Inside Politics: Why Peter Dutton is opposing foreign student caps

Published Nov 21, 2024, 6:00 PM

This week, the federal Opposition ruled out co-operating with the government on legislation to cap the number of international students coming to study at Australian universities. 

Both Labor and the Coalition say that international student numbers need to come down, to ease pressure on housing and infrastructure. But Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said Labor’s bill was flawed because it favoured the big Group of eight universities at the expense of regional unis. 

Dutton promised the Opposition will impose bigger cuts on international students than Labor, and he said that the best way to bring down migration numbers is to vote for the Coalition at the next election.

So what will the central issues of the next election be? When is it likely to be?

Joining Jacqueline Maley to discuss is political correspondent Paul Sakkal and federal politics reporter Natassia Crysanthos.

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From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. This is inside politics. I'm Jacqueline Maley, it's Friday, December 22nd. This week, the federal opposition ruled out cooperation with the government on legislation to cap the number of international students coming to study at Australian universities. Both labor and the coalition say that international student numbers need to come down to ease pressure on housing and infrastructure. But opposition leader Peter Dutton said Labor's bill was flawed because it favoured the big group of eight universities at the expense of regional unis. Meanwhile, the labor caucus was given a strong talking to by federal ALP secretary Paul Erickson. Erickson wants labor to learn from the failures of Kamala Harris's presidential campaign for the Democrats in the United States. All in all, it is starting to feel a lot like an election is looming. So what will the central issues of the next election be, and when is it likely to be? Our chief political correspondent, David Crowe, is still on his jaunt with the Prime minister in South America. So joining me today, we have political correspondent Paul Chuckle and federal politics reporter Natassia Chrysanthos. Welcome to the Pod team.

Thanks, jacki. Hey, guys.

Pull. The government and the opposition both say that they want to cut the numbers of international students who are coming into the country because they say those students are worsening the housing crisis and putting pressure on infrastructure, particularly in the major cities. But this week, when labor put forward legislation to do just that, the coalition said it wouldn't support it. So can you just tell us what's going on?

Yeah, this is obviously a huge election issue. The level of migration has surged post-Covid. Inflation has also surged. People are feeling strain in the community, and there is a tendency for politicians to apportion some of that blame to people coming into the country. If you listen to the rhetoric over the last year or so, you hear the coalition speak in sharper terms about the role that international students play. They really focus on that element and talk about their effect on the housing and rental market. So it would have been a unsurprising thing to some extent, if the coalition backed labor on their plans to pretty drastically cut student numbers from next year. However, the politics of the issue and the kind of political importance of being seen to be the toughest on migration, I think, led the coalition to want to find fault in Labor's approach. They wanted to paint Labor's approach as chaotic and, for various reasons, flawed, and they want to go to the election suggesting that they're the strongest on migration and they will have deeper cuts on international students. And in order to do that, Peter Dutton felt he needed to oppose this bill to not give labor a win.

It's a disaster across the rest of the sector, and we're not going to support a bill which creates a bigger mess of the government's making on top of what they've already done. So what Dutton.

Said this week when he came out to block them, was that the caps that Clare had set were still too generous to the Group of eight universities, who would only see about a 1% reduction in numbers based on previous levels, whereas the deepest cuts would be felt in the private higher education sector and the vocational education.

Sector. And so what the government's doing under their so-called Cap is baking in a benefit to the bigger universities. Mark Scott made $1.4 billion in one year. And the government essentially is baking in that opportunity for the University of Sydney and the other seven. And that's not something that we're going to support.

But what he didn't address was why he opposes the mechanism. He alleged that this legislation baked in generous caps for the Group of eight, but it doesn't do that. It creates a mechanism. So he didn't actually address that substantive issue. But he created this narrative of kind of rich international students coming in at the expense of struggling Australians who can't find housing.

And what was Labor's reaction to the coalition's refusal to to back the bill to us?

Well, we had Jason Clare come out very strongly, quite immediately accusing Peter Dutton of being a fraud on migration.

I've got a letter from 16 small and regional universities telling us that they want this. 70% of the Australian people say they want this, and the Liberal Party and the National Party and the Greens are getting into bed to stop this. Australians are fast starting to realise they can't trust this bloke on anything.

So it's a real gift to labor in terms of giving them something to pin Dutton on as a hypocrite in his big kind of anti-immigration rhetoric. And when you've got both parties kind of competing to be the strong man on migration. This is probably the first time that Labor's actually had a leg up.

Yeah, and Tony Burke made some very personal comments, didn't he? Basically, he said that if there's anyone out there who is struggling to find a home in Sydney or Melbourne or any of the major cities, the leader of the opposition has just decided to make it worse.

Yeah. So he really played into that narrative that we're seeing really firm up here around the effect of immigration and international students in particular on the housing crisis. It's the facts are much more nuanced than that, I think. But it was interesting, I think, that you saw Burke basically directly buy into Peter Dutton's argument and then flip it on him.

