Inside International Education
One Nation’s student crackdown targets a chain, not a course
The course-hopping story is real. The fix on offer is blunt, and the 2024 reforms already moved the goalposts.
One Nation released its student visa policy on Tuesday. Five measures. The problem it describes is real. Where the fixes land is the more interesting question, because three of the five miss where the abuse actually sits.
What was announced
On 9 June, the party set out five changes for student visa holders. Students would have to return home before lodging a further study visa. Drop-outs would lose access to bridging visas. Drop-outs would lose the right to appeal to the Administrative Review Tribunal. Total migration would be capped at 130,000 a year, with foreign students counted inside that cap. Student visas would be restricted to the applicant alone, with no dependents.
The framing is course-hopping. The account runs like this: a student enrols, drops out, applies to another course, sits on a bridging visa for months, appeals any refusal, then claims protection, with each step buying more time. Hanson’s own figures put bridging visas at around 200 days, appeals at roughly 64 weeks, and protection claims at close to three years.
The 2024 reforms already shut the front door
Here is the part the announcement leaves out. The most-abused entry pathways were closed two years ago. From 1 July 2024, visitor visa holders and temporary graduate visa holders can no longer apply for a student visa onshore. The visitor-to-student pathway alone ran to more than 36,000 applications in a single year before it was shut. That door is closed.
What stayed open is student-to-student. A student can still drop a course and lodge a fresh student visa application onshore, moving onto a bridging visa while it is processed. That is the churn One Nation is describing. It is narrower than the announcement implies, and it is a known, identifiable mechanism.
The fixes miss the part doing the work
The abuse on offer is not really about the course. It is about the chain that runs after a refusal: bridging visa, then merits review, then protection. Each link is a separate part of the system with its own settings. Targeting enrolment does not touch the part doing the work.
There is a front end to this too, and it is the part nobody wants to touch. The initial course selection and the quality of the student’s information is the most important step in the whole process, and it gets the least attention. It is also where the regulation gap sits. Inexperienced, unregistered agents work the source markets, making money off people who trust them and lodging applications they are not qualified to lodge. If integrity is the goal, the obvious lever is the one no one pulls. Only agents registered in Australia should be allowed to lodge a visa on someone’s behalf.
Two of the five proposals are blunt in a way that matters. Requiring every student to leave the country before applying for further study treats a genuine change of course the same as a deliberate stall. Monash’s Andrew Norton made the point this week: the category is a mix of people gaming the system and people making real educational choices, and a blanket offshore rule hits both, with a flow-on cost to the sectors that staff themselves with student labour.
The appeal ban is the proposal worth watching most closely. Merits review is not a loophole. It is the mechanism that catches departmental error. Removing it for a single visa cohort is a structural change to how decisions are checked, not a tweak to student integrity.
The 130,000 figure is a permanent-migration number. Students are temporary entrants, counted in net overseas migration, not the permanent program. Folding all foreign students into a permanent cap mixes two different ledgers. It makes a clean headline and a messy policy. The dependents measure is largely symbolic by comparison, since student visa dependent numbers are already small.
What I would do instead
I have run agencies and a provider for two decades. Here is how I would fix the chain, link by link, without the blunt instruments.
Onshore reapplication should stay. A student changing course onshore is not abuse. Forcing everyone home to reapply punishes the genuine to inconvenience the few. If government insists on an offshore rule, pair it with a 50 per cent refund on a refused visa. Sending someone home to lodge again and then making them wear the full charge on a refusal is a double penalty.
Onshore review of a refusal should stay as is. Merits review is the check on departmental error. Removing it does not lift integrity, it removes the check.
The link to close is the protection claim. A student who lodges for protection has, by definition, contradicted the offshore application that got them here. They declared an intention to study and to return. They declared access to funds. A protection claim says the opposite. If the system still allows it, the settings should match the original declaration: in-person lodgement only, no work rights, since they declared they had funds, and detention, since someone who genuinely needs protection does not need to keep working and moving around freely. That is not cruelty. It is consistency with what they told us to get the visa.
Bring back automatic cancellation through PRISMS. The mechanism existed and it worked. A student who breaches enrolment is reported, given an automatic letter with 28 days to act, and the visa is cancelled if they do nothing. It ran without drama in the early 2000s. It puts the obligation back on the student and takes the slack out of the bridging visa wait.
And stop counting students in net overseas migration. They are temporary by design. Folding them into the NOM headline turns a housing and population argument into a student argument. That is how you end up with five blunt proposals chasing a problem that sits three links further down.
What it means for the sector
For providers and agents, the specific proposals matter less than the signal. Student integrity is now a standing political product, not a one-off reform. The measures that bite will keep landing on the post-refusal chain, not on enrolment. The 2024 onshore restrictions were the first round. Bridging visa settings and merits review are the next pressure points, whoever forms government.
Plan for that. The course is not where the scrutiny is going.
Read our past post on GS student requirements
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