By and large, governments of all persuasions, of all political persuasions in Australia ha

ve been reducing proportionately the amount of money that goes to education and many of us think that really is a great pity and shows a lack of foresight into what Australia really needs, but that nonetheless is what is happening. As a result of that many universities and schools are heavily dependent on overseas students to make up the shortfall. //I think we need to be really very careful in Australia that as this trend continues that overseas students who come to Australia not only to learn facts, but also to learn something about Australia and the Australian way of life otherwise they will have a very skewed view of what our Australia is about. Because I think it is important that if you go to an Australian university then at least you'd meet a reasonable number of Australians. //

There is a big push from many universities to recruit more and more students and more and more overseas students, but in a climate when there isn't a lot of money for further strengthening of education and educational methods and facilities. If we all keep trying to recruit more and more students, then the experience is going to deteriorate and my university for example has decided to cap the number of students at the university. Because we believe that if we have many more students then we won't be able to do it properly. //

There aren't many universities in the fortunate position of my own to be able to do that. And the reason why we can do it is if you take a couple of our more popular faculties to get to university, you need something which we call UAI (University of New South Wales Admission Index). To get into medicine at UNSW you need to have a pass mark of 99. 8%. To get into law and commerce you need a pass mark of 97.5%. Now a lot of you in this room tonight will know what I mean when I say that Chinese and Vietnamese especially value education and therefore it wouldn't be surprising to know that proportionally more Chinese and Vietnamese kids get their 99.8's and 97. 5's. //

I took a university graduation on Friday before I came up here. It was a commerce graduation and of 200 graduates, 150 were Asian. Half of those were local kids, the other half were overseas. Commerce is something that is particularly popular, particularly in Hong Kong and Singapore, but it's probably a reasonable indication of what is happening. And all I am really trying to make a point about is that if we accept money from overseas students and from overseas families, then there is a responsibility that we give them the good education, the good experience. I'm not saying we don't do it, but I think what is important is that we recognize that the experience we are giving them is potentially threatened by the large numbers coming in which are not being matched by the provision of adequate resources to service them. I think it's great to take more and more students as long as we can service them properly. //

(Excerpts from the speech delivered by Dr. John Yu, Chairman of the Australia-China Council, on the Australia-China Oration Series 2002, November 6, Beijing)