For anybody out there who might who might feel that they're missing out on a rental accommodation because an overseas student is taken, just know the leader of the opposition wants to make that situation worse. If anybody out there is thinking that because of the rate of immigration, they're having trouble getting into a home modification. Just know the leader of the opposition has decided to make that worse.

Yeah, Paul, I want I want to get your take on that because Peter Dutton very directly links now to the issue of migration numbers and in particular international student numbers to the housing crisis, particularly in the major cities. And labor, as Charles has just pointed out, have basically co-opted that narrative as well. Now, what's the strategy there, whether or not it's actually true? I think most economists and housing sort of specialists say that that's part of the picture, but not the whole picture.

Yeah. It took labor a little while to to move on this issue. Dan Tehan, who's the shadow immigration minister, has been talking about a big Australia policy since the early days of this government once international students started flooding back in post-Covid. Labor didn't react to this super quickly. They had two ministers, Andrew Giles and Claire O'Neill, in those immigration roles who were not as attuned to the kind of political sensitivities as perhaps they should have been, which led to them being moved out of those portfolios. But over time, Labour has cottoned on to the issue, realised there is real strain in the community, there is tension in the community over it and has perhaps adopted some of the more crude interpretations and bits of rhetoric around the issue. On this framing of Dutton as as weak on migration, I think he he let his guard slip a little bit in this press conference he did this week, which is his first press conference in Canberra, when he said in response to a question about Labor's attacks on him being a fraud on migration, he said perhaps a bit hubristically that every time Labour attacks me on my personality, my numbers just go up.

What the last two years, 18 months has demonstrated is that the more the Labor Party attacked me personally, the higher my numbers go. And I'm happy for that to continue, because what we're arguing.

And I think this does highlight this interesting point around Labor's attacks on Dutton, on being weak on migration. For example, we saw this in the Nzyq case when he blocked a Labour attempt to quickly rush through a bill to re detain people had been let out of immigration detention. Claire O'Neill tried to portray him as a defender of paedophiles, quite controversially, and he just the liberal reaction on attacks like that is, Dutton is known chiefly in the public's mind as someone who is tough on borders, tough on migration and perhaps a populist on those issues. So it's really hard to change perceptions of someone when that is what their character is chiefly kind of grounded on.

Thus, we know that the university sector really doesn't like this policy of the international student caps. Can you just tell us what the chief objections are from the sector?

So the sector's kind of comes at it from two when we're talking about universities. You've got your group of eight universities, which again Peter Dutton was talking about who are your city universities that have made the most money, I suppose, from international students in the last few years. and it's a slightly wealthier market. And then you've got a lot of regional. Or smaller universities whose students are more likely to come from India and Pakistan and other countries in South Asia. Now, regional universities have typically had lower numbers of international students. Group of eight universities have had higher numbers of international students. What Labour did about a year ago was introduced this interim measure, called Ministerial Direction 107, which changed the way that student visas were processed and that kind of became a de facto cap because it made it really hard for students from South Asia to come to the country. So regional universities and all of the smaller universities have already been quite drastically affected by the government's migration policies. They want that direction to be removed. And under Clare's caps, they actually would have been able to increase their proportion of international students. But on the other hand, the group of eight universities were the ones who were going to see the more significant cuts. So you have the Group of eight universities really campaigning against this, complaining about an economic hit. They'll lose income, they'll have to cut staff and so on. And then you have regional universities, perhaps a bit more amenable to it because they just want to see this ministerial direction scrapped. So they're kind of coming at it from from two different perspectives. But overall, the sector is pretty unhappy with the way that Labour has handled and consulted on this legislation.

Peter Dutton used this opportunity, exploited this opportunity of the debate over the international student cuts this week to sort of talk about his own migration policies going forward to the election. So he said that he wants to cut permanent migration by 25%. He said that he will cut student international student numbers by more than whatever Labour does. But he was kind of vague on the detail, wasn't he? What do we actually know about the opposition's plans for migration?

Well, not a heap. Angus Taylor, who's their shadow treasurer, gave a Press Club address in the middle of this year, shortly after their budget in reply speech, where they committed to this 25% cut in the net overseas migration figure. We just don't know how they're going to achieve it. And there were some details out last week, I think, from the ABS, which showed that a big proportion of our high immigration numbers at the moment are people coming in from New Zealand, where the economy is not going well at all. So a lot of Kiwis are coming over here and they want to find a job. And they think that being in Australia for a couple of years will give them a better crack at having a better life in Australia. So that's a difficult part of the immigration system to stem the flow of, because we have obviously reciprocal rights and we have similar arrangements with other countries as well. So the the temporary migration section of the migration system, unlike student caps, is much harder to actually control for the government.

