Max Chandler-Mather (Griffith, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

We welcome the changes introduced in the bill to reduce exploitation of international students and weed out non-genuine education providers and agents. Nevertheless, the introduction of international student caps and broad ministerial powers to interfere in the tertiary education sector is something the Greens cannot support. The government is attempting to write extraordinary powers for itself into legislation, allowing the education minister to set limits on uni enrolments down to specific providers, courses or locations. This is an extraordinarily heavy-handed approach.

The Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment (Quality and Integrity) Bill 2024 demonstrates unprecedented government intervention in the university sector, and that has the possibility of government simply using the legislation to take aim at providers or courses that it does not like. There are no safeguard mechanisms in the bill, no avenues for providers to review decisions and no guidance on how the minister will be guided—or in what way—in making the legislative instruments that are possible under these expansive powers. Capping international student numbers is shockingly bad policy. It meddles with the independence of higher education institutions and totally disregards the needs, welfare and interests of international students.

International students play a vital role in this country, and this bill sends a message that they are no longer welcome here. Attempting to silo international students into particular degrees or locations will not improve their uptake. It means international students will simply look elsewhere. Students should be able to choose what they study and where they study; it is not for the government to decide.

Lots of the talk around the international student caps, though, has stemmed from one of the more disgraceful bits of rhetoric that goes on in this place—conflating migration with the housing crisis. International students far too often are demonised, targeted and singled out as somehow a cause or a contributor to the housing crisis, with very little—essentially no—evidence to back that up. We know that, for instance, since COVID there has been a net increase in migrant households in this country of 375,000 migrant households. At the same time, the Australian private housing sector has built over 600,000 homes—almost double the rate of new migrant households in this country, which includes international students. In that same time period, the group that has purchased the most homes that have been built in this country are property investors. In that same period property investors purchased just under 600,000 homes.

Far too often in the middle of cost-of-living and housing crises, the rich and powerful and the political establishment will attempt to demonise and single out the weak and defenceless or people who don't have a big voice in this country in an attempt to protect the financial interests that actually cause the housing crisis and benefit from it. It's no coincidence that the Commonwealth Bank can make a record $10 billion profit in 2023, just as mortgage and housing stress is reaching a peak disgraceful limit. It's no coincidence that at the same time as the government wants to avoid responsibility for building enough public housing for people in this country they and the opposition, the Liberals and Nationals, decide to team up to partially blame migrants for this housing crisis. It's no coincidence that as the Property Council, property developers, the banks and property investors want to avoid any responsibility for this housing crisis we hear more and more talk of migrants and see more and more of the singling out and demonising of migrants, whether it be international students or people fleeing wars and conflict and coming to this country for a safe haven.

What we know about that sort of rhetoric is that it is designed to distract from the real causes of this housing crisis, whether it be the fact that the government chronically underinvests in public housing, whether it be that over the next 10 years property investors will pocket $165 billion in tax handouts from this government, whether it's the fact that neither a federal nor any state or territory government outside of the ACT—where the Greens are in government—will even contemplate capping rent increases.

There are a variety of causes of this housing crisis, but one of them isn't international students or migrants. The more that they are targeted, the more likely it is that the rich and powerful and the real culprits of this housing crisis will be able to get away with continuing to profit from the housing crisis they have caused while they get to turn around and single out migrants and international students as the culprits when they've had nothing to do with it.

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