The story about violence and racism against Indian students in Melbourne will not die. The lead story in the Indian magazine Outlook accusing Australians of racism has been receiving lots of coverage here, including a live interview with Outlook editor Venod Mehta on ABC Lateline on Monday night. As much as one has a slight distaste in one’s mouth, old left-baiting Gerard Henderson in Tuesday’s SMH may be broadly correct that it is arguable whether racism is the principal factor behind the attacks on foreign students.

In any case these discussions appear to be a distraction from the real issue, which is, at bottom, the great Australian complacency allied with political opportunism to offset the conservative right’s peculiar reluctance to invest in education (and I’m looking at you, Gerard). For the Howard Government it was a win-win policy to encourage large numbers of fee-paying foreign students to Australian institutions. Not only was it a cheap “export” industry requiring very little effort, not to mention money, from the government, they could simultaneously reduce federal funds to universities in direct proportion to their income from this new source. The universities were coerced and essentially blackmailed into maximising their revenues from foreign students.

This predictably led to disputes over falling academic standards even in the top tier of institutes and dubious credentials in the bottom tier of private technical colleges, including in some cases outright fraudulent promises of easy Australian work permits. It also led to escalating fees to the point today where it is a fine point as to whether Australia presents a good deal when compared with the other English language countries, especially the US, Canada (read Greg Barnes) and the UK.

But in the short-termist view of our political class, the benefit to our perpetual trade deficit has been reported to be up to $12.5 billion annually with about half of that attributable to educational fees, closely paralleling the decline in direct federal funding. There is no accident that in the Howard epoch Australian universities dropped down the international ratings but, of course, expert spin could be applied to claim ever-increasing student numbers and increasing university budgets.

If Australian governments want to consider foreign students as a business then, like any business, it needs to make investments for future sustainability instead of its apparent expectation of a perpetual free-lunch or magic pudding. If the income figures are correct, then Australia may have benefited by about $100 billion over the past decade, yet the Australian authorities are so miserabilist they will not even allow student concessions on public transport, as discussed by Greg Foyster in Crikey.

By better planning and sustained funding of our universities, treating the extra student fee income as additional rather than as a substitute, the educational sector, especially the critical tertiary component, could have grown substantially and partially caught up with our international peers. Anyone with experience in the leading English language countries is rendered gob-smacked by the huge resources evident in their tertiary institutions — and not just Harvard, Stanford, Oxford or Cambridge — compared to ours. Looking at the funding differentials, it is astounding that Australian universities manage as well as they do. Even in the once vibrant student union supported sports, performing arts and politics a regressively minded Howard government has managed to cripple that, too.

In the Asia-Pacific educational market that Australia must appeal to, there were indeed huge opportunities. In addition to fee income — and the early strategy that it should be perceived as much better value than the expensive American alternative — it should also have been a great cultural opportunity for all concerned, repaying in trade, business, tourism, the arts and diplomacy for decades into the future. But what goes around comes around and now we have the deputy Prime Minister eating crow, probably to no avail, in the largest English-speaking country in the world. No doubt the Chinese are taking note and all the other developed Asian countries, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and the world’s largest Islamic country and our closest neighbour, Indonesia. The likely growth hemisphere and future of the world for this century.

In addition to the obvious — much better regulation of the academic standards, accreditation and general student support services — some creative thinking could have been applied to the accommodation issue that exists almost everywhere in the developed world but has grown in difficulty due to the great Australian self-inflicted housing affordability crisis.

An interesting case is Paris, which had long-standing ambitions to be a leader in educational “exports” to the world — “mission to civilise” and all that. Early in the 20th century when the problems of availability and affordability of appropriate accommodation were becoming serious, the state, helped by a rich benefactor, used part of the redundant old-walled defences at the southern limit of the city to create the Cité Universitaire. Conceived as a residential campus to provide affordable digs specifically for foreign students and provincial French enrolled in the plethora of universities spread around the city, it was modelled on the garden city and also partly the Oxford/Cambridge college system.

The idea was that each country would design and build a residential hall for its students although in the end the French had to heavily subsidise the scheme. Ideally the buildings would be in the style of their country and use some of their best star architects. Most of the campus was built in the years 1923-1939, with another burst after the war. As a consequence the campus is a rather curious modernista museum — the brutalist aesthetic* is not everyone’s favourite style but it includes several seminal masterpieces, including two by Le Corbusier — but typical of what makes this true world city an architectural wonderland.

It was also conceived with ideals of the mixing of nations and fostering of international relations. Residency was mandatory for first-year students and was intended to provide — in addition to a lower cost entrée into an expensive city — orientation, collegiality and peer-group support for this often very disorienting and stressful period for young foreigners. Such a facility in Melbourne would go some way to, as Greg Barnes said last September in Crikey: “Attracting students to Australia’s universities requires convincing them, and their parents, that they will be secure and not face the prospect of being racially abused …”

Just imagine how fabulous such a campus in Australia could be, consisting of a dozen or more of the rich Asian styles potentially reflecting 5000 years of history and associated cultures. A campus that would promote integration, provide social supports and reasonable accommodation — at least for the first difficult year — compared to the over-crowded near-squalor that some students now live in. But that would require that our politicians thought their policies through a few decades into the future and showed a bit of imagination.

Michael R. James is an Australian research scientist, writer, and alumnus of Cité Universitaire, Paris.

* Speaking of brutalist aesthetic, Australia does have an example of a modernista palace in Paris, not a student’s palace at the Cité U. but just next to the Eiffel Tower. It is our embassy designed by Harry Seidler, Marcel Breuer and Pier Luigi Nervi, commissioned by Gough Whitlam (who later became the occupant of the opulent penthouse when he was UNESCO ambassador) and our most expensive embassy in the world. It is easy to adopt the “outraged taxpayer” stance but if you visit there, and especially if you score an invite to cocktails to the penthouse, it kinda swells the beating Aussie heart.