Recently, Australian universities have been required to be more financially independent of government funding than ever. This situation has brought overseas students, who pay full fees to universities, before the public attention. Maintaining the competitiveness of the universities in recruiting overseas students in the international education market is one of the tasks that Australian universities must tackle these days. However, this cannot be achieved solely by each university.

The Australian Government's initiatives to make Australia attractive for overseas students can be found, for example, in the website of the Australian Government in Japan. In one of the web pages is a list of advantages of studying in Australia.1 There are four points listed in the page and the first is ‘The existence of the globally unique “National Law for Overseas Students’ Rights Protection.”’2 This ‘globally unique national law for overseas student's rights protection’ is the so-called ESOS Act, the formal title of which is the Education Services for Overseas Students Act 2000 (Cth).

Notwithstanding its status as the first advantage of studying in Australia, the ESOS Act in fact has not advantaged overseas students effectively. This article analyses what the ESOS Act aimed at and why the ESOS Act failed to achieve it. Although the ESOS Act covers all Australian education institutions which admit overseas students,3 the focus of this article is limited to the operation of the ESOS Act in the university context.