The rank-and-file committees at Western Sydney University and Macquarie University, and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) are jointly hosting an online forum on Wednesday, September 11 at 7 p.m. to discuss how to fight the Australian Labor government’s cuts to international student enrolments and the thousands of job cuts they are triggering across the tertiary education sector. To register click the link:

https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_3-2u5sbnQ1-1FmQwiyP8rg

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government has lined up with the right-wing Liberal-National Coalition to slash the number of international student and other migrant arrivals, threatening thousands of jobs throughout the higher education sector.

Education Minister Jason Clare declared yesterday that he had capped foreign student enrolments at 270,000 for 2025—about 53,000 less than this year—with limits set for each individual institution.

Both Labor and the Coalition are engaged in reactionary nationalism, first of all to divert rising social discontent. They are trying to blame international students, like refugees and immigrants more broadly, for the worsening housing and cost-of-living crisis, and deteriorating living conditions affecting millions of working-class households.

This anti-foreigner policy is, at the same time, intended to whip up a war-related atmosphere. Not accidentally, Chinese students are being targeted in particular, amid a growing anti-China witch-hunt by the political and media establishment.

Enrolments will be cut to 145,000 for publicly-funded universities, but the biggest cuts are for those that have by far the greatest number of students from China. Under the guise of trying to shift students to regional universities, the so-called Go8 elite universities, which predominantly attract Chinese students, will have their enrolments slashed from this year by 22,000 or 27 percent.

This also forms part of Labor’s plans to halve overseas migration to 235,000 annually for the next three years. In what amounts to a bipartisan front, Coalition leader Peter Dutton has vowed to cut annual net migration to 160,000, which could reduce student inflows to less than 15,000.

This offensive is already eliminating jobs in universities, as well as private colleges, on top of Labor’s deepening of years of systemic underfunding of the universities by Labor and Coalition governments alike.

Among the universities announcing or foreshadowing job cuts, or imposing hiring freezes and non-renewal of employment contracts, are Federation, Tasmania, La Trobe, Wollongong and Sydney. That is just the tip of the iceberg. Many more casual jobs are being eliminated.

Universities Australia, the peak management group, told a Senate committee inquiry this month that 60,000 fewer student visas had been issued in 2023–24 compared to the previous year, costing over 14,000 university jobs—about 7 percent of the total workforce.

Private colleges told the inquiry that they had made up to 40 percent of their staff redundant.