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SYDNEY: Australia will raise its cap on foreign students by 9 percent to 295,000 next year and prioritize applicants from Southeast Asia, the government said on Monday.

Limits on places were announced last year as a way to rein in record migration that had contributed to a surge in housing prices, with 270,000 places made available for 2025.

An additional 25,000 places were being granted in 2026 as the policy was successfully bringing down “out of control” international student numbers, the government said.

“This is about making sure international education grows in a way that supports students, universities and the national interest,” Education Minister Jason Clare said in a statement.

Australia granted nearly 600,000 student visas in the 2023 financial year, as international students returned to the country in record numbers following COVID-19.

Australia’s largest cohorts of students come from China and India.

As well as introducing the cap on numbers, the government also more than doubled the visa fee for foreign students in 2024 and pledged to close loopholes in rules that allowed them to continuously extend their stay.

The government’s measures to curb migration were “bearing fruit” and allowed for a modest increase in the cap in 2026, International Education Assistant Minister Julian Hill said.

“The numbers were growing out of control,” Hill told national broadcaster ABC.

“The government has taken tough decisions over the last 12 months, not always loved by the sector, to get the numbers down and get them to a more sustainable footing.”

Roughly two-thirds of places will be allocated to universities and one-third to the vocational skills training sector.

Larger, public universities would need to demonstrate domestic and international students had “access to safe and secure housing” and recruit more students from Southeast Asia to increase their individual allocations, the government said.

It was important “for Australia’s future soft power that we continue to bring the best and brightest from our (Southeast Asian) neighbors to have a bit of Australia with them for the rest of their life,” Hill said.

Relations with Southeast Asia have been a focus of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor government as it looks to reduce Australia’s economic dependence on China.

Universities Australia welcomed the “sensible” increase in places.

“Universities have called for growth in this critically important sector, and the government has honored this,” CEO Luke Sheehy said.

Australia has one of the highest shares of international students globally. The sector contributed more than A$51 billion ($33.05 billion) to the economy in 2024, the country’s top services export.

BANGOR: On Ireland’s blustery western seaboard researchers are gleefully flying giant kites — not for fun but in the hope of generating renewable electricity and sparking a “revolution” in wind energy.
“We use a kite to capture the wind and a generator at the bottom of it that captures the power,” Padraic Doherty of Kitepower, the Dutch firm behind the venture, told AFP.
At its test site in operation since September 2023 near the small town of Bangor Erris, the team transports the vast 60-square-meter (645,000-square-feet) kite from a hangar across the lunar-like bogland to a generator.
The kite is then attached by a cable tether to the machine and acts like a “yo-yo or fishing reel,” Doherty said.
“It gets cast out and flies up, the tether pulls it back in, over and over again, creating energy,” he said, testing the kite’s ropes and pulleys before a flight.
The sparsely populated spot near the stormy Atlantic coast is the world’s first designated airborne renewable energy test site.
And although the idea is still small in scale, it could yet prove to be a mighty plan as Ireland seeks to cut its reliance on fossil fuels such as oil and gas.
“We are witnessing a revolution in wind energy,” said Andrei Luca, operations head at Kitepower, a zero-emissions energy solutions spin-off from the Delft University of Technology.
“It took nearly 25 years for wind turbines to evolve from 30 kilowatt prototypes to megawatt scale, and decades to offshore wind farms we see today,” he added.
The system flies autonomously, driven by software developed at the university in the Netherlands, but Doherty acts as the kite’s “pilot” on the ground, monitoring its flight path for efficiency.
The kite flies up around 400 meters (1,300 feet) and reels in to about 190 meters, generating around 30 kilowatts for storage.
The force spins “like a dynamo on a bike,” Doherty said, adding that “it generates up to two and a half tons of force through each turn.”
The electricity is stored in batteries, similar to solar photovoltaic systems, with the kite currently able to fully charge a 336 kilowatt-hour (kWh) battery.
“That’s a meaningful amount of energy, sufficient for powering a remote outpost, a small island, polar station, or even a construction site,” Luca said.
“Add additional kites and we can power a bigger island.”


According to Doherty, a chief advantage of the kite system is its flexibility and swift start-up capability.
“We can set up in 24 hours and can bring it anywhere, it’s super mobile, and doesn’t need expensive, time- and energy-consuming turbine foundations to be built,” he said.
A kite system is “way less invasive on the landscape (than wind turbines), produces clean energy and doesn’t need a supply chain of fuel to keep running,” Luca added.
During January’s Storm Eowyn, which caused widespread and long-lasting power outages in Ireland, the system showed its value in Bangor Erris, according to Luca.
“Paired with a battery, it provided uninterrupted electricity before, during and after the storm,” he said.
Ireland’s wind energy sector has long been touted as full of potential.
But progress on large-scale delivery of onshore and offshore turbines has been held up by planning delays and electricity grid capacity constraints.
The Irish government has set ambitious targets for offshore wind energy to deliver 20 gigawatts of energy by 2040 and at least 37 gigawatts by 2050.
In 2024, Irish wind farms provided around a third of the country’s electricity according to Wind Energy Ireland (WEI), a lobby group for the sector.
This compares to the UK where, according to trade association RenewableUK, wind energy from the country’s combined wind farms first reached 20 gigawatts in November 2022.
The ability of airborne wind energy (AWE) systems to harness high-altitude winds with relatively low infrastructure requirements “makes them particularly suitable for remote, offshore or mobile applications,” Mahdi Salari, an AWE researcher at University College Cork, told AFP.
But he said Kitepower would face challenges on “regulation, safety, and system reliability.”
Such technology however could plug gaps in places where “land availability, costs or logistical constraints hinder the deployment of traditional wind turbines,” Salari said.
By the 2030s, he said: “I expect AWE to contribute meaningfully to diversified, flexible and distributed renewable energy networks.”