Education Minister Jason Clare has celebrated the Chinese Government’s directive that it will no longer recognise foreign academic degrees and diplomas if the study was conducted online.
This directive is expected to result in up to 50,000 Chinese students rushing to get back to Australia for face-to-face teaching before the new academic year commences in mid-February.
In an interview with Sky News (below), Clare described the directive as “great news” for Australia:
“It’s great that we’ve got China opening up and students are coming back”.
“The challenge obviously is getting back to class – there’s about 80,000 Chinese students that are here right now and about 40 or 50,000 that are still in China that will need to go through the rigmarole of getting on a flight to get here.”
Clare went to great length waxing lyrical about the purported massive economic benefits these Chinese students will bring, while ignoring any downsides.
Here’s a genuine question for Jason Clare: where are these 40,000 or 50,000 Chinese students supposed to live given Australia’s rental market is already the tightest on record with rents soaring at double-digit rates?
As noted this morning, the tidal wave of Chinese students could wipe out one-third of the available rental stock in Sydney and Melbourne, according to the Grattan Institute’s Brendan Coates:
“Assuming that they all do come back, those 40,000 students [coming to Australia] would need something like 16,000 homes”.
“In Melbourne and Sydney, that bump would be the equivalent to about a third of the dwellings currently being advertised for rent.”
This deluge could also force rents in inner Sydney and Melbourne up by a further 5% over the coming month, according to Kent Lardner, founder of Suburbtrends:
“We usually see an increase in vacancy rates in the suburbs around the university campuses over the Christmas break, but in the coming weeks, students will be returning, and new students begin their search, which will see vacancies quickly drop to below 1 per cent in most suburbs”.
“The return of the Chinese students is likely to make this competition rather fierce, and I expect to see rental increases of at least 5 per cent in the next four weeks or so”.
Why do Australian politicians only ever talk up the benefits of immigration while ignoring any and all costs? Their intellectual dishonesty is why mass immigration is loved by politicians and their lobbyist backers, but hated by Australians at large.
The only outcome from the Chinese student deluge (and Labor’s ‘Big Australia’ immigration policy more generally) is increased housing stress and homelessness.
