International students deserve better than this

International students deserve better than to have their chances of getting a viaa governed by the electoral cycle.

Here’s something that is true. Australia has just recorded its largest net migration gain – 548,800 people – in a 12-month period.

Here’s something that’s also true. This huge figure was largely driven by an influx of international students, returning to Australian after Covid.

And here’s something that’s not true: the federal opposition’s tirelessly repeated claim that this means Australia is being overwhelmed by migrants and that Labor has a policy of “Big Australia by stealth”.

However, you’d be excused for thinking – based on Labor’s panicked action over the past few months to drastically cut the number of international students coming into Australia – that the opposition is on to something.

In fact Peter Dutton and his immigration spokesman, Dan Tehan, do have something in mind. Their dream is of a potent migration scare campaign that will humble Labor at the next election. And Labor, in turn, is going flat out to make sure that this nightmare (for it) doesn’t happen.

With the 2025 election looming, and with migration, international students and the related issue of housing stirring up powerful emotions, we can’t expect much in the way of sense, or good policy, to appear in the next 12 months.

But here, standing outside the political debate, we can apply some logic to the issue. Why is the record net migration figure, announced last Thursday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, not an indicator that migration policy is running out of control?

The fundamental reason is that international students are not permanent residents. They are temporary visitors who are required to go home unless, after their course of study, they successfully apply for permanent residency.

This is an entirely separate process that the government has full control over. Late last year the Albanese government tightened it up and it has to power to do so again if it wants fewer international students here permanently.

International students appear in the net migration figures because when somebody comes into Australia, they are recorded as a migrant if they intend to stay for 12 of the next 16 months.

So most international students, under this definition, are migrants. They add to net migration when they arrive and they detract from it when they leave.

Another factor is that a boom in net migration is exactly what is expected to happen after international students have been kept out of the country by Covid for a couple of years and then coming rushing back. It’s a temporary spike, not a permanent increase.

The rapid growth in student numbers last year also had an economic effect. It led to spending growth in Australia that accounted for over half (0.8 per cent) of Australia’s tepid 1.5 per cent GDP growth in 2023, according to the National Australia Bank economic team. Without this rush of returning students the economy would have dipped close to recession. Tell that to Dutton and Tehan. But this pair have had a major impact on policy, and it’s not for the better.

Scared of the scare campaign, Labor has applied the brakes to student visas, causing chaos for universities and other education providers that have been forced to turn away tens of thousands of international students who wanted to start courses this year.

Labor’s hasty reaction is the antithesis of good policy. It has arbitrarily and inconsistently slowed down student visa processing and upped the rejection rate so that it’s unclear to applicants what criteria are being used to process their visas. Let’s also be clear that the visa panic has nothing to do with the separate and justified effort that Labor is making to crack down on dodgy colleges and education agents who are exploiting the student visa system.

A more sensible approach by the Albanese government would have been to see where international student numbers stabilised after the post-Covid rush and then act in a deliberate, evidence-based and transparent way if the student visa rules needed to be changed. Unfortunately the exigencies of politics don’t allow for that.

Still, it’s odd that two years ago, in the dying days of government, the Coalition was doing it all it could to rev up the student market and Tehan, as education minister, was leading the charge.

Australia then badly needed international students to revive the international education industry and to fill the shortage of casual labour.

There’s also a final truth. International students deserve far better than to have their fate tossed back and forth as Australia’s electoral cycle ebbs and flows.