Melbourne (PTI) Warning that the recent surge in attacks on Indian students in Australia could severely hit the USD 15 billion overseas student market, educationists here have said that urgent steps should be taken to address the issue and re-assure foreign students.

While the recent attacks did not appear race-based, the fear now was that such a tendency could be developing, Chris Nyland, an Australian expert at the Monash University said.

Mr. Nyland said while foreign governments were actively intervening to protect their students here, Australia needed to respond "with more than spin" if it wished to avoid a collapse within its billion dollars overseas student industry.

"We need to respond with more than spin. We need to acknowledge there's a problem," he was quoted as saying in 'The Australian' newspaper.

Asked if he believed attacks were race-based, Mr. Nyland, a member of a liaison group here involving police and Indian students, said: "It's really difficult to say because we have no empirical evidence. We have no research in this area.

"I suspect it wasn't, but I fear a racial element is developing with heightened risk now of copy-cat attacks," he said.

Meanwhile, Daryl Le Grew, Universities Australia's spokesman on international affairs said the furore was a "wake-up call" for universities.

Contending that Australia faced potentially crippling sanctions from Chinese and Indian governments over student safety, Mr. Nyland said it was a "wake-up call" for Universities and colleges, which needed to do much more to help protect students on campus, while they travelled and even at late-night workplace.

Australian authorities said anti-discrimination laws stopped them collecting the statistics that could shed light on emergent trends in overseas student safety.

Mr. Nyland said the overseas student industry had grown so large that police needed greater resources for patrols and an independent ombudsman should be created for overseas students.

Though the furore over attacks appeared to have sprung up overnight, Australian authorities had already received strong warnings from Chinese, Indian and Indonesian embassies about attacks on their student nationals last year, he said.

"(But) this is now an industry where the governments of our supplier countries are already actively intervening and expressing their disquiet with how things are being done in Australia and they have the power to affect supply," Mr. Nyland told the Higher Ed Services, a professional company owned by country's peak higher education bodies.

Citing the example of New Zealand, whose education industry "got seriously whacked by China" when it failed to act on student concerns of the Chinese in 2003, Mr. Nyland said it was a lesson for Australia.

A new survey carried out at nine universities as part of a project backed official data that showed more than 80 per cent of overseas students were happy with their experience in Australia.

"But that leaves a large minority - 20 per cent - not happy and our data found the same message. It's not as rosy as we like to paint and, as (Deputy Prime Minister Julia) Gillard says, we need to do more for the 20 per cent," Mr. Nyland said.

"Our data showed very few overseas students had experienced attacks... but when you are dealing with half a million people, including spouses, even a small minority can be a large number of people," he said.

University of NSW's postdoctoral research fellow Clifton Evers said while he had not studied the detail of the latest attacks, he believed race was a factor.

"Race is involved in these attacks, but it's also about classic masculinity and working-class guys trying to prove their worth by picking on a group that is marginalised," he said.

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