00:01This is just a continuation of years of chipping away at Australia's great national
00:07asset which is international education that serves the country, serves the economy, helps
00:13fund our world-class universities and subsidises the education of nearly a million students.
00:19What the intention of this policy is pretty clear, they want fewer international students,
00:24they want to slash the numbers coming into the country.
00:26That will have real consequences, both economic and for our relationships across the world.
00:31For many decades, Commonwealth governments of both political colours have encouraged universities
00:37to find international students, so the Treasury gets a cut-price deal on a world-class university
00:45system in this country.
00:46So if you slash the number of international students, the simple next question is, who
00:52is going to pay for the gap?
00:54It creates huge gaps in the way we fund our buildings, our teaching and our important
01:00breakthrough research which can transform our economy and the way we live.
01:04If you take one revenue source away, then either the sector shrinks or you support that revenue
01:11source from government funding.
01:14Universities can take matters into their own hands in terms of where they might find revenue,
01:20but we're fairly narrowly defined institutions, and if you're a massive university in metropolitan
01:27Sydney, for example, there's not that many opportunities that you have to generate the scale of revenue
01:33that might be lost through very significant changes to the revenue flow from international students
01:39in the very short term.
01:40There's a lot of commercialisation and innovation, and there's a lot of other work in partnerships
01:45for research, et cetera, but if you look at those data, there still would be a very significant
01:51shrinking, and our research funding has been shrinking.
01:53So you're either going to shrink the Australian higher education sector and the quality of the
01:58experience for Australians, or you're going to have to supplant those funds from other government
02:03funding.
02:04There's not really a third way.
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