International students make up about 5% of the total rental housing demand but their impact tends to be felt most in capital cities where the universities are.

Removing them won't improve things as much as you might think.

The housing crisis is a supply and demand problem so they've got to increase housing supply.

The problem there is these is a shortage of construction workers. So the workforce simply isn't there to build more houses. Current construction workforce is 110% maxxed out.

I reckon they should be handing out visas to qualified construction workers left and right to solve that problem, then get the homes built. Dubai and Singapore do this and have no such shortage of construction workers. I can't see why we can't do the same.

Removing international students will also have big flow on negative effects for the rest of the economy.

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defrost an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> Removing international students will also have big flow on negative effects for the rest of the economy.

Damn right, it's big business for Australia; International education earned Australia $55 billion in 2025 from some ~ 844,000 students that year.

( ~ 850K students has been peak international student population per annum in Australia, its never exceeded a million )

These are temporary education visa's that may in a few cases lead to insecure work visa's in Australia and while some international students may get citizenship after 10 years of expensive and insecure stay in Australia .. the total number of permanent migrants accepted each year is (currently) capped at a modest 185,000 per annum (across the board, not just limited to former international students).

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pan69 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Removing international students will also have big flow on negative effects for the rest of the economy.

It will. Because guess what, these students are working jobs (mostly in hospitality) no one else wants to work. Businesses no longer able to find staff.

I agree. The solution isn't cutting overseas students. The solution is to build more houses. To build more houses get more construction workers (who can coincidentally also build houses for themselves).

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commandersaki 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

Nobody wants those jobs because they're illegally paying below award wage and the work conditions are substandard. Domiciled Australians (rightfully) expect fair wage and decent working conditions.

	▲	seanmcdirmid 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Just do what Singapore does and import migrant construction crews from China or India (or other south Asian countries). You get the standard 33 story concrete blocks that they can build cheaply, and your housing problems are solved. You can even turn them into pseudo public housing (again like Singapore does). I think in most of the west construction jobs are so incredibly protected and regulated, they just can’t seem to build anything anymore.