For those wondering whether Peter Dutton would baulk at any extremity of Donald Trump’s rhetoric and tactics, the question was firmly resolved yesterday when the opposition leader launched another extraordinary attack on foreign students.
We already know — even if the parliamentary press gallery won’t acknowledge it — that Dutton is copying Trump’s tactics on migration by blocking Labor’s efforts to reduce migration so he can complain that Labor hasn’t reduced migration. But his remarks yesterday go much further in what is now essentially a campaign of demonisation of foreign students.
Dutton has already claimed foreign students are the new boat arrivals, a ridiculous claim given foreign students are here legally and generate tens of billions of dollars in exports while providing a key source of workers. But foreign students are also dangerous criminals, according to Dutton — another line direct from the Trump playbook.
Asked yesterday about deporting foreign students who remain beyond the end of their visas, Dutton used the question to return to one of his favourite migration tropes: the dangerous foreigner.
Look, if people are in breach of their visa conditions, they can expect to be deported. Look at what Tony Burke’s done or what he hasn’t done in relation to 501 cancellations. Do we think that there are less rapes being committed? Or less domestic violence? Or less sexual assault? Or less drug dealing? Or less drug trafficking?
When a journalist challenged him as to whether he was calling foreign students rapists and drug dealers, Dutton didn’t back away. “I’m saying if you look at the mess of the migration portfolio, there are many elements to it.”
The evidence is foreign students are far more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators. When the Coalition was in government, it demanded universities do more to protect foreign students against assaults. Moreover, they’re one of the worst groups for exploitation by employers.
But if Dutton wants to credibly sell the idea that foreign students are criminals, he has personal baggage on the issue: we now know that one of the hallmarks of Peter Dutton’s time as immigration and then home affairs minister was his loss of control of Australia’s borders and the exploitation of student visas by criminal gangs.
The Australian Border Force’s Operation Inglenook, commenced at the end of 2022, found that — in the words of Christine Nixon in her review of the Coalition’s migration system — “non-genuine providers are colluding with disreputable agents to facilitate student visas, and then funnelling students into criminal activities.”
If Dutton wants to claim foreign students are criminals, he can start with the student visa system he ran — or rather, neglected — when he was in charge.
Demonising migrants as violent criminals is a Dutton racist trope. In 2018, he notoriously claimed Melburnians were too scared to leave their homes because of “African gang” violence. In 2016 he criticised the Fraser government for allowing in Lebanese migrants, whom he said were often charged with terrorism offences.
Another of Dutton’s tropes aimed at refugees is they’re wealthy illegal immigrants. “There are a lot of people that haven’t come out of war-ravaged areas. They’re economic refugees — they got on a boat, paid a people smuggler a lot of money,” he said in 2017. “Somebody once said to me that the world’s biggest collection of Armani jeans and handbags [is] up on Nauru waiting for people to collect when they depart.“
Now he has his own foreign student version of that trope. When a journalist raised the problem that accommodation for foreign students is not easily swappable for family housing, Dutton replied, “If you’re a student at the University of Sydney, paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for a course, you probably haven’t come from the background that you and I came from … There are plenty of international students in pretty schmick accommodation. Let’s be frank about it.”
It seems foreign students are not merely criminals but many are also wealthy criminals. Wealthy criminals who Dutton wants to continue to flow into Australia, given he will block the government’s foreign student cap legislation. Challenged on why he wouldn’t let what he says is Labor’s unworkable bill through and bring in his own, allegedly better, legislation when the Coalition wins the election early next year, Dutton’s only response was “this problem can be solved with a change of government at the next election … This can be solved by voting in a competent government.”
Just how competent the Coalition, and Dutton in particular, were on foreign students, and on preventing abuses of the visa system generally, was demonstrated in the savage Nixon review. But there’s still a long way to go before the next election. And it seems the path to it will feature more lies, hypocrisy and smears on migration from Dutton.
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