E&OE 

GARY ADSHEAD: Luke Sheehy is the chief executive at Universities Australia and joins me on the line. Hi, Luke. 

LUKE SHEEHY: G’day, Gary. Good to be with you. 

GARY ADSHEAD: They’re saying that on top of the issues around housing shortages and so on, that there are those organisations that set themselves up, perhaps as providers of education, who are allowing the student visas that are being used to come over here to be rorted – particularly by people who might be operating in the sex trade. What do you say? 

LUKE SHEEHY: Yeah, Gary, it’s actually been a really concerning trend that we’ve seen in the student visa program in Australia for a number of years, and that’s why universities and people in the education sector have been very supportive of the government’s work in the Nixon Review. One thing we don’t want to see as Australian universities, and I’m sure all your listeners will agree, is student visas used as a way to exploit individuals. When there are crimes being undertaken in relation to international people coming into this country, we need to clamp it out and stamp it out and get rid of it. We’ve been very strongly supportive of that. The other thing I would say is we’ve seen since COVID-19, and particularly during those lockdown periods, we’ve allowed international students to work full-time. That was a way to help our own supermarkets and logistics and hospitality industries keep going in that difficult time. That created some perverse incentives for some unscrupulous providers to bring international students into the country as a way to get them to work. That’s been stopped and we’re really supportive of that, too. A lot of work to get the student visa system more robust and a lot more integrity into it. You won’t hear a complaint from universities on that. 

GARY ADSHEAD: In terms of that, what sort of role can universities play in stopping the exploitation or the deliberate use of the student visa as the reason to bring someone into the country? I mean, can you spot that from the point of view of administration?  

LUKE SHEEHY: Certainly. We have really strict measures in place across our sector around how we deal with international students in university settings. I can’t speak to what’s been done in vocational colleges, some other English language colleges and other non-university settings, but for universities, we have very strict procedures and very strict ways that we deal with students. We have legislation, both state and federal, and our own procedures to make sure that these things don’t happen. I’ve been in this sector for 20 years and we work really hard at a university level to make sure our international students know their rights, particularly when it comes to the workplace because we don’t want to see international students ripped off. They make a really great contribution to the WA economy and the right across Australia – $50 billion, nearly. We want to make sure that we look after this sector, but those students themselves are looked after as well. 

GARY ADSHEAD: How are you going in terms of convincing the federal government to not cap the numbers? You know, we talk about the Federal Education Minister Jason Clare still sticking to that January 1 model of bringing down the numbers by up to 60,000 students. How are you going in terms of winning them over? 

LUKE SHEEHY: Gary, I’d say this is what we’re really asking for. We want to make sure this $50 billion sector, the second biggest sector after mining, contributes really strongly to the eastern states, but also right across the country, including in the west, and that we preserve this sector, we give it a strong future. One of the big issues that we’ve been talking about this week is actually the visa processing changes that were made by the last Home Affairs Minister around Christmas last year which have caused chaos. What it’s meant is that some universities haven’t been able to get students in, and we’ve seen 60,000 fewer international student visas for universities alone. And that’s why we think we need to get a better outcome for our universities. We need to scrap the way that the visa processing arrangements have been put in place for the last six or seven months, and we need a strong allocation for growth, particularly for those unis in regional Australia or in the outer suburban areas. Places like Murdoch and Edith Cowan and those great universities you have in Western Australia need and are able to take international students tomorrow if they were given the opportunity to do so. 

GARY ADSHEAD: One of your peers, Group of Eight Chief Executive Vicki Thomson, told the Senate inquiry on Tuesday and quoted in The Australian newspaper this morning – she said this in relation to the capping of student numbers – ‘they [the changes] are draconian, interventionist and amount to economic vandalism on the day when we’ve seen Wall Street suffer its worst result in two years, creating massive global economic uncertainty’ – could it be that bad in terms of this decision by the federal government? 

LUKE SHEEHY: I was sitting next to Vicki in the Senate hearing when she said that. What I would say is, I absolutely agree with the fact that this sector delivers economically for Australia. Half of our growth last year came from this sector alone. If we’re going to take a sledgehammer to it, we need to think about the consequences that it has for the economy. As I said, it’s our biggest export sector after mining, and it supports jobs – but not just jobs in universities. It supports jobs in tourism, in hospitality and right across the economy. Small businesses benefit from this sector, so we want to see it have a strong future. I think the interventions and the powers the Minister is asking for need to be looked at because they’re a little over the top in our view. We want to get the balance right and get a really fair dinkum deal for our unis. 

GARY ADSHEAD: Just finally, because it’s the old chestnut that comes around and that is that this is being done because we’re still facing a housing crisis in this country. What do you say to that? 

LUKE SHEEHY: Our universities understand that there is a housing crisis. We see young Australians struggling to get into the rental market. It’s a supply issue. We know that we’re constructing less houses than we did before the pandemic. It’s a Team Australia effort to make sure that universities, along with federal and state governments and the private sector, turbocharge our construction efforts to get more housing. The reality is, putting the blame on international students entirely is nonsense. They only make up four per cent of the private rental market. Our analysis shows out on the eastern seaboard, in the major capital cities, that rental vacancy rates around universities and around the inner cities are higher. We want to be real about what the actual issue is here. International students aren’t the problem. They aren’t the cause of the housing crisis in Australia at the moment. 

GARY ADSHEAD: Thanks very much for joining us, Luke. Appreciate your views. 

LUKE SHEEHY: Great to be with you, thanks.