On the way back from his honeymoon, Mike Ferguson and his wife are walking across a square, headed for the airport.

Two guys come up from behind.

A knife to his throat. A gun to his wife’s head.

And somehow, unbelievably, what follows is not just a story about being mugged, it’s a story about negotiation, keeping your head, and walking away with the things that actually matter. Including, in a twist I genuinely did not see coming.

This episode starts with that kind of energy and then keeps going. Because Mike is one of those people who, the more you talk, the more you realise he’s lived about five careers and 60 countries worth of stories.

He’s worked in government, including designing the simplified student visa system, and he’s now on the university side, which means he can see the cracks, the incentives, and the misunderstandings from both directions.

Along the way, we get into the stuff the sector often talks around, but rarely says plainly: what public servants can actually commit to, why policy “boom and bust” cycles keep repeating, and why genuine consultation is not a nice-to-have, it’s the whole game.

A few highlights to listen out for:

• The honeymoon mugging story, including how you “negotiate” your way out of a nightmare.

• Mike’s case for broader engagement, consultation, and genuine co-design between government and sector, especially when integrity and sustainability are on the line

• • A lighter moment that still says a lot: childhood dreams of being a bus driver and a train driver, which might explain more about international education careers than we’d like to admit.

  
  

  It’s part travel yarn, part policy masterclass, and part reminder that international education is, at its best, built on relationships, trust, and shared goals.

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  Global Horizons is a production of The Global Society, Australia’s Learning Abroad support company. Our editor is Len Zamora and our distribution specialist is Angelo Ablao.

  Rob Malicki is the executive editor and host.

  The podcast wouldn’t be possible without The Koala News, Australia’s international education news website.

  This episode is supported by Choosing Your Uni, Australia's unique, AI-powered platform that helps domestic and international students to find the right institution for them, and that helps Australian institutions to access new markets.

  For guest suggestions and feedback, email podcast@globalsociety.com.au

G'day and welcome to Season 4 of the Global Horizons podcast!

To open up the season, Rob Malicki reflects on some of the highlights from Australian higher education from the past 12 months.

Over the past 12 months, the narrative of universities "losing their social licence" was shown to be a simply ridiculous, click-bait headline.

Here's the proof:

In the latest data, our universities taught 1,676,077 students, up 4.7%, with success also up, at 87.9% and attrition down to 12.2%.

Equity and access to higher education also moved: more First Nations, low-SES, regional and disability students getting in, and through.Institutions invested, and built, in some bigger projects than ever before: Adelaide University launches on 1 January 2026, and Edith Cowan University's $853m City campus is already energising Perth’s CBD... and it hasn't even opened yet!

Deakin University and the University of Wollongong are building real campuses in India, not fly-in deals.

Monash University is investing a Billion (yes, capital "B"!) in TRX Kuala Lumpur... such a big commitment that even the Prime Minister turned up to back it.

In the labs and libraries across Australia, our researchers continued to punch well above their weight, delivering a Nobel prize, state prizes, and countless breakthroughs from CO2 concrete to soil ecology to brain cancer.

Looking at rankings, and Australia continues to slay on a global scale. Six unis in THE top 100, ten in the top 200, and 97% of public universities ranked globally. If we look at sustainability and climate action rankings, our institutions are leading the world at just the right time, when humanity needs it most.

International education has had a mixed year (read the article by Dirk Mulder in The Koala News for the best summary of that). But on the domestic front, students are better protected and supported now than when the year began: the National Student Ombudsman is live, HELP indexation has been fixed, and the Commonwealth Prac Payments (a BRILLIANT and long overdue addition to our system) are underway. Those initiatives deserve some flames (so I'll oblige: 🔥🔥🔥).

If we truly care about Australia’s future, our university sector is the one doing the heavy lifting. It's educating our people, and driving research and innovation. In short, it's setting us up for the future. And there can't be a better way to fulfil a social license than that.

When we sat down to record this episode, it felt a bit like opening a time capsule from twelve months ago and asking, “So, how wrong were we?”

At the end of 2024, Dirk predicted a country divided into two halves, pre-election and post-election, with migration politics sitting right in the middle of it all. I went the other way and suggested life in the sector might simply slide back to “normal”. In this end-of-year wrap for 2025, we revisit those predictions, look at what actually happened, and try our luck again for 2026.

We start with the big structural shifts that have shaped the year. The ESOS bill, national code changes and constant migration rhetoric have all put pressure on different corners of the sector, from public universities with level one allocations to ELICOS, colleges and private VET providers, whose backs are firmly against the wall. At the same time, purpose-built student accommodation has been booming, TNE has become the new frontier, and TAFE has suddenly become the star of a lot more domestic conversations than it used to.

In this episode we get into:

• Policy and politics: ESOS reforms, looming national code changes in early 2026, and why migration is still the easiest lever for politicians to pull, even when the public seems tired of the debate.

• Winners and strugglers: Why public universities feel relatively comfortable, while ELICOS providers, English-only colleges and parts of private VET are staring down some real pain.

• Higher education shake-ups: From the UniSA and University of Adelaide merger and restructures at Western Sydney, to the quiet turbulence inside a range of institutions that do not always make the headlines.

• New builds and new bets: Edith Cowan’s striking new CBD campus in Perth and the broader re-shaping of the city, plus the rapid expansion of TNE in India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and what “TNE done well” actually has to look like.

• TAFE and the domestic pivot: The rise of trades, free or fully subsidised TAFE places, and why parents, students and careers advisers are talking about vocational routes in a very different way.

• AI hype and reality: Rob's prediction that we are heading into a disillusionment phase for AI, even as something genuinely game-changing is likely to land in the next twelve months, especially in video and teaching.

  
  

We also take a moment to look behind the microphones. Dirk opens up about the growth of The Koala News, from a gap he spotted in the market to a fully fledged independent news outlet with hundreds of thousands of views and 1.4 million events on the site this year, and why he launched a supporters campaign to keep independent media healthy.

And because it would not be a Global Horizons wrap without a bit of chaos, we finish with our annual outtakes reel.

Global Horizons is a production of The Global Society, Australia’s Learning Abroad support company. Our editor is Len Zamora and our distribution specialist is Angelo Ablao. Rob Malicki is the executive editor and host. The podcast wouldn’t be possible without The Koala News, Australia’s international education news website. This episode is supported by Choosing Your Uni, Australia's unique, AI-powered platform that helps domestic and international students to find the right institution for them, and that helps Australian institutions to access new markets.

For guest suggestions and feedback, email podcast@globalsociety.com.au