CANBERRA: While Australia's economy is on track to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic, the country's education sector remains a notable exception with insiders struggling to find a solution for the international student drought.

A plan proposed by Treasurer of New South Wales (NSW) state this week, Dominic Perrottet to bring overseas students back put the stranded sector under the spotlight again, Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday. He proposed to quarantine arriving international students in the island state of Tasmania, in a bid to get around strict limits on the number of overseas arrivals each Australian jurisdiction can process.

After the plan was rejected, the Treasurer asked for changes to the international arrival rules and to use some of the caps to bring the international students back. International education was worth AUSD 40.3 billion in 2019, making it the country's fourth-biggest export.

Last year, the border closure blocking international students from entering Australia cost the sector a loss in export revenue of nearly AUSD 9 billion, according to new figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

Universities Australia said the varsities shed at least 17,300 jobs in 2020 and lost an estimated AUSD 1.8 billion in revenue compared to 2019.

The announcement by the federal government earlier this month to extend the border closure for at least another three months to mid-June, as well as the current arrival caps, further extended the predicament.

With international students still shut outside, the international education sector is estimated to lose a further 5.5 percent or AUSD 2 billion in 2021, according to Universities Australia.

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