Yeah. Well, I think what's interesting is, is Dutton has announced a cut or in his budget reply speech last year, said he would put a number on the cut to permanent migration. But what the issue has been for this government that the opposition has kind of taken them to task on, has been net overseas migration figures. And that's where you're looking at your temporary visa holders, of which students are a part. But the other elements of that are things like New Zealanders. Now, New Zealanders don't have the strict visa conditions that other people arriving in Australia have. They're an uncapped group. And with the New Zealand economy, you've got people coming over here. And the way that that visa setting exists is there is no way for the Australian government to actually cap it at the present moment. So that's a variable that the government can't really control. Same thing with Australians coming home. That's always going to be the number that's in flux. So it is really difficult to control that number. And I think that's where Peter Dutton is going to have to very clearly outline. He would do it because you've seen this government really struggle with it.

Well, he said a 25% cut to permanent migration, which seems like a very, very big cut to me. And yet it's unclear how they'll do that and how they'll do that without damaging the economy. But this whole debate does tell us a lot, doesn't it, about the focus for the next election, because the issue of immigration is clearly something that people feel strongly about. Tasc reported this week on some research from, I think, the Scanlon Institute, which showed that people's views about immigration have sort of changed a bit, haven't they?

Yeah. So this is a survey that's been done every year, I think, since about 2007, 2008. So we've got a lot of data. And what came out this week was that the proportion of Australians who think that immigration is too high is the highest that it's ever been. It's at 49%. Now, that does coincide with the highest ever levels of migration. So it's reasonable that people are responding to that. But it does show how front of mind it is at the moment. But what was really interesting out of that research was the fact that that concern about immigration is likely to be driven by fears about the economy and housing affordability. It's not necessarily an anti-multiculturalism sentiment or an anti-migrant sentiment. It comes back to those cost of living concerns.

Our colleague James Massola had a really interesting story this week about the ALP national secretary, Paul Erickson, who, of course, looks after the organisational wing of the Labor Party. He gave a talk to the caucus room in Canberra, and he wanted to talk about the results of the US presidential election and all of the pitfalls that he thought that the US Democrats and the Kamala Harris campaign fell into that he wants to avoid. So what did he say, Paul?

I was actually just with Paul Erickson, and he said that James measles story was very accurate. So well done again to our esteemed colleague. What he told the labor caucus of Anthony Albanese was that this government is well placed to talk about its economic narrative and well placed to run a campaign that is focused on bread and butter, cost of living issues off the back of its record. You know, coalition people might scoff at that, but Erickson's view is that this government has created a million jobs for a big chunk of this term of government. It has focused on the inflation challenge in the last six months. It's rolled out a bunch of cost of living measures. And looking internationally at the difficulties incumbents have faced, where almost in almost all circumstances, incumbent governments are losing vote share because of how bad people are feeling in the economy. Labor's reacted to that by working up what they believe will be a really ambitious, tangible set of policies that they'll be able to say after the next election will make people's lives easier. And Erickson's plan is to put working people, nurses, childcare workers who have benefited from wage rises. Mining workers who have pay rises due to Labor's IR changes at the centre of their advertising. Talking from first person experience and saying this is a government for workers, for the middle class that is focused on tangible policy.

Yeah, I was interested in that because he sort of said, you know, we're going to we're going to put working people at the centre of our advertising campaigns, and celebrity campaigners are out, you know, because Kamala Harris, of course, famously used all these celebrities and it perhaps made her campaign look a bit too sort of elite. And also, I think he said that that Labour would deliver or would seek to deliver its message to young men through podcasts and other non-traditional media. So does that mean Albo is coming to a broadcast near you?

I don't know if we I don't know if there is an Australian equivalent of Joe Rogan, though.

Maybe you could set it up.

Or maybe we can. Maybe Paul will bring Joe Rogan for an Australian tour.

That'd be. That'd be exciting. I'd like to have a few words with Joe Rogan myself. Anyway, I'm aware that election speculation is not always that interesting to everybody who is outside the Parliament House bubble or the media bubble, but do we have any indication of when the next election might be? Because they're all gearing up, they're getting, you know, they're getting in in position, but we still don't have a date.

We don't have a date. We won't have a date for a while. Like the Prime Minister won't flag that this year. They're keeping their options open for any month really next year after February. So there could be a circumstance under which the Prime Minister calls an election just after Australia Day for early March or mid-March. The budget's in late March. Quite a lot of people inside the government think that the leadership does not want to do that budget, but they are planning for a budget. There is expenditure review committee meetings and the budget is going ahead at this stage. So March is an option. April is an option. May is an option. There is a lot of chat this week around Canberra that it will be March, but there's been lots of bouts of election speculation before that haven't been right. So I will try and figure that out today because I'm trying to write a story in this space. So buy the paper.

Buy the paper, subscribe to our website. And with that plug I will wrap up. Guys thank you so much. That was very interesting. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Thanks. Bye.

Today's episode of Inside Politics was produced by Kai Wong and Tammy Mills. Our head of audio is Tom McKendrick. Inside politics is a production of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. If you enjoy the show and want more of our journalism, subscribe to our newspapers today. It's the best way to support what we do. Search the age or Smh.com.au forward slash. Subscribe. I'm Jacqueline Maley, this is Inside politics. Thank you for listening.