Every month the same hysterical chorus belts out a louder, more breathless lie:

"Education is Australia's third-biggest export!" "$50 billion and climbing!" "Bigger than coal, bigger than iron ore, bigger than natural gas combined!"

Recently the Australian Bureau of Statistics quietly admitted what the rest of us have known for years: the entire $53.6 billion "education export" figure is a grotesque, pumped-up fantasy. Even the ABS now concedes that at least one-third of it – $15.6 billion – is money that international students earned right here in Australia, working at 7-Eleven, Deliveroo, or in cash-in-hand kitchens. That's not an export. That's just domestic consumption dressed up in a graduation gown.

But it gets worse. Much worse.

The Three Layers of the Great Education Export Illusion

1.Local wages masquerading as exports $15.6 billion (ABS own estimate) + untold billions more in cash-in-hand jobs the tax office never sees. When Raj earns $1,200 a week cleaning tables and spends it on rent and Maggi noodles, that is NOT foreign income flowing into Australia. It's Australian dollars circulating inside Australia. Calling it an "export" is like one selling their left shoe to their right foot and declaring it international trade.

2.Remittances that vanish into thin air World Bank says $15 billion left Australia in 2024 as migrant remittances – the overwhelming bulk from the same Indian and Nepali students who dominate the "export" boom. Jobs & Skills Australia: 90–96% of Indian/Nepali students explicitly chose Australia because they could work and send money home. Money Transfer Australia: $4.8 billion to India alone in 2024, and rising fast. The ABS admits none of this is deducted from the headline figure because "remittances between non-residents are out of scope." Translation: we pretend the money never leaves.

3.Offshore agent commissions the universities pay tens of thousands of dollars per student handed over to education agents in Delhi, Colombo, and Ho Chi Minh City. These are straight-up imports of services – but again, the ABS nets them off somewhere else in the current account so the sacred "$53.6 billion export" headline stays pure and untouched.

Add it up and the real net contribution of international education is probably closer to $20–25 billion, probably much less. Suddenly it's not the third-biggest export. It's not even in the top five. It's a middling industry that has been juiced, spun, and laundered into a national economic superhero by bureaucrats, vice-chancellors, and politicians who needed something – anything – to replace the manufacturing jobs they let disappear. And to foster the Great White Replacement and Asianisation.

The Monthly BS Escalation

Watch the pattern:

2019: "$40 billion industry!"

2023: "$48 billion and growing!"

2024: "Record $50 billion!"

2025: "$53.6 billion – our greatest export success story!"

Each new record is greeted with the same manic press releases from Universities Australia, the same triumphant tweets from state treasurers, the same smug op-eds about how clever we are for "exporting knowledge" while China exports actual things people need.

Meanwhile, the ABS itself now publishes a footnote that basically says: "Yeah, about a third of this is fake, and we don't subtract the money they send home, but international standards say we have to do it this way, so please keep quoting the big scary number."

It's the statistical equivalent of a restaurant boasting about "$100 average customer spend" while quietly admitting that $40 of it came from customers who washed dishes in the kitchen to pay their bill.

The Real Economy vs. the Fantasy Economy

While vice-chancellors build new marble atriums and property developers throw up another 80-storey "student only" tower in the CBD, the rest of the country gets:

Crushed rental markets (international students now 25–40% of private rentals in Sydney/Melbourne).

Collapsing TAFE and regional unis starved of funds.

Wages in hospitality and retail kept artificially low by an endless supply of visa-tied labour.

A generation of Australian 20-somethings locked out of the housing market forever.

But hey, at least we have a really big, totally legitimate export number to wave around, right? Wrong; dead wrong.

Time to Kill the Zombie Statistic

The ABS should be forced – by law if necessary – to publish two numbers every year:

1.Gross expenditure by student visa holders (the current fantasy $53.6 bn)

2.Net contribution after wages earned in Australia, remittances, and agent commissions (the real number, certainly under $25 bn)

Until that happens, every politician, journalist, or academic who quotes "$53.6 billion in education exports" should be treated like someone who still swears the earth is flat.

Australia didn't build the world's third-biggest export industry. We built the world's most successful statistical hallucination.

And the junkies – universities, property spruikers, state governments – are so hooked on the high they'll keep shouting the fake number louder every month, even as the ABS itself whispers the truth in a footnote nobody reads.

$53.6 billion isn't an export success story. It's Australia's biggest and longest-running accounting scam.

https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2025/12/abs-admits-education-export-figure-is-exaggerated/