Really depends on the quality of the EAL/ESL/EFL course, IMO. And that can vary pretty widely. A good one could be more demanding than standard English classes at that level, considering how useless those mostly are. A bad or lazily-planned/taught one would be easier, but then there are similar loopholes for immigrant students doing Chinese, Italian, or similar as "another" language when they speak it at home.
My high school, back in the day, had a program of accelerated maths where you ended up doing year 12 methods in year 11, and then specialist the next. Clear advantage to anyone who did the latter, since they got all the knowledge from the other already under their belt. Unfair for anyone at a school that didn;t have that program that wanted to do both. Made it easy for me to do extra subjects and so pick which ones counted towards my entry score.
I sometimes think education would be better if we just stopped trying to pretend it's fair... I mean, we try to keep it as fair as possible, but the rich will always do better, the people with educated parents do better, and research even shows better looking people get better marks on average, even if you control for possible correlations between looks and intelligence. There are way bigger issues than a partially deaf kid getting to skip VCE English, and those aren;t ever going to be fixed.
Also you can get 40 in politics as a second-language speaker, for sure. check how many of the top scorers each year came to Aus as children and come from non-English-speaking homes--more than you'd think.