David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) | Hansard source

I too support this motion moved in my name and in my colleague's name. There's a reason we're doing this. We are seeing Labor join with One Nation to punch down on migrants, to punch down on foreign students. As Senator Faruqi made clear, they think they can punch down on foreign students with particular brutality because they don't vote; therefore, they don't see them as entitled to any protections or decency. They're a free political target in Labor's mind.

Well, I've got to remind Labor that they're connected to communities. They're people with experiences and potential connections to this country that can be of enormous value for them, in their future lives and their careers, and for us, in terms of being thousands of cultural ambassadors who come here and spend years in Australia, meeting with Australians, engaging with our university sector, opening their minds up in courses of study and getting a sense of a possible future that we can give foreign students through our education institutions. They're meeting Australians as friends and getting a sense of Australians' values—values, hopefully, of tolerance, diversity and democracy—and what it's like living in a country with a strong belief in the rule of law. But they're also making friendships across the board and then, after completing their study, returning home with such fond memories, we would hope, of Australia—with friendships and a sense of connection to Australia that is of so much more value to Australia than one or two diplomats in an embassy or a high commission somewhere.

These are tens and tens of thousands of people, free cultural ambassadors, who will, hopefully, leave Australia having contributed economically to our higher education system, sometimes having done jobs that many Australians don't want to do, and having built those friendships and, hopefully, those connections. They will then go back and look back fondly on their time in Australia, having built a new career and maybe connected Australia with their home country economically, culturally or through friendships. What an extraordinary asset that is for Australia. What an extraordinary strength it is for any nation to be able to have that global connection with tens and tens of thousands of people who have spent years living there, building those connections.

But, instead of seeing it in that light, Labor literally just cuts and pastes what One Nation says. They call foreign students some kind of threat—some kind of economic threat. That's how Labor sees it. They literally cut and paste the One Nation playbook and then punch down on foreign students. It's extraordinary, watching it. I remember a time when our country viewed students coming here to learn not as a problem but as an asset, as a cultural benefit—and, true, as an economic benefit too, to our higher education systems and to our economy. I recall—if you look back at some of the debates about what Australia's place in the region should be and what Australia's place in the world should be—proud investment in things like the Colombo Plan to literally bring students, young people, from around our region into Australia to connect with us culturally and then to go back to be those decision-makers, those future politicians or those engineers and actually build that connection with Australia, a real people-to-people connection with Australia. This was an incredibly successful project which continues to benefit Australia—but not under the Albanese Labor government. Under the Albanese Labor government, they want to gouge foreign students. They want to punch down on them in the debate. They want to pick up One Nation's debating points. That's what Albanese Labor is doing. You can see the impact already in the numbers. No doubt Labor will celebrate this because this is their playbook—their One Nation playbook.

Last year, the number of Vietnamese students coming into Australia plunged by 40 per cent, and this year the number of students from Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka dropped by 67 per cent, 78 per cent and 87 per cent, respectively. We are currently in the process of burning off those thousands of future cultural ambassadors. In doing so, we are limiting and cutting off those ties with our region. That's what this instrument does. It massively ramps up prices and massively ramps up fees to make it even harder now. Those numbers will go further back. It's even harder under Labor for people, young people, to come here to study.

At some level, Labor knows this is wrong. Some part of their lizard brain knows that it's wrong because they've carved out Pacific nations. They must know on some level that our education system means we get not only some of the best minds in the world coming here but also thousands of new connections and thousands of new cultural ambassadors. So why are we, under Labor, cutting ourselves off from our neighbours? For years Labor has been happy to openly talk about international students as just cash cows to prop up the higher education sector. Now, having spent years economically exploiting them and wanting to ramp up that exploitation with this instrument, Labor sees them as great scapegoats so that they can try and outflank One Nation and talk about cuts—cuts here and cuts there. They think they can just punch down like they do so often.

What we do see, though, is that Labor is using this as an opportunity to gouge people, often people from our region and often families who have gathered together the funds to come and study in Australia. It's been an incredible economic burden to meet the costs of coming to Australia, and this government, the Albanese government, wants to gouge those families even further. The Albanese government is forcing people coming to Australia to contribute yet more fees. Get this: under the Albanese Labor government, visa fees in this country are going to vastly exceed the amount of income coming in under the PRRT from the export gas industry. In this financial year, in 2025-26, Labor budget to get just $1.6 billion from the gas industry under the PRRT and they're budgeting to get almost $4.7 billion from visa application charges.

If you want to get a sense of where Labor's One Nation priorities are going forward—they're on a unity ticket here with One Nation in giving gifts to the gas industry while punching down on foreign students—look at the projections in Labor's budget. Labor are projecting, under their budget, that the amount of tax revenue they're going to get from the export gas industry under the petroleum resources rent tax is going to collapse to just $1.2 billion by 2029-30, but they expect to be gouging visa fees at a rate of $7 billion. That's almost six times more revenue coming in from gouging foreign students and people seeking to come here on visas, almost six times more from families often struggling to meet those fees, than they're going to take from the export gas industry under the PRRT.

It's the One Nation-Labor unity ticket. Give a big gift to Gina Rinehart, give a big gift to the export gas industry and join with One Nation to punch down on foreign students. It's Labor and One Nation sharing those politics. Labor have been in this race to the bottom. Up to this parliament, it was a race to the bottom with the coalition. But now they've joined in a race to the bottom with One Nation. It's a race where everybody loses. When this happens, when foreign students are marginalised by this government, we see an environment in which they can be exploited by bad employers and by bad agents. What does Labor do? Does it go after the bad employers? Does it go after the bad agents? No. Labor punches down and goes after the students, time and time again.

Even just today, in question time, we saw, again, Labor completely accept One Nation's framing of immigration and completely accept the appalling assumptions in Senator Hanson's questions about mass migration. Labor's response was not to meet the ugly politics of that but to accept it and meekly say, 'We're cutting numbers.' It was shameful behaviour from Labor.

Labor has no capacity to defeat the divisive politics of One Nation because they've set the stage for it. They've spent the past four-and-a-bit years scapegoating migrants, introducing some of the cruellest migration laws and setting up corrupt deals with Nauru to actively force people—people often found to be refugees—off to a cruel detention regime in Nauru. That's what Labor's been doing, and they've got form. It's not just in this parliament. If you want to see the nastiest migration laws, the nastiest responses, they've always got a big Labor stamp on them. Mandatory detention, offshore detention and deporting kids—that's always been Labor. Labor has made it clear that they want to treat migrants differently from everyone else—as lesser than everyone else. How on earth can they be surprised when that politics empowers One Nation?

The Greens see migrants as people—our friends and our neighbours. We see them as whole people who deserve to have families, connections and a positive future. We see foreign students through a positive lens, as potential future cultural ambassadors, economic connections, family connections and person-to-person connections around this region. But Labor sees foreign students as a political opportunity to punch down and to join One Nation on. That's why we reject this legislation. That's why we reject this, and we look forward to, hopefully, somebody from Labor—maybe even somebody from the coalition—having the guts to break with One Nation's nasty, racist rhetoric and join with us in this.