Australia can avoid being left in the backwash of the world's international education industry if it generates fresh waves of innovation.

That's according to Professor Tony Adams*, an international education consultant and former senior academic, who delivered the Inaugural Dr Martand Joshi Memorial Lecture ... at CQUniversity Melbourne this week (April 14) to honour a champion of cultural relations between Australia and India.

Professor Tony Adams (left) honours Dr Martand Joshi (right) in a memorial addressAs well as praising Dr Joshi**, Professor Adams looked to the future and noted that international student hubs are being created in Asia and the Middle East.

LINK HERE for the Inaugural Dr Martand Joshi Memorial Lecture

LINK to Students and staff awarded in memory of Dr Joshi

"Often government funded, they are about attracting the world's top universities to their region to create an export industry that in the main will be regionally focussed. Students are able to go overseas to study but still remain in a similar culture," he said.

"With more than 20% of our university students being international there is decreasing capacity in our system. In the wake of voluntary student unionism many of the services that international students value need to be rebuilt and VC's need to understand that there is a relationship between investment, quality of services and success.

"The fallout from India will continue to roll on and be used against us in many other markets by our detractors and there will need to be a new alignment between recruitment and skilled migration. We are as dependent on skilled migration for our future as we were a year ago.

"We were the innovators, of the 90's, and the first decade of this century. If others are learning from our experience it is likely that many on the way through will bring their own innovations. We may be left in the backwash.

"I suspect that the increasing baggage that the international education industry carries through ESOS, AUQA and the like, encourages a homogenised vanilla approach that is the enemy of innovation. I personally hope not.

"If we don't have dreams and we don't have innovation it won't be fun anymore, and we will be in the backwater.

"It can be said we are going through a bad patch. We have survived bad patches before. International education has proved to be very resilient over the past three decades. We should celebrate where we have got to, be confident about our future, ensure that our academic, service and compliance settings are appropriate and in place, and most of all, celebrate innovation."

Professor Adams said he was once asked ‘off the cuff' to say what international education was about.

"My immediate response was that we ‘sell dreams'. That is the closest that I can come to as a description of what my colleagues and I have done for over a quarter of a century.

"Those dreams are from ‘real people' and we must not forget that. We must continue to strive to ensure they are realizable dreams and not our ‘flights of fancy' being inflicted on them or uncaring governments reversing policy on the run."

Professor Adams said Australia was the first country to create such a systematic framework for international student protection and for the administration of student visas. We have been one of the first to explicitly use international education as a tool in national manpower policy.

"These national achievements have been far from perfect and at times have been disastrous, but overall we have been far better off with them than we would have been without them," he said.

The experienced academic noted that, as a director or PVC of international programs or as a head of international student support, "you get to spend a lot of time solving problems or dealing with some times tragic situations".

"When you are dealing with the parents who sent their only child to Australia, only to see that child die, you are in a space that no one should have to inhabit and you struggle to comprehend the grief that the parents feel ... It's not until you step back and reflect on the excited parents and loved ones at a graduation or run across an international graduate in an airport lounge in a far off place that you begin to get the perspective right.

"Such has been the excitement at many offshore graduations that I have been to, that we have had to create barriers to prevent over exuberant parents and loved ones rushing the stage in their enthusiasm and delight.

"We spend too much time reading the writings of the naysayers and the downright dangerous on the fringes of our industry, and the sloppy work of journalists who pick up indiscriminately on their latest press releases. We don't spend enough time celebrating the achievements of the dedicated and skilled staff who make up our endeavour or the international students who have or will make their marks in the professions in Australia and globally.

"We don't spend enough time celebrating that the world is beating a way to our door to find out how we did it and how they can make it work for them."

Professor Adams said changing a brand to be seen as the world's leading universities, or the clever country is fraught.

"Our brand will always contain elements of these things, but substantially our brand is who we are. To be selling what we are not is very dangerous as a marketing strategy.

"That is not to say we don't get or should not do our utmost to attract the crème of the top students, it simply says that top students are not in the main what we are about."

Professor Adams said our two largest states have ignored for a quarter of a century the presence and importance of international students.

"The negligence of the Victorian and NSW governments over this period is palpable. The refusal over this time to grant transport concessions is symptomatic of a larger malaise and a lack of concern for and respect of the endeavour," he said.

"For as long as I can recall, the ESOS act has had real teeth. Yet the state and federal authorities over more than a decade have failed to close down or reform the errant providers.

"The changes to skilled migration which saw annual growths in vocational education visas by over 70% pa was the catalyst that brought it all together. When I said a couple of years ago in a newspaper column that this was unsustainable I was well and truly howled down and derided as not supporting vocational education.

"Nevertheless the signs were there. An overheated rental market, new institutions and businesses created to fill the void and to perhaps exploit the students, overstretched institutional resources, a global economic crisis making casual work harder to get and sudden changes to the ethnic compositions of parts of Melbourne and Sydney in particular, were all amongst some very explosive ingredients.

"I don't know and perhaps never will the actual extent of the issue of Indian students being physically preyed upon....I do know that if similar things happened to Australians oversees then I am sure that the Australian press would have been every bit as vitriolic and sensational as the Indian press seemed to be.

"The good news is that the relationship will recover and will be stronger and Indian students will still seek out Australian institutions in large numbers...

"It is easy to stereotype the latest groups to come to Australia. Although not refugees, like many groups before them, students and graduates particularly those that are young, without adequate private means and forced to work to support themselves remain very vulnerable.

"We see them as taxi drivers and petrol station cash register jockeys and we fail to learn from our experience as a country of migrants. As a metaphor for the inclusion that occurs, the taxi drivers come to own the taxis and the petrol jockeys to own the petrol stations. It takes time, but it happens as it always has."

* Professor Tony Adams is from Tony Adams and Associates, International Education Consultants, and is a former Pro Vice-Chancellor of Macquarie University.

** The event recognised Dr Joshi's contribution to numerous cultural, religious, professional and community organisations in his role as Honorary Consul of India in Victoria and as International Cultural Adviser for CQUniversity's Melbourne and Sydney international campuses, before his death in May 2009.