Australia, and other Western nations, long ago entered an Orwellian era where ‘double-speak’ is becoming increasingly common in politics. It’s a classic tactic for the political elite to use deceptive naming techniques when presenting new policies or programs to the public.
A perfect example of this is the ‘Safe Schools’ program, littered with explicit and age-inappropriate content. Similarly, President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, an environmental activist’s dream, had precisely zero effect on inflation.
This branding strategy has been used with great success by politicians who rely upon a trusting, and apathetic, public which rarely seeks the detail beyond the headline.
In this vein, the federal government has outdone itself again with the recently announced National Planning Level (NPL) policy, which seeks to address new international student intakes. It is a sensitive issue for the government as Australia continues to suffer through a housing crisis with little new supply, unaffordable prices, and ever-rising rents.
What the federal government said it offered was a ‘cap’ or ‘limit’ on the tertiary education sector’s new international student intake, but the Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has since admitted that Australian universities will have ‘roughly the same number of students starting next year as they did last year’.
Full points for creative messaging, but it again proves the devil is always in the detail. Australians can no longer take policy headlines at face value. In fact, the safest option is to assume the policy may have the opposite effect to what it purports.
A closer look at the federal government’s student ‘caps’ shows new international student commencements at higher education institutions in 2025 could be 15 per cent higher than in 2023. The new student cap of 175,000 will be a significant increase on the roughly 152,000 new international students who enrolled in higher education in 2023.
Moreover, this cap excludes school students, those who come to study degrees above undergraduate level, students undertaking standalone English language courses (ELICOS) and multiple other subgroups. In 2023, new international student commencement in these courses added up to more than 130,000 alone.
In the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector, the federal government’s approach will see around 95,000 new international student commencements in 2025 – a 17 per cent increase on 2023 numbers, despite claims about a decrease which will only affect private VET providers.
Ultimately, what has been reported as a ‘cap’ looks far more like a planned expansion of student numbers in the higher education sector. It increasingly seems that it is university vice chancellors who are actually in control of Australia’s migration system.
IPA research has shown the massive expansion of immigration and the sharp increase in international student numbers under this federal government has placed immense upward pressure on housing prices and the cost of living more generally.
In the 2023 financial year, IPA analysis showed the federal government oversaw the largest ever net intake of international students, more than 250,000, which filled the equivalent of 70 per cent of new housing supply in that period. Between 2023 and 2028, the analysis also showed, international students will fill the equivalent of approximately one-quarter of Australia’s net new housing supply, baking in housing shortages and rising rents.
On top of the international student intakes, over a million net migrants have entered Australia since the election of the Albanese government – a 62 per cent increase on the previous record and the largest net migration intake in history – equivalent to a new migrant every single minute.
Compounding this, on Monday, ABS figures showed the federal government was already 25 per cent below the required 20,000 average monthly approvals required to meet its 1.2 million new homes commitment by 2029, as established under its National Housing Accord.
Australia has and always will be a welcoming country, but the federal government is setting Australia up for economic and social failure and has demonstrated no plan on how to provide housing and critical social services.
The government has been called upon to scale-back migration and the international student intake to manageable levels. While the NPL policy purports to do so, it will likely have the opposite effect.
The so-called ‘cap’ on students is at best disingenuous, at worst deliberately deceptive. Moreover, its use of double-speak strongly suggests the federal government has no intention of addressing the problem. And, of course, it is a symptom of a much broader problem in politics – governments that can’t be trusted to present policies which can be taken at face value.
Brianna McKee is a Research Fellow and the National Manager of Generation Liberty at the Institute of Public Affairs