Population growth from international students has ruined Australian housing.

The government handed universities free reign to hand out as many visa as they liked, and they handed out millions.

And the unspoken deal is that you're not buying an education, you're buying residency in Australia because a large percentage of these students never go home again.

And the government has staunchly - ridiculously - stated for years that international students do not impact housing. Yeah right - they don't live anywhere.

It's just a vast population growth program under the guise of international education with immigrants required to pay their $50K to universities for the nod and a wink right to live here.

Australia, which already had a housing crisis, now has a housing nuclear inferno.

Absolutely out of control population growth. The governments do it because more people equals "growing economy" - the only thing they care about.

And they don't invest in the infrastructure to support the millions of people added to the population so the quality of life goes down for everyone, there's budget cuts in government services, the inequality gap widens.

Growth - through population growth, through "international students" - governments absolutely love it because it hides their bad economic management, and the rich people declare how wonderful massive population growth is because those rich people own at least 3 houses.

The entire game is rigged for rich people to get rich and everyone else to shove over and make room because there's a lot more people coming.

Tuition fees for international students were already very expensive in the UK compared to most of the EU. Surely this will only make things worse? Is the goal to reduce the number of int'l students?

I couldn't afford full time tuition in the early 2000s, in spite of working a half time job while at uni.

The article reports it in an odd way, making it sound like it singles out students from Nigeria, Kenya, India and Pakistan. The fee applies to any student who pays international tuition rates.