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Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke will unveil a migration overhaul that bars most international students from bringing family members to Australia, aiming to cut net overseas migration from about 305,000 to 225,000.
International students will face tough restrictions on bringing family members to Australia under a long-awaited immigration overhaul to be unveiled by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke on Thursday.
The changes are designed to bring down net overseas migration while doing the least damage to the economy. Burke will address the National Press Club in Canberra with a speech titled The work of managing the migration program: Who arrives, who stays, who leaves. He had been due to announce the plans more than a month ago, but the speech was cancelled at the 11th hour amid debate inside cabinet about the direction and scale of the changes.
The reworked plan was endorsed by Cabinet's Expenditure Review Committee this week ahead of the rescheduled address. It shifts some visa rules away from demand-driven settings, giving the government more control over the numbers of people coming into and departing the country. Under the mooted changes, the vast majority of international students would be required to come alone. Last financial year, 337,427 student visas were granted, and of those, 45,991 were secondary applicants classed as dependents or family.
The government wants net overseas migration to fall from about 305,000 to about 225,000 over two years, ending years of higher-than-expected arrivals, including from international students and working holidaymakers. It also plans 185,000 permanent arrivals annually. Net overseas migration measures people coming into or leaving the country for at least 12 months over a 16-month period, including leaving and returning Australian citizens. It has fallen in seven consecutive quarters, but temporary visa holder rates remain high.
For the 2024-25 financial year, there were 568,370 overseas arrivals, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data. Labor plans to use legislation to gain more control over arrival numbers but could rely on regulation and directives to departmental officials if it cannot find agreement in parliament. Anthony Albanese tried to secure Coalition support for legislative changes in talks with opposition leader Angus Taylor last week, but no agreement was reached.
The prime minister leaves Australia to attend the United Nations general assembly in New York on Friday. Ahead of the announcement, Burke told Question Time he would like to implement the overhaul via legislation but will pursue other levers if he cannot get parliamentary support. Since the Hawke and Howard years, a whole lot of our immigration system has been demand-driven, and processing speeds is one of the only things, with planning levels, we currently have available, Burke said.
The best form of outcome there will be if we are able to sort our way through for a legislative option. In the absence of that, there are still more levers the government will be able to use, and I will be making those announcements tomorrow. Burke also said: We do need to get net overseas migration down.
We need to make sure that we deal with the numbers overall, and do so in a sensible, a targeted way that provides the easiest pathway through the Australian economy. Changes including efforts to stop people whose visas have expired from transferring to different categories are likely, essentially forcing some overseas citizens to leave the country more quickly. The government is also considering curbing the ability of people to claim protection after their visas have expired.
Department of Home Affairs data shows that, as of July, there were 110,898 individuals not granted a protection visa who were yet to be deported. The total includes people on bridging visas and others seeking a judicial or administrative review. An average of 1,580 claims for protection are being lodged onshore every month, mostly by people from China, India and Malaysia who have come to Australia on a student or visitor visa.
About 90 per cent of those claims are rejected, but applicants can appeal through the Administrative Review Tribunal and the Federal Court, a process that regularly takes up to eight years. During that time, a person is placed on a bridging visa allowing them to stay in the community and work, prompting government concerns some are simply gaming the system.
Labor had also been considering changing the favourable treatment of British backpackers to make the scheme less attractive before ruling out any move that could breach the Free Trade Agreement between the two countries. Under pressure to bring down overseas arrivals, Burke has already made sweeping changes to the migration system, pausing or slowing down the processing of working holiday maker visas in July and reprioritising the processing of skilled visas.
The changes, under Ministerial Direction 119, mean any worker applying for a skilled visa from overseas faces slower processing. It is unclear whether the government will also target the families of skilled migrants, but Burke recently used his powers to dramatically slow down the processing of skilled and family visas lodged by applicants offshore. Labor's plan has some similarities to One Nation's migration policy, released this week, which included a crackdown on family visas for both students and skilled migrants.
Business groups, universities, the aged care sector and both Labor and the Coalition all savaged the plan, warning One Nation's proposals would hurt essential services and the economy. Independent senator David Pocock said on Wednesday the country deserved a mature conversation about immigration, not one starting with numbers. The big thing I would love to see is a plan. There is this constant talk about numbers, about classes of visas.
Rather than actually having the conversation as a country, what is our 10-year plan for migration, he told ABC radio. What are the skills that we need? What are the trade-offs when it comes to housing, impact on the environment? The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry boss, Andrew McKellar, called for an end to the race for the lowest net overseas migration, warning business needed skilled workers from overseas.
We do not have a migration problem in Australia; we have a housing crisis and skill shortages. Those are the problems we need to fix. Shortsighted approaches that damage the economy will not solve them. Those are red lines for business, he said.
Labor's efforts to regain the initiative on immigration come as One Nation surges in the polls and as community sentiment on the number of overseas arrivals remains a key issue motivating voters.
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GuardianAus:Foreign students to face tough restrictions on bringing in family under Labor’s immigration planThis story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
Policy Student Visa Family Visa International Students Tony Burke International Student Visas Net Overseas Migration Tony Burke Immigration Policy Family Visas Crackdown Australia Migration Targets
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