Dr. Peter Varela

20, 30 years, we have added things to the points test.

So we've added a range of these items, things like studying regional areas, things like professional years.

And as a result, we kind of have various things in the points test at the moment that aren't

particularly predictive of migrant outcomes.

Some of them are indeed negatively correlated with migrant outcomes.

And so there's sort of a low hanging fruit option here, which is just to kind of clean out the points test, get rid of the categories that have been added over time that aren't doing a lot to improve that process.

But I'm also sort of kind of optimistic that we might do a little bit better.

There is no way to kind of measure that.

So I'm an empirical researcher.

My job is to go into the visa system and see what's happening.

And the question you've just asked of how many people go through the student pathway as a sort of a

a ticket to residency is very difficult to directly measure.

I will start from the important statement that international education is a fantastic thing to be able to sell.

It is an export market that every country would love to have.

It is sort of a thing that has wonderful productivity tech spillovers within Australia.

It also has sort of really important international relations benefits.

So if you talk to DFAT, they will sort of see international education as a really important mechanism.

It's kind of soft power.

Soft power, exactly.

And so the international education, it is sort of very valuable on a lot of important dimensions.