Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

I, and also at the request of Senator Shoebridge, move:

That the Migration Amendment (Temporary Graduate Visa Application Charge) Regulations 2026, made under the Migration Act 1958, be disallowed [F2026L00163].

The Migration Amendment (Temporary Graduate Visa Application Charge) Regulations 2026 have doubled visa application fees from $2,300 to $4,600, the third increase in a year. This must be rejected. The motion is to disallow this disgraceful regulation. Not a week goes by without attacks on international students and migrants, whether it is the racist, billionaire funded One Nation or it's the Liberals trying to compete with the far right or, indeed, it's the Labor Party and their ongoing dog whistling on international students and migrants. Without this visa, international students cannot put their degree and skills to work for the community here in Australia. This massive fee hike sends a clear message that international students are not welcome here. There are too many international students who have told me that.

No wonder Australia's already tarnished reputation as a destination for higher education is eroding even further. And, really, for what? So you can beat your chests about cracking down on international students and migrants? This afternoon, Senator Wong stood there and wanted the Greens to work with them. Well, I can tell you this: the Greens will never work with the Labor Party or the Liberals or One Nation when you punch down on migrants and international students. That is never going to happen.

Graduates already face enormous degree fees and are suffering under the cost-of-living crisis like everyone else in this country. They are skipping meals because they can't afford to eat, and the Albanese government think now is the opportune time to twist the knife and bleed them some more, because that's what they are doing. It is no coincidence that just as student visa rejections reached a 21-year high in February this year, the Albanese government decided to immediately double these visa fees. They want to exploit international students even more while also punching down on them at the same time.

Ariya Masud, National Union of Students international officer, has rightly said that this sends a clear message to international students about their standing in Australian society. They are regarded as ATMs to funnel a multibillion-dollar industry instead of human beings being forced into abandoning the lives and careers that they have built here. They have built lives and careers here over years and years, but Labor did not even bother with the pretence of any consultation with students or international students.

Before this latest doubling of visa fees, it was already the most expensive post-study work visa in the world. We were already there. Australia's temporary graduate visa application fee is now 10 times more expensive than Canada's, three times more expensive than New Zealand's and more than twice as expensive as the UK. If your visa gets rejected, what happens then? Too bad—there is going to be no refund. This is an incredibly unfair process that abuses the precarious position that these international students are in. What this visa fee's doubling does is force students to cough up thousands upon thousands more dollars that they were not really expecting; otherwise, they must abandon their lives, their careers that they have built here. Labor is making life harder and harder for them and their families, and is treating international students with such disrespect and callousness. Because that's what it is—disrespect and callousness. It is appalling, shameful and disgraceful.

The government does this knowing full well that international students can't vote them out. They think there are no consequences for their dog whistling. But can I tell you there are consequences. The more you indulge the fantasies of the far-right extremists in this place, the more you make it a reality, then the more you harm international students, migrants and people of colour living in this country. Labor and the coalition are bleeding votes to One Nation because for years you yourselves have blamed and demonised migrants for everything under the sun, and you have treated international students as cash cows. So no wonder you are back with another One-Nation-flavoured attack on migrants. You created this environment and now you will be buried by it.

The way out of the cost-of-living crisis, the housing crisis, isn't by attacking international students. If you want to do something, stand up to the coal and gas corporations destroying our planet, stand up to the billionaires dodging taxes, stand up to the price-gouging supermarkets and stand up to the profiteering banks.

We know that Labor, the Liberals and One Nation will flock to that side of the chamber to vote down this disallowance because they are on a unity ticket on scapegoating and fleecing international students, who can't fight back.

David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) | Link to this | 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.

Kerrynne Liddle (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care) | Link to this | Hansard source

The coalition will oppose this disallowance motion. The motion represents yet another example of the Australian Greens trying to wind back reasonable migration controls and remove price signals from a system that must be sustainable, workable and in the national interest.

The regulation increases the visa application charge for the temporary graduate visa subclass 485 from 1 March 2026. For most primary applicants, the charge increases from $2,300 to $4,600, with corresponding increases for secondary applicants. Applicants from specified countries and Timor-Leste remain exempt from the increase and continue to pay the previous prices.

Australia's migration system must be properly managed. That means visa settings should reflect the cost of administering the system, the value of the rights conferred and the broader set of pressures that the current migration program is exerting on housing, infrastructure, services and the labour market. The temporary graduate visa is not a student visa. It is a post-study work visa that provides unrestricted work rights and allows graduates to remain in Australia temporarily after completing their studies. Visa holders have unlimited work rights and may work in any field or occupation once they are granted the visa.

In essence, the Greens therefore want to remove a measure that helps to ensure that the program is priced and controlled more appropriately and effectively than it has been in the past. The changes being made through this regulation do not represent a ban. They do not establish a cap and they do not, in any way, abolish the existence of the temporary graduate visa. They introduce an increased visa application charge for a temporary visa that confers significant work rights in Australia. The regulation preserves lower charges for Pacific and Timor-Leste applicants, recognising those strategic and regional relationships that have existed for centuries.

The explanatory statement says the uplift does not apply to applicants whose primary applicant holds a valid passport from specified Pacific countries or Timor-Leste. In particular, this disallowance motion should be rejected because it would weaken the government's ability to manage temporary migration settings at basically the worst possible time to do so. Against the backdrop of an annual net overseas migration figure of more than 300,000 for 14 straight quarters, the Greens are, again, arguing for fewer controls in the migration system, lower charges and disregard for the pressures people are already living with in Australia.

A temporary graduate visa is a valuable visa. It provides an opportunity to live, study and work in Australia after completing an Australian qualification. It is reasonable that applicants make a fairer contribution to the cost and value of that visa. International students make an important contribution to Australia, but the temporary graduate visa is a separate post-study work visa. It provides substantial benefits, including unrestricted work rights. A higher charge does not remove access to the visa. It ensures the settings better reflect the value and cost of the program.

A credible international education sector depends on integrity and public confidence. Weakening migration settings does not help the sector in the long term. Sustainable settings are essential to maintaining community support for international education. This is not a punishment. It is a charge attached to a temporary visa that allows people to remain in Australia and work after study. The visa remains available, and exemptions remain in place for eligible Pacific and Timor-Leste applicants. More broadly, it is the Albanese government that has created a migration crisis, and there are many more things that we could all argue about, but this motion specifically is about placing a more appropriate charge on a valuable temporary visa.

In short, the coalition will not support the Greens' attempt to weaken Australia's migration settings. Temporary graduate visas provide significant work rights and must be priced reasonably and responsibly. At a time of pressure on housing, services and infrastructure, the Senate should reject this disallowance motion. The coalition believes migration must serve Australia's national interest. This means a system that is fair, orderly, sustainable and credible. The Greens' motion does not meet that test.

Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the disallowance motion in the names of Faruqi and Shoebridge be agreed to.