New peak body for international students

COAG might be scrambling to put together a strategy for international students. In the meantime, they’ve put together their own representation.

Office bearers for a new international students’ peak body will be elected in Hobart this week, picking up the strings of the old National Liaison Committee for International Students (NLC) and ending a two-year gap in dedicated representation for Australia’s overseas students.

The body, possibly to be known as the International Students’ Council of Australia, will represent international students in all sectors apart from schools – giving overseas VET and English language students their own voice for the first time.

The new body is expected to lobby on issues of specific interest to international students, such as visa arrangements, consumer rights, safety, accommodation, transport and social inclusion.

The existing student peak bodies, the National Union of Students (NUS) and the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA), both represent overseas students. But CAPA president Tammi Jonas, who chaired the working group that drafted a constitution for the new organisation, said international students needed more.

She said that international students had specific needs that warranted an independent association.

Jonas said the old NLC had played an extremely important role for over two decades. She said the Education Services for Overseas Students (ESOS) Act – regarded as a global benchmark in consumer protection for overseas students – probably wouldn’t exist without the NLC’s lobbying.

“CAPA can provide a postgraduate international voice, but we don’t have scope to cover the plethora of specific issues that face internationals in the same way they can themselves,” Jonas said.

However, in 2008, the NLC was subsumed by a new group – also calling itself the NLC – in the post-voluntary student unionism (VSU) environment. In March last year the NUS disendorsed the new NLC over questions about its funding and bona fides. Most universities have also refused to deal with the new NLC (CR, 28.04.09)

Like NUS and CAPA, the newly established international peak body won’t have individual members – it will be an umbrella group of affiliated organisations.

They’re likely to include campus-based overseas students’ associations and ethnic student groups such as the Federation of Indian Students of Australia (FISA), which expects to affiliate with the new organisation.

Many campus-based undergraduate and postgraduate groups are also likely to affiliate, while both the NUS and CAPA also intend to continue representing international students. “CAPA would never step away from our responsibilities of representing international issues,” Jonas said.

But Jonas said she hoped to see new overseas students’ associations established, and that the existing associations – largely social bodies – would take on more of a policy role.

If that happens, she said, undergraduate and postgraduate groups won’t need to join the new organisation.

“They could be welcome at the annual forum, but not actually be voting members – that would probably be the ideal model.

“We’ve lost a lot of overseas student associations on campuses, just as we have lost postgraduate bodies and some student unions. In the VSU environment, who knows whether we’ll get any campus organisations back up?”

Federation of Indian Students of Australia president Gautam Gupta said the new organisation was based on a model FISA had been developing for the past two years. He said he welcomed it so long as it retained connections with NUS and CAPA – and so long as no individual ethnic groups took control.

Gupta said ethnic groups helped to bring communities together and highlight their specific issues. But he said they shouldn’t have executive power in peak organisations.

“Ethnic groups should have a very limited purpose. What happens to students from Cuba, for example, if organisations representing the Indians or Chinese take over – that’s really not fair.”

The NUS’s international student officer, Lily Yuen, said it was important for international students from all tertiary education sectors to have peak representation. She said students in smaller VET and English language colleges had been isolated even before the old NLC’s demise.

But Yuen stressed that the NUS would also retain its representation of international undergraduates. Later this year it plans to campaign on public transport concessions and caps on international students’ fees, she said.