Coronavirus: Plea for help to get international students back

Australia’s COVID-ravaged international education sector will hold a landmark meeting with six top cabinet ministers in Canberra as it pushes for more support.

The first returning flight of 64 international students arrives in Darwin. Picture: Katrina Bridgeford

Australia’s COVID-ravaged international education sector will use a major meeting with six cabinet ministers in Canberra this week to push for more support and a rejuvenated campaign to entice foreign students to sign up to Australian universities.

A group of 64 Charles Darwin University students — the first to arrive since the pandemic began — are likely to be the only group to enter the country until next year as Scott Morrison prioritises the return of Australians.

The National Council for International Education, chaired by Education Minister Dan Tehan, will convene on Thursday for the first time since the crisis began and experts will hand a report to the Prime Minister on the state of the $40bn-a-year industry in the wake of the pandemic.

International Education Association chief executive Phil Honeywood, the council’s convener, said the sector would seek the ministers’ backing for more support and a new PR campaign targeted at prospective foreign students they fear will study in Canada and Britain instead of Australia.

“We look forward to providing the six federal ministers at this week’s national council meeting with a comprehensive update on the state of this $40bn industry,” he said. “Clearly, we are hoping for agreement on enhanced public relations messaging and policy support to put us firmly back on the road to recovery. Australia has the world’s best international education governance structures but we need to focus on our social licence to operate.”

Australian universities face a $16bn financial hole left by the loss of international student fees and the sector has been lobbying federal and state governments to increase the quarantine capacity to take more international students.

The push for a new Australian PR campaign comes as Canadian and British universities aggressively pursue international students in Asian countries while Australia’s international borders are closed, and both countries have put in extra effort to process student visas quickly.

The high-level meeting with the international education and university sectors will include Mr Tehan, Trade Minister Simon Birmingham, Foreign Minister Marise Payne, Immigration Minister Alan Tudge, Employment Minister Michaelia Cash, and Industry Minister Karen Andrews.

Mr Tehan said on Monday the government would only accept foreign students into Australia once it was clear all states had a plan to quarantine students and they could meet the demand for returning Australians first.

“I wrote to all states and territories asking them to submit their plan for international student arrivals by the end of November,” he said. “The commonwealth will only consider further international student pilot programs for 2021 on the basis that places under the caps, and complementary arrangements, are being used to the maximum extent possible for returning Australians and a satisfactory rate of return of Australians is achieved.”

NSW, the Northern Territory and ACT plan to submit their plans to take in larger numbers of foreign students this week, with Victoria and South Australia also working on submissions to the Education Minister.

The meeting comes as several large universities were forced to push back pilot programs aimed at bringing in small batches of foreign students who were studying in Australia but trapped overseas when they visited home nations before the pandemic struck.

The 64 Charles Darwin University students who arrived in the NT on Monday — from China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Indonesia — are the first cohort to get through under a pilot program. They will spend 14 days in isolation at the government-run Howard Springs quarantine facility.

Group of Eight chief executive Vicki Thomson said the Darwin pilot showed how thousands of students could be returned to Australia for next year’s first semester.

“Hopefully, this will act as a successful proof of concept so we can see more of our tens of thousands of students return to study at our major universities when it is safe to do so and when the federal government tells us it is,” she said.

“We know that NSW, SA, Victoria and the ACT are ready to go, with detailed COVID-safe plans in place to ensure that all involved, our students and the broader community, remain safe. And that must be the priority.”

A planned pilot program involving SA’s three universities — Flinders, South Australia and Adelaide — and due to start this month was delayed by the state’s recent coronavirus outbreak.

The Australian National University and University of Canberra’s joint plan to return 300 foreign students to the ACT was delayed by the Victorian second wave and there is no fixed date to get them back. An ANU spokesman said on Monday it would be more difficult to get students to return the longer the international border remained closed.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has backed the quick return of international students and other migrants to her state.

Mr Morrison has said repeatedly that foreign students must wait until the backlog of nearly 30,000 Australians trying to return from overseas was cleared.