E&OE

GREG JENNETT: We heard yesterday from a university professor arguing that proposed laws that would allow for capping the number of international students at individual universities is unnecessary. Today, a Senate committee inquiring into those powers has heard from several peak bodies within the tertiary education sector. The Chief Executive of Universities Australia, Luke Sheehy, very forcefully claimed the caps could seriously harm this almost $50 billion sector. Luke Sheehy then joined us after giving his testimony to the Senate.

Luke Sheehy, welcome to Afternoon Briefing. You made quite an impassioned plea to the Senate committee looking into these proposed caps for international student numbers. Now, the headline grabbing figure that you presented was the potential loss of 14,000 jobs in the sector. I just wonder if you can clear it up for us. Are you saying those jobs would go with the current drop off rate in international student applications, or as a result of going down the caps route that the government’s proposing?

LUKE SHEEHY: Good to be with you, Greg. I was making an impassioned plea for a sector that’s delivering for Australia. What we’ve found, since December when the Minister for Home Affairs put out Ministerial Direction No.107, what that’s effectively done is slowed down visa processing for universities and international students. We’ve found nearly 60,000 fewer student visas for higher education in Australia have been issued in the past 12 months. On our calculations, every international student supports about four jobs in higher education. So, we’re predicting that’s around 14,000 potential job losses. Universities are not-for-profit, so they’re doing their hardest to deliver for Australians and ensure that they continue employing people and continue to deliver high-quality research and education.

GREG JENNETT: Okay, so is there an inevitability about getting to a figure, you know, at 14,000 or otherwise, because the 60,000 student drop off, or at least visa drop off is already baked in. Does that make it inevitable?

LUKE SHEEHY: Job losses are inevitable, and our universities are working really hard to ensure that they can continue to employ as many people as they can because it’s important to deliver all of those things that I’ve talked about – world-class education for Australians and high-quality research that will help drive solutions to the big problems we have in Australia. I don’t want to see any job losses in our sector, but certainly the funding arrangements that we’ve seen, both in terms of what we get directly from the Commonwealth and what we also get from the revenue from international students, are at risk. What we want to make sure of is that our sector has the adequate financing to support its mission to deliver.

GREG JENNETT: Is it your contention that if these visa approval constraints continue or students are deterred from applying in the first place because application fees are going up, all of the government and the opposition stated concerns about population pressures, housing pressures and the like will resolve themselves under existing policy settings?

LUKE SHEEHY: I don’t think taking a sledgehammer to the international education sector is going to solve Australia’s housing supply issue, and what we want to make very clear to both Labor and the Coalition is that international education is not the only contributor to the housing issue in Australia. In fact, it’s a very small part of it. Only four per cent of international students are in the private rental market in Australia today. What we know is that we’ve got a supply issue, and we need to work both as universities, but certainly the federal government, state governments and private providers and the private sector to deliver more housing, both for Australians and for students. It’s an important Team Australia moment.

GREG JENNETT: And what can you report from the university sector about the number of accommodation dwellings in the pipeline that might bridge that gap, which is pronounced at the moment, isn’t it?

LUKE SHEEHY: We’ve had a lot of funding dry up in our sector over the last couple of years, and remember, we’re coming out of COVID-19. It takes a long time for universities to recover from a big global shock like the pandemic. Ironically, some of our universities have actually had to sell their housing stock to keep their budget afloat. We’re coming from a long way behind, and we’re working hard to ensure that there is a pipeline, but that takes a long time, Greg. It takes nearly five years to get housing stock from whoa to go and there are big impediments in the way, including the supply of capital in our own sector and, of course, state government and other regulatory barriers that are preventing us from getting those online quicker than we’d like to.

GREG JENNETT: All right, so what is the central request or ask that you put to the Parliament here? There does appear to be the numbers to get this caps regime passed into law. Are you saying that the effects of that should be ameliorated by additional funding, compensated by additional funding to universities?

LUKE SHEEHY: There are two things here, really, Greg. One is that the current visa processing regime is no longer, well, it never has been fit for purpose and we want to see that scrapped immediately. And then we want to see a really fair dinkum deal negotiated between the sector and the government on the allocation of numbers. There is a lot of anxiety in our sector at the moment, particularly in regional and outer suburban universities which haven’t been able to access international students because of the changes to visa processing. That’s the first thing. And then if we get a decent allocation for our sector, we can allow all those universities to grow because those budgets are constrained and when they’re constrained, they can’t deliver world-class education for our Australian students and international students like they have before.

GREG JENNETT: All right, because the differences between city-based universities and not even all city-based universities, it’s those in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and the regions are massive at the moment when it comes to international student enrolments. Why do you say that can be fixed by giving a leg up to regional institutions?

LUKE SHEEHY: There are many regional universities and other universities for that matter that are ready, willing and able to take international students now, but because of the visa processing arrangements, they’re unable to get those students into Australia, so there’s a lot of anxiety in the sector. We want to see that processing arrangement go, and then we want to have a fair dinkum negotiation with the government on what the allocation for growth might be. We don’t want to just universally say that the government and the ministers can have the power to cap both at an institutional and a course level without seeing what their plans are for growth for this important sector.

GREG JENNETT: Yeah, we did speak to Andrew Norton of the ANU who produced a paper on this yesterday. He addressed the course-by-course cap regime. Do you think that will be baked in here or they might negotiate that away?

LUKE SHEEHY: This is an intervention into universities that is unprecedented in my two decades in this sector, Greg. I think it really is something that the government should reconsider in this legislative package, so I hope it will go. And I hope the Senate and the House of Representatives look at it in great detail.

GREG JENNETT: Now, just rounding out where we started, Luke, on your opening statement, it was forcefully presented to the Senate committee, I will say. It also included references to the politics that sit behind this. If this goes ahead, is there some sort of implied threat here that universities might use their voice, if not their money, to run a political campaign in conjunction with the next election?

LUKE SHEEHY: I will say this: for the last four decades, this sector has served the country immeasurably in terms of our soft diplomatic effort, our capacity to deliver research and, importantly, essential funding to deliver education for both Australian and international students. We’ve had champions on both sides of politics for many years, so I’m continuing that tradition of being a champion for the sector and I don’t want to see us get into a bidding war between both major parties. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done to fix the housing crisis in this country and international students can’t be a scapegoat for one part of that very important discussion.

GREG JENNETT: All right. Well, that is noted, Luke. Somehow, I think this may not be our last conversation on this sector. Thanks so much for joining us.

ENDS