Cutting off your nose to spite your face!

7/04/2025

Another day in Australian politics and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton again reached into the nether regions of his political kit bag and comes up with a new group of people to focus his hatred towards. This time it is International Students.  He has flagged that there will be a reduction of 30,000 in the International Student numbers because of their impact on the rental market and prices.

What Dutton failed to address was the March 2025 study that categorically stated the following: “The main message here is, because the correlations between the international [students] numbers and the rental costs are random, there's really no pattern. We don't have evidence that international students make finding housing harder for everyone”.

This academic study used data from the ABS as well as a host of other sources. Further, Dutton does not address the fact that the total International Student Industry contributes around $51.6 billion to our economy annually. Cutting 30% of this amount is going to pose some significant budgetary considerations for the Federal Government.  Let us also remember that the fees paid by the International students subsidises the courses undertaken by the local students. So a cut of this nature will simply leave us further away from achieving the status of the “clever country” so enamoured by politicians of yesteryear.

The short-sightedness of Dutton’s call is appealing to those in our society who have not considered the implications of a cut of this nature. We must resist these attempts at “cutting off our noses to spite our faces”.

Suresh Rajan