High student visa refusal rates and extreme fee increases are blunt, haphazard tools for cutting net migration. Australia needs a long-term migration plan it can explain and defend.
Education Minister Jason Clare has announced that the National Planning Level (NPL) for new overseas student commencements for the higher education and VET sectors is to be retained at 295,000 for 2027. At the same time, he says “current tracking indicates international student commencements are on track to be below the NPL for both 2026 and 2027”. He says commencements are trending at 8 per cent below the NPL.
What is the point of an NPL the government has no intention of delivering? This has not been explained.
The Group of Eight (Go8) lobby group has issued a media release welcoming the government’s decision not to reduce the NPL. The release says nothing about the Government’s intention not to deliver the NPL. That is most likely because Go8 universities will meet their respective NPL allocations, particularly as these universities have an over-reliance on students from China. It is lower-tier universities and VET providers that will not meet their allocations.
When the 2026 NPL was announced in mid-2025, the government was still talking about ‘managed growth’ of a ‘sustainable’ international education industry. At the time, I asked the government what the 25,000 increase meant for the Treasury’s net migration forecasts. I was told net migration is just a statistical measure and not a consideration in setting the NPL. Astonishingly, this may well have been what the government thought at the time, as some academics were also peddling this line to them.
The announcement of the higher NPL for 2026 led to a strong increase in offshore student application rates because education providers understandably recruited to the higher allocations they had been given. That clearly had the government worried by September 2025 when net migration had stopped falling and was increasing again.
From October/November 2025, the government cranked up offshore refusal rates for student visa applicants, particularly from South Asian nations (but not for China) to unprecedented levels. While the government argued this was about achieving greater levels of visa ‘integrity’, there is no question that reducing net migration was also an objective.
By March 2026, Assistant Minister Julian Hill said “growth has stabilised, commencements are down about 15 per cent”. Within nine months, the government had gone from talking about ‘managed growth’ to proclaiming commencements had reduced by 15 per cent.
The cranking up of refusal rates eventually impacted offshore application levels, with these falling in May 2026 to levels not seen since 2015-16 (outside COVID). Offshore student applications for 2026 to date are now below pre-COVID records (see Chart 1).
Can high refusal rates based on very subjective criteria be sustained? Will these be enough to get net migration down sufficiently before the next election?
To try and put further downward pressure on application rates (and thus net migration), the Government initially increased the student visa application fee to $2,000. This was double the next highest student visa fee, which is around $A1,000 charged by the UK.
The government subsequently doubled the temporary graduate visa fee from $2,300 to $4,600 on 1 March 2026. Then as part of another major hike in most visa application fees on 1 July 2026, the government increased the student visa application fee to $2,500 and the temporary graduate application fee to $5,750.
The two main instruments the government is now using to reduce net migration are high student visa refusal rates and extreme increases in visa fees. Both are very poor policy instruments and reflect a degree of panic to reduce net migration against the background of a surge in the polling of One Nation.
The government has gone from Treasurer Chalmers saying in May 2023, when asked about the blow out in net migration, “that isn’t a government policy or a government target. It’s not a floor or ceiling, it’s not something the government determines”, to the Prime Minister saying on 8 June 2026 he is committed to delivering the Treasury’s latest net migration forecasts.
But two problems arise. First, the government has to date been using very poor and untargeted tools for managing net migration down and has applied them in a very haphazard way. Second, it still hasn’t done enough to get net migration down to the levels the Prime Minister has committed to by the time of the next election. It will need to do more.
A better approach would be to develop a long-term plan for net migration and to clearly explain that plan to the Australian public. None of the three major forces in Australian politics seem interested in doing that.
Abul Rizvi PhD was a senior official in the Department of Immigration from the early 1990s to 2007 when he left as Deputy Secretary. He was awarded the Public Service Medal and the Centenary Medal for services to development and implementation of immigration policy, including the reshaping of Australia’s intake to focus on skilled migration, slow Australia’s rate of population ageing and boost Australia’s international education and tourism industries.