International student caps ‘as bad as ARC vetoes’: UA chair

The Labor government’s proposal to cap overseas enrolments is as bad as its conservative predecessor’s vetoing of research grants, according to the head of the representative body for Australian universities.

Universities Australia chair David Lloyd was due to tell the National Press Club that the bill to limit foreign student numbers was an “extraordinary intervention” of a type “not seen since the Morrison government politicised Australian Research Council [ARC] funding grants in 2021”.

According to a draft of the speech, Professor Lloyd will point out that education minister Jason Clare promised to end the days of ministers using the ARC as a “political plaything”, by ushering legislation to limit ministerial intervention through parliament.

“Ironically, universities are squarely once again a political plaything,” he was expected to say. “Just as we enact a research-enabled recovery from a pandemic, [elected officials] are using international students as scapegoats to blame the housing crisis on.

“The Albanese government and the Peter Dutton-led [Liberal-National] coalition are now outdoing one another in their rush to reduce the number of overseas students. This poll-driven attack on a major component of our sector has once again put universities on the front pages of newspapers…for all the wrong reasons.”

The speech says visa policy changes have already “inflicted incredibly serious financial harm” that, combined with the proposed caps, could cost the sector 14,000 jobs and leave it without adequate funding for research, teaching and campus infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the government’s target for 80 per cent of working-age Australians to have tertiary qualifications by 2050 – as articulated in the May federal budget – will require 1 million more taxpayer-supported higher education students by 2050.

“This is the equivalent of creating a new institution the size of Monash University every two years,” the speech says.

“How exactly can we deliver for future learners and increased skills provision in the midst of a tail-spinning downward spiral of core funding?”

Professor Lloyd was expected to use the speech to implore both parties to “make universities a policy priority instead of a political pawn”.

He will cite the examples of founding Liberal prime minister Robert Menzies, whose Australian Universities Commission was credited with “saving Australia’s universities from a funding crisis that threatened their very existence”, and Labor’s Bob Hawke, whose Higher Education Contribution Scheme “revolutionised our system”.

In the ensuing decades, the system “has been subjected to a unique blend of passive neglect punctuated with occasional bursts of occasionally well-intended ideologically driven intervention”, the speech says.

“The next federal election is a fork in the road for our sector,” Professor Lloyd will say. “Higher education belongs on the national policy agenda, not in the political playbook.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com