Coronavirus: Abysmal treatment of Chinese students will be costly

Passangers arrive at Sydney airport last month. Pictuee: Chris Pavlich

“This mess is so big and so deep and so tall, we cannot pick it up, there is no way at all.”

Does even Dr Seuss come close to describing the scale of the government’s blunder at Australian airports on Sunday morning?

Australian Border Force officials reacted to the China travel ban, announced late Saturday afternoon by Scott Morrison, by detaining Chinese students, cancelling valid student visas and sending some of them back to China.

What’s the problem with that? Only that these students could not have reasonably been expected to know about the hastily imposed ban. There is no doubt that some of the students had left China — travelling via transit through third-country airports — before the Prime Minister even made his announcement.

That in itself is a breach of the fundamental principles of fairness and reasonableness. But it gets worse. These students were from China, Australia’s largest source country for international students, which spent $12.1bn on education services in Australia last year.

Some of the students were arriving in Australia to start their courses. What a welcome they got. How do they feel about their decision to choose Australia as a study destination?

Other students were arriving to complete courses in which they and their parents had already invested tuition fees of about $40,000 a year (for a Group of Eight university) and paid $30,000 or more a year for living expenses.

Can we expect a word-of-mouth recommendation for Australia from them?

Some of the Chinese students who arrived on Sunday morning were detained for days. A small group in Brisbane is believed to still have been in detention on Tuesday. Senior university officials were justifiably concerned about their wellbeing.

University officials say some of the students who arrived on Sunday were forced to return to China at their own expense under threat of being deported and unable to ­return to Australia for three years. They say other students had their student visas cancelled but eventually were allowed to enter Australia on temporary 30-day visas and told they would have to reapply for their student visas, which costs $600. They also say some students in detention were deprived of food and required to change into clothing provided by the Border Force. The Department of Home Affairs has not yet answered questions I’ve put to it seeking to verify these claims. The good news is it has assured universities it will waive the $600 visa fee for students who have to reapply.

The full impact of the Border Force action on Sunday morning has yet to play out.

But it comes as the international education sector is ­urgently trying to get co-operation from the Chinese government to ease the impact of the travel ban on Australia’s $39bn-a-year education export industry. Don’t expect much help.

The industry now must try to recover from the perilous situation it is in because of the coronavirus. The outlook is seriously bad.

The best outcome to hope for is a rapid end to the epidemic and a lifting of the travel ban by mid- month before classes begin at Australian universities. But this has its own problems.

More than 100,000 Chinese students who are enrolled for courses in Australian tertiary education this year are still overseas, with the overwhelming majority likely to be stranded in China by the ban.

Can airlines find the capacity to get them all to Australia quickly? Will a shortage of seats mean that students are charged rip-off rates for air tickets?

Universities are considering online courses as a fallback but have quickly realised this is a viable solution only for the first week or two of term. Universities simply don’t have online versions of the courses taken by most Chinese students. Also there is no cultural acceptance of online education at university degree level in China. And then there is the problem of the great Chinese internet firewall that keeps out foreign content.

The appalling reality is that if the travel ban is not lifted before mid-March then it is highly likely Chinese students will have to defer their first semester studies. Australian National University higher education analyst Andrew Norton has a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the cost of that to universities — $1.8bn to $2bn.

This alone is a disaster. Worse is the down-the-track impact as prospective students from China choose where they will study later this year or next year. Will it be Australia or a country such as Canada or Britain, which have not yet imposed a China travel ban?

If only the Border Force had treated Chinese students with courtesy and dignity when they arrived on Sunday morning. Might have helped a little.