Federal government must ignore international student lobbyists

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Chief lobbyist for the international education industry, Phil Honeywood, continues to pressure Australia’s governments to roll out the welcome mat to international students, accusing governments of double standards:

International Education Association of Australia chief executive officer Phil Honeywood said there was a double standard with Victoria and others “moving heaven and earth for tennis players, seasonal fruit pickers and Hollywood actors to come here”…

Mr Honeywood said the international student sector had “no idea” what was happening and was worried that 2021 would be a write-off. “With the states driving quarantine and the feds controlling border force we have had this game of pass-the-parcel going on and are now caught between a rock and a hard place,” he said.

“Semester one is our biggest intake and clearly it has pretty much been and gone.

The situation was incredibly frustrating because other countries such as Britain and Canada were opening their borders to international students, and New Zealand was taking 1000.

No international students should arrive in Australia until all citizens and permanent residents stranded abroad have returned home. Once that has been achieved, international students should be allowed to return in a managed way via hotel quarantine at their own expense (not taxpayers’). If Australians can be charges $2500 to $3000 for their hotel quarantine stays, so should international students.

The education lobby are once again displaying classic moral hazard behaviour, as they have throughout the pandemic when they:

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  1. Lobbied against China travel bans at the start of the pandemic;
  2. Paid for Chinese students to circumvent travel bans via third countries like Thailand and Dubai; and
  3. Lobbied for students to jump the arrival queue via so-called ‘safe corridors’ hotel quarantine.

Of course, the industry stands to privatise the financial benefits from international students’ return, while the costs and risks are borne by taxpayers and the general community. It’s a classic heads I win, tails you lose arrangement developed by the industry for the industry.

With virus numbers having exploded internationally amid new highly infectious strains, the risk of importing the virus via returned travellers has increased accordingly.

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Yet the education industry continues to shamelessly lobby for Australia to stress its hotel quarantine system to allow students to return, which would risk further virus outbreaks.

Given the clear risks involved in quarantining international arrivals, quarantine places must be reserved for returning Australian citizens and permanent residents only. To do otherwise would not only be unfair to the tens-of-thousands of Australians still stranded abroad, but would also greatly increase the risks of importing the virus.

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Higher Education institutions need to swallow this bitter pill and learn to survive with lower international student fee revenues. Cut the fat in administration and the ridiculous salaries paid to senior executives and focus on educating local students in priority areas. That is their primary purpose, after all.

The education industry’s shameless lobbying for international students to return needs to be called out and rejected outright. Phil Honeywood is talking his own book and does not represent the interests of Australians.

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.