Australian educators fear that more crackdowns on international education may be looming, as migration continues to pose political headaches for the governing Labor Party.
Legislation introduced into parliament gives the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (Atec) the power to set quotas for overseas enrolments at each university and higher education college. Meanwhile, the latest monthly visa processing figures show that one in four would-be higher education students were denied visas after lodging their paperwork abroad, together with the non-refundable A$2,000 (£1,044) application fee.
The 75 per cent success rate in May appears to have been artificially inflated by a slowdown in the processing of visa applications from the countries most likely to elicit rejections – Nepal and Bangladesh, whose grant rates slumped to 34 per cent and 40 per cent respectively.
Nepalese applications constituted 12 per cent of the visa lodgement caseload but just 8 per cent of the visas processed, the figures show. Applications from Bangladesh comprised 8 per cent of lodgements but 6 per cent of the processing effort.
Tougher visa processing may have contributed to a decline in net overseas migration (Nom), which fell 12 per cent in 2025 to just under 301,000. Immigration expert Abul Rizvi said that while this was well below some alarmist estimates, it was considerably higher than the government’s long-term net migration target of 225,000.
