Australia’s immigration system destabilised by little‑known legislative tool

During the COVID pandemic, the government also removed any restrictions on student work hours (previously capped at 40 hours). Businesses became increasingly reliant on cheaper labour even as the pandemic receded. Students can now legally work 48 hours a fortnight, and illegally a lot longer, making Australia more attractive to those who also want to be able to send money home to their families while studying.

In 2013-14, the number of student visas granted was 292,000. Last financial year, that number exceeded 371,000.

“Over the last two decades, the Australian government has cut its contribution to universities to a point where they only cover around a third of the cost of educating a student,” says Parkinson.

“So essentially, how we cover that is through student fees, domestic and international. Fees from international students also help replace the shortfall in government funding for research. So if you suddenly remove the international students, you are basically going to threaten the financial viability of the university sector, with consequences for student access and support, staffing and Australian research.”

The challenge for Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke is keeping universities alive without taxpayers footing the bill.

That’s left him targeting partners and parents, who will be restricted from being able to join students on visas, as well as students who hop from one course to another. Ruddock has urged him to go further, arguing international students should have to leave Australia after completing their degrees, then reapply for visas to re-enter the country. Burke will also take out a chunk of the 300,000 backpackers in the country by introducing a ballot system.

Until Pauline Hanson’s One Nation put them back at the top of the news cycle this year, many of the other recommendations in Parkinson’s review met the fate of countless other inquiries: filed away in the cupboard, gathering dust.

Burke disputes this, arguing he has been working on solutions since he was appointed Home Affairs Minister in 2024, but accepts that politics is the prism through which the media and the public may view the immigration policy overhaul.

Hanson has proposed cutting international student places by 40 per cent, a figure that Universities Australia has warned will see campuses shut down and research decimated.

Now even Burke’s modest changes may have more far-reaching consequences than initially anticipated, as tighter regulations combine with anti-immigration sentiment to drive more people out of the country and stop more people from coming in.

The government had planned to bring net overseas migration down from 300,000 to 225,000 a year.

“Net overseas migration is now poised to significantly undershoot,” Timothy Hibbert from Oxford Economics said on Wednesday.

“It is forecast that NOM will fall to 160,000 in 2028-29, slowing the national population growth rate to 0.95 per cent – the lowest figure since 1993.”

Australia has a long history of migration boom and bust.

“Migration: Crisis Point” screamed the headline in this masthead on September 10, 1967.

The crisis former editor Max Suich raised in these pages was not about too many migrants; it was about too few.

“The large and rapidly growing number of immigrants who are leaving Australia should not be tolerated,” Suich wrote. “This leak can be plugged.”

By the end of the next decade, the leak had not just been plugged; the ship had been refloated. The White Australia policy had been abandoned.

The country welcomed Tran Hue Hue, who, after fleeing Vietnam, survived five months marooned on a coral reef by eating seagulls. In Melbourne, a decade later, they celebrated Eritrean refugee Kongit Abdulmalik Mohammed joining Melbourne University’s medical faculty as one of the state’s top-scoring high school students.

And in Sydney, Chui’s father Andy Chui and uncle Terrence Tang emigrated from Hong Kong to open Tang Dynasty: the Hurstville institution that would go on to serve generations of Australians. His mother, Annie Tang, became the deputy mayor of Kogarah, and Australia would go on to have the longest unbroken period of economic growth in the developed world.

Chui has opened half a dozen venues under his Urban Agency banner, including the Hong Kong-style Kowloon Cafe and the modern Australian-adjacent Touch Wood at the Sydney Fish Market.

“My Western friends think I’m too Asian. My Asian friends think I’m too Westernised,” laughs Chui.

Urban Agency merged with Castle Group, a developer started by Sri Lankan migrant Ritchie Perera that is building hundreds of new homes across Austral and Rouse Hill in the outer suburbs of Sydney.

Chui says many migrants feel like they have to prove themselves. “I think one of the strongest things that we have inside us is building the community and building the people around us,” he says.

When his father founded Tang Dynasty, it was one of the few yum cha restaurants in Hurstville. Now the suburb is filled with food from Xinjiang to Beirut.

“I think we’re the only country that I’ve been to where you can enjoy culture and food with such diversity,” says Chui.

“You can’t go to Hong Kong and have a nice kebab.”

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