E&OE
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: You have been hearing this morning about Labor’s plans for international students and their families as it grapples to bring down net overseas migration. Now my next guest is the Chief Executive of ºÚÁÏÀÏ˾»ú, and he is understandably worried about any plan that targets international students, which is, as I have been saying, one of our biggest exports. Luke Sheehy, good morning to you.
LUKE SHEEHY: Good morning, Nadia.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: Immigration Minister Tony Burke is expected to tighten the rules for international students, and we are hearing that he is looking at banning family members from coming with them while they study. What will the impact of this be?
LUKE SHEEHY: We will wait and see what the details of Minister Burke and the Labor Government’s proposals are when he finally releases them sometime around lunchtime here on the East Coast. But my general response at this time is that it is quite worrying. It is chipping away the confidence in what has been a great national asset for this country – international education. You rightly pointed out it’s worth $55 billion for the Australian economy. In Western Australia (WA), that means about $4.3 billion last time I checked my figures and supports 12,000 real jobs both directly and indirectly. So, every signal we send to say we want fewer international students is going to have a real impact on communities, particularly in Western Australia.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: But what is the benefit of bringing families out as well to the Australian economy?
LUKE SHEEHY: Firstly, many students bring out their families because they might not be studying for an undergraduate degree. They might be taking a PhD. They might be doing a Masters by Research in an important field that benefits human discovery, and they want to bring their families with them because they can be here for up to three or four years while they do that. The other important thing that I think gets missed in these debates is that families that come with international students or families that come to visit them, they prop up other industries, especially the tourism industry. We know around one third of Australia’s tourism industry is supported by the families of international students. Now, if you start restricting access to families or you start diminishing or slashing the number of international students, we are putting that all at risk. That’s a $3.5 billion dollar sector to WA alone.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: So, you believe this would make Australia a less attractive place to study?
LUKE SHEEHY: I know because I have seen what happened in the UK. Rishi Senak at the end of the conservative government back there a couple of years ago did exactly the same thing, and we saw their international students nosedive. It really sends signals to the outside world – we are not welcoming international students. International students have a choice. China is growing its offerings. Western Europe is opening its offerings. Canada has finally worked out how to attract more students, and New Zealand is knocking at our door. So, they have got options and we’re sending absolutely the wrong signal.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: What are the numbers when it comes to international students? Can you break it down to WA?
LUKE SHEEHY: I know that WA in the last couple of years was sitting around 90,000 international students and it’s probably grown a little bit, but the Government has put a lot of pressure on the visa program, the world’s highest fees for student visa applications and slowing down of visa processing. So, that had a real impact on the numbers flowing into Western Australia and in fact right across the country. But it is a really important sector. I am going to be really, really excited to come to Perth in the next two weeks to go to the official opening of that wonderful new campus that Edith Cowan University has in the city. We know that that campus is built with the idea that it would teach thousands of Australians, but also thousands of international students. And what a wonderful asset for Perth. But if we can’t get international students in to pay full fees and support that campus, I worry about its future.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: But is there an argument that universities have become too reliant on overseas students as a moneymaking venture?
LUKE SHEEHY: Well, Nadia, one of the things I say to that question, which I get a lot as you can imagine, is that successive governments over the last couple of decades have encouraged universities to enrol more and more international students. Why? Because the Commonwealth Government gets a cut price on a world-class research and university system because it can push the costs to international students. My message is pretty clear. If you want fewer international students, that is something that we will work with, but there will obviously be a big gap and a big bill for someone to pay. And I don’t want to see that slugged on students, particularly Australian students who are doing it tough. If there’s a big bill that comes from fewer students, who’s going to pay? The Commonwealth needs to put its money where its mouth is and think about how it’s going to fund our world-class universities properly.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: Well, so subsidise universities?
LUKE SHEEHY: That’s right because they’re subsidised now by the billions of dollars the international students pay in international full fees.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: Do you often get students that switch courses to extend their stay? Is that a thing? And then that maybe the Government is potentially looking at restricting those sorts of transfers so that they can’t keep
studying and just keep staying?
LUKE SHEEHY: There’s something that we’ll look closely at the announcements today, and we expect something on that. I think some course shifting and course changing has caused many people to stay in the country longer than they should. And I think some tightening up in that would be welcome, but we’ll look at the details once we see it.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: Thank you so much for talking to me, Luke Sheehy.
Ends
