Source : Perth Now news
Restricting foreign students’ entitlements, tweaking bridging visas and lubricating a clogged system would be welcome first steps of any migration overhaul – but it’s a delicate job, advocates warn.
Clamouring for headline migration figures to come down has left industry leaders terrified slapdash cuts will cripple overstretched workforces.
Strategies to reduce Australia’s population growth due to migration, from about 300,000 in 2025 to 225,000 within two years, will be unveiled by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke in a speech to the National Press Club on Thursday.
Those with squeezed rosters acknowledge the regime needs streamlining.
“The first change needs to be cracking down on gaming of the system,” Australian Hotels Association chief executive James Goodwin told AAP on Wednesday.
“Improving the integrity of the system will in turn hopefully free up the resources of home affairs to be able to be able to dedicate more time to processing.
“Arbitrary cuts to different programs in due course may not be needed with an improved system.”
It’s expected Mr Burke will announce that Labor will target family visas for foreign students and the work rights of those on bridging visas, but that has not been confirmed.
AAP has contacted Mr Burke’s office for comment.
Former immigration department deputy secretary Abul Rizvi told AAP that the government was paying for sleeping at the wheel while post-pandemic migration exploded to 555,000 in the year to July 2023.
“They convinced themselves … it was just catch-up and it was nothing to worry about,” he said.
“Once you’ve had such a huge wave of migration, there are flow-on consequences.”
A proposal to cut three-quarters of a million migrants over three years has been floated by One Nation, while the coalition wants to slash net overseas migration to about 170,000 a year in line with housing construction and will not support Labor’s changes.
According to Mr Rizvi, legions of migrants now on bridging visas while their appeals lumber glacially through the Administrative Reviews Tribunal could not be cleared at the wave of a minister’s wand.
“They’ll have to be processed … what you want to do is stop the rate of appeals,” he said.
“That is, in essence, the One Nation policy: let’s do something about that big wave.
“It would be mad (for Labor) not to take sufficient effective long-term action now.”
But the political imperative to put a lid on net overseas migration was now so pressing there was no guarantee it would be done carefully, Mr Rizvi said.
“Governments making a stupid decision is always a possibility,” he said.
This is the home affairs minister’s second run at announcing migration changes, six weeks after canning his first over cabinet disagreements.
Australia’s net overseas migration in the three months to March will be released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics about an hour before Mr Burke starts speaking.
