Remember the international goodwill education engenders

Lowy took its policy brief to Melbourne, having its launch co-hosted by Asialink, a centre of the University of Melbourne.

Gardner was one of two respondents to Lowy's policy paper. The other was Simon Overland, chief commissioner of Victoria Police, for his perspective on community and student safety.

Wesley warned of "serious negative consequences" for Australia.

"As the recent attacks on Indian students demonstrate, media attention to such incidents can inform broader perceptions overseas about Australian society," said the highly regarded foreign policy specialist, former director of the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University and co-chair of the working group on Australia's place in the world at Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's 2020 (community) Summit last year.

"Australia can't afford to forget that the end of the White Australia Policy occurred just over a generation ago - and that people in several Asian countries believe that racial prejudice is still prevalent in Australian society."

Wesley traces the roots of the problems to the "steady marketisation" of higher education in Australia since the mid-1980s, in the deregulation of the tertiary education sector including the reintroduction of university fees for Australian students, and the charging of full fees for international students.

"The growth of perceptions overseas that Australian education seeks to maximise profits and minimise costs, paying declining attention to quality control, threatens to damage its brand name and eventually its dynamism as an export industry," says Wesley.

He warns of the risk of a "poisoned alumni" of international students returning to source countries spreading negative perceptions of Australia as a destination of choice for students who did not make the grade for Europe or North America.

Gardner agrees to a point. But it would be a stretch, in her view, to liken alumni from her university and tertiary institutions like hers to those given student visas to study cooking, hairdressing and hospitality in "hole in the wall" colleges, as is the case for many of those students from India alleging mistreatment in Australia.

As one former student now back in India remarked in an online forum, "this is nothing but an immigration scam".

The former student was responding to a discussion in On Line Opinion that would make for hilarious reading in parts if the issue was not so serious.

The forum was triggered by an education and public advocacy consultant who is as critical as Gardner of the policy change in 2001 of the previous government under John Howard, to allow overseas students to apply for permanent residency as skilled migrants.