The Australian government, specifically the Labor Party, is grasping at straws. Rather than address the complex issues facing their society with solutions that touch on their actual causes, they have decided to rest the blame on international students.
It is telling that the vast majority of international students are from Asian countries. The rhetoric about international students seems like a thin veneer over a racist core.
While the referendum for an Aboriginal advising body for Parliament to be added to the Constitution should have been an easy slam-dunk as a basically symbolic gesture to one of the most grievously wronged groups of people on Earth, the Australian people showed the colors and chose oppression and racism. Since the referendum was tied up with Labor’s pursuits, its failure, they fear, symbolizes the end of their reign.
Their response to this, rather than reach out to their base and remain to true to what are supposed to be left-leaning ideals, they are appealing to the racism that voted against the referendum.
Cities like Sydney do not have enough places to house the population. Rather than reform their housing policies to incentivize affordable, decent housing built vertically to support an urban population, the government has decided that immigrants are taking too many places to live from “real” Australians.
Rather than addressing the complex causes of the “cost of living crisis,” they blame it on people from other countries abusing student visas.
Australia has a slavery and human trafficking problem. People essentially fleeing repressive governments have their desperation used against them, and are tricked into coming to Australia by companies promising a future they cannot deliver. One tactic employed is to get people into the country as students, and then once here, leverage that to get them into doing unskilled labor for little to no reimbursement. The latest migration policy changes can be seen, in some regard, as a limp effort to do something about this. By raising the English language requirements and requiring some evidence that student visa applicants are truly students, they could block these desperate people from being taken advantage of in this way. While this does nothing to address the fact that these are humans seeking safety that are being turned away, it makes it harder to abuse a student visa.
But they don’t stop there. Vocational schools are being outright closed down. This supposedly is because the dreaded international students enter into these vocations. But by closing the schools, this curtails pathways into the trades for everyone. It isn’t like Australia no longer needs trade-workers. Especially if there was any intention to address the housing shortages in any meaningful way.
There is another visa in their crosshairs, the graduate visa. The purpose of a graduate visa is to give recent graduates a shot at finding employment in what is likely a new field. After gaining some experience, other kinds of work visas are more accessible. It was already strange that this was limited to people under 50 before, but now this age limit has dropped to 35. While people abusing the student visa system to essentially get low-skill workers, those same people are not graduating from schools and seeking graduate visas to get the required work experience to qualify for a sponsored working visa; they are withdrawing from school and disappearing into what effectively amounts to slavery. Dropping the age limit to such a young age effectively makes it so that an adult seeking to change their career path should skip Australia, and does nothing to address the problems the government is “trying” to address. They cite wanting to keep people in the workforce for a long time as a goal, as if millennials will ever actually be able to retire.
They have also dropped the maximum age to apply for permanent residency to 45. These age restrictions read as if a bunch of 8-year-olds were asked at what age someone becomes old rather than engaging with reality.
If the Labor Party’s goal is to decrease immigration, then this policy is already working for them. I came to Australia to pursue a degree in law. While my initial interest in law was more focused on climate change, seeing the way Aboriginal Peoples have been treated here really motivated me to focus on human rights and providing legal aid for people who cannot afford a lawyer. This is a chronically understaffed field, as the work is difficult, and the pay is much lower than other fields of law. It is a role that is desperately needed in Australia. This change to the migration policy has cost them at least one of these lawyers, as I will be unable to gain the required work experience to get a work visa after my degree. There is no point in even finishing my degree here.
Australia, like most places on Earth, is also in need of nurses and other medical professionals. My wife is studying to become a nurse to help satisfy an actual need facing society, and Australia has consequentially lost a future nurse as well.
Other people pursuing advanced degrees are in the same situation. There are several vacanies of skilled workers which Australia cannot fill, and these policies, while freeing up a few apartments, will not fill those gaps in employment.
By scapegoating people from other countries (the majority of which are from Asia, those from the West are collateral damage), the Labor Party, aside from moving further towards right-wing politics and alienating their own voters, is poised to worsen all of their problems. International students, by the college enrollment, make up and significant portion of Australia’s economy. Schools will be losing money, and the result will damage Australian students. Australians will be simultaneously forced to both enter more highly skilled roles and more low-skilled roles. Australia has appealed to me before as it seemed to be resisting the urge to let politics become sports, where one team prevailing becomes more important than the actual work of government. And I was wrong.
In other words, this decision was short-sighted, cruel, and has left a putrid taste in my mouth. I worked hard to get here, I took on new student loans, and it has all been swiftly flushed down the toilet in an appeal to racism as part of a desperate plea to remain in power.
Good riddance.