“Morally indefensible” universities smuggle international students

Advertisement

Last week, it was discovered that Western Sydney University was offering $1,500 payments to Chinese students to help fund travel packages to third-country transit destinations to skirt the federal government’s coronavirus ban:

Now other Australian universities have joined the fold, with Melbourne University, Adelaide University and ANU also offering grants to Chinese students to serve quarantine periods in other countries:

The University of Melbourne has announced it will pay students up to $7500 each to cover accommodation, airfares and quarantine costs incurred during the ban.

Others, including the University of Western Sydney, Adelaide University and the Australian National University, have offered smaller packages ranging from $1500 and $5000, with some also promising to waive fees if those forced to study remotely fail their courses.

Advertisement

Sydney University Associate Professor, Salvatore Babones, has rightly labelled the grants “morally indefensible” as it risks spreading the virus through poor, vulnerable countries like Thailand:

Associate Professor Salvatore Babones, from libertarian think-tank the Centre for Independent Studies, said it was “morally indefensible to encourage thousands of Chinese youngsters to travel at this difficult time, especially when they would be transiting through poor, vulnerable countries like Thailand”.

“It is thoroughly unethical for a university to encourage students to undertake risky, refugee-style travel in order to slip into Australia through a third country backdoor.”

So Australia’s universities are people smugglers now, willing to risk spreading the virus to protect their treasured ‘cash cow’?

Advertisement

The virus of greed has clearly infected our purported bastions of enlightenment.

About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.