I have worked in our tertiary education system over the past twenty years and have watched it be corrupted by this 'Education Industry' ethos. Keating saw overseas students as a quiet diplomacy, with the hope that, once being educated here, there would be a greater exchange in business between compatible entrepreneurial and mercantile classes, but it was the Howard government that turned our educational services into a money machine. Also, since the Liberals have always been for an immigration system that brings a constant flow of cheap labour into the country, the backdoor residency scheme was not just an unfortunate oversight,
I have seen academics in tears, forced to pass people who really did not qualify. I have even overheard a university security guard counseling an asian student on how to successfully appeal if he did fail. I know an academic who resigned rather than pass a whole class who simply failed, and saw his supervisor remarking the papers as he left. I have worked with an asian postgraduate in whom I found no evidence of the learning required by the qualification and it became self-evident that residency was their family goal.
I am saddened and angered by this eating of the golden goose, and further distressed that these poor people have become vulnerable targets, both for the unscrupulous vultures that gather round all such honey pots and the resentment of other groups bouncing around on the bottom of our society.
If we wish to restore out tertiary education system to a fragment of its former rigor and excellence, where learning took pride of place, we need to stem the tide of vocationalism that has swept aside the maxims of knowledge for the sake of itself, and learning as a moral good that once underpinned it.

I'll second the "education as industry" story. Standards dropped and income became everything under Howard. Academics were discouraged from being independent and a new breed of "management" took over. Like the local councils, the new "managers" come from the psychopath school of living. It is also true that industry lobbied government to allow cheap labour into the country to avoid paying market rates. This labour market distortion is typical of the Howard regime.
The Indian government and press were very silly to play into the racist hands by over-reacting to the Indian attacks. The article describes the true situation quite well: Huge numbers of naive students coming here under difficult conditions. If you do the maths, it is highly unlikely that any systematic "racism" is involved.

An excellent [although sad] account of a part of the immigration policies and criteria laid down by "both" parties Dr Merlyn. These immigration policies and criteria existed long before John Howard served. The skilled migration project has been in the pipeline and worked on and over for many years.

Indian families, in all fairness, are notorious for pushing their children into top notch careers and hold high expectations of them. The Government is not to be blamed for the pressures placed upon students, by their parents, to choose degrees out of their depth for studying.

Lohit Shandilya's article has the ring of truth. However, to the extent that the attacks are something more than opportunistic crime, I suspect that the real issue is immigration as an instrument of class warfare rather than racism, that there would be just as much hostility if the "students" came from Scotland rather than India.

These migrants in the guise of students have been moving in large numbers into areas where they are competing with already disadvantaged existing residents, both native-born and migrants themselves, for jobs, housing, public services, and amenities. Even the most enthusiastic population boosters admit that more people contribute to crowding in the cities, high housing costs, and additional pressure on the environment. The government's own Measuring Australia's Progress reports have shown progressive deterioration in every environmental indicator except urban air quality.

There is also no evidence, based on a large number of studies, that mass migration is of any significant economic benefit to average non-elite citizens in the host society and much evidence that it hurts the people at the bottom. From p. 318 of our own 2006 Productivity Commission report on immigration: "Although there is an income loss for the base-case [host] population . . . there might (also) be significant distributional effects . . . Individuals relying on wage income tend to lose and individuals relying more on capital income tend to gain from increases in skilled immigration."

Stats are right here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zKoluh0eh4

Conclusion: The number of incidents reported in the Indian media don't even come close to 1% of the expected number of assaults victimizing Indians in Australia if crime were, on-average, colour-blind.

In other words, the Indian media lies when it says that by the number of attacks itself, there is "obviously" a pattern of racist violence.

Also see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-glx_bh4xc for the hypocrisy of the Indian media in this affair.

And more on the deceptive Indian media coverage here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDIbS04rM24

Again today another Indian is arrested for murdering two other indians by stabbing, yes stabbing them to death. Stabbings were very rare years ago in Australia before we had these 3rd world migrants. Keep bringing in 3rd world migrants and Australia will basically become a 3rd world country.