With student visa applications and approvals down the government may have had an election-eve reprieve.
Full year figures from the Feds show HE visas awarded were 200,000 for the 2023-24 year, down from the record 260,000 in ’23-’24.
Even better for the government, desperate to be seen to be doing something about vocational colleges providing cover for immigrants, VET visas awards were 55,000 compared to 128,000 the previous year. Applications are still up there, unchanged on the previous year for both systems but the nation’s unofficial HE statistician in chief, Andrew Norton from Monash U, suggests this occurred in VET, with people getting in ahead of the crackdown. In the second half of calendar 24, when the Feds tightened the screws, visa applications were mostly down on 2019, the last pre-Covid year.
HE applications are certainly down from countries where education is a synonym for immigration – notably India. But they are not lower from China, which isn’t seen as so much of a problem for the immigration suppression push, as Chinese students more frequently do their degree and go home.
This is good news for the Albanese Government, which has, “successfully suppressed vocational international education with migration policy alone,” Mr Norton writes.
But while he warns there are universities (sadly he names no names) that may want to keep issuing enrolments regardless of the indicative number the government gave them last year, this may not be a big election deal. Despite university complaints at the government’s succession of attempts to reduce their numbers, it seems that voters gave ministers marks for trying, at least talking about trying. And arguments that international students push rents up have gone quiet in the face of evidence that if it occurs at all, it is only in a handful of inner-city seats.
The Opposition first joined the Greens to block Education Minister Jason Clare’s caps per campus bill in the Senate, arguing it was not enough, but lately has eased up on the outrage.
Last month, Peter Dutton said that in government, “we will work with major metropolitan universities to set stricter caps on foreign students to relieve stress on city rental markets,” which can mean whatever the Group of Eight can negotiate it to mean.
