course-related employability,” said Honeywood, CEO of the International Education Association of Australia. “They…want the chance to stay in the country.”

Deakin University international education researcher Ly Tran said her surveys had found that access to 485 visas was the most important policy-related factor attracting students Down Under. “[It enables them] to stay longer in Australia, to find work experience [and] improve employability, to have more time to improve their English proficiency, to build professional networking opportunities. For a lot of our international students, that is the opportunity for them to gain…a return [on] the investment [of] study in Australia.”

But Norton said employment-related factors could also change the “political dynamic” underpinning Australia’s escalating policy restrictions. Some industries “simply cannot function without international students”, he told a symposium of the Association of Australian Education Representatives in India.

According to the latest available data, international students and temporary graduate visa holders constitute 18 per cent of cooks and chefs, 16 per cent of cleaners, 13 per cent of food preparation assistants and 6 per cent of carers and aides. Employers lobbied the government about staff shortages when border closures reduced overseas student numbers during the coronavirus pandemic, Norton said.

“It’s not going to take too much before these occupations start becoming dysfunctional again,” he said. “There will be a point where [they] fall into crisis. We’ll be back to having employers screaming that they can’t get staff, and people being frustrated that they can’t get the services they’ve been used to.”

He said regional employers had already mounted a successful campaign against changes to working holiday visas, which had left farms and hospitality businesses short-staffed. The Queensland Hotels Association has produced a very alarming – and very amusing – short video about the real-life impacts of a loss of the migrant workforce.

“If there is a political dynamic that can bring international education to life, I don’t think it’s the universities lobbying,” Norton said. “Universities have lost a lot of credibility…in Canberra. It’s going to have to come from the labour market.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com