Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has unveiled Labor's long-awaited migration overhaul, promising to bring net overseas migration down to 245,000 this financial year and 225,000 in 2027-28 — a package that, as Guardian Australia reports, reaches from international students' families to backpacker visas and visitors who never leave. On Thursday the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirmed net migration had eased to 292,000 in the year to March, from 299,000 in December.
The enforcement side is the sharpest edge: new compliance measures to ensure people without valid visas leave the country, a former Melbourne quarantine facility to be repurposed as a detention centre, and an additional 100 compliance officers. "This is not the sort of operation that some people have seen on TV happening in other countries," Mr Burke said ahead of his National Press Club address. A new "no further stay" condition will be added to all visitor visas, and migration agents face new penalties for helping what the minister calls visa rorters. "Once they get here, and if they apply onshore, the process has been that they stay, and they're [put] on a bridging visa," he said. "It's a double standard that really has no logic attached to it."
International students face the biggest structural change. Australia issued more than 337,000 student visas last year, about 45,000 of them to dependants or family members — and under the changes, the vast majority of students will be required to come alone, with so-called visa hopping restricted. On the other side of the ledger, ministerial directions will tell officials to prioritise applicants with in-demand skills in healthcare, construction, education and law enforcement — a list covering hundreds of professions from paramedics to electricians and teachers — with defence, resources, agriculture, aquaculture and fishing applicants also in line for improved consideration.
The backpacker changes carry the sharpest regional consequences. Amid agriculture-sector concern that the tightening could create workforce shortages and even delay harvesting and processing in the lead-up to Christmas, Mr Burke said working-holiday rules will move to a ballot system for second and third years — with a regional work requirement attached. Processing times for working-holiday applications will be stabilised at three months; the onshore wait is currently about five days, though offshore applicants can already wait months. For harvest regions like South Australia's, who fills the picking rosters next year now runs through that ballot.
One nationality is quarantined from the crackdown: working holidaymakers from the UK stay outside the caps and regional requirements under the free trade agreement. Their numbers — almost 80,000, more than double the pre-pandemic peak of 35,000 — are a "challenge" Mr Burke says he will raise with the UK government. "It's a level of growth that means we are just, at the moment, going to continue to be processing that one slowly," he said. The character test will also be updated to reflect Australia's stance on stamping out hatred and family violence.
The politics are not subtle: the Guardian frames the speech as Labor's latest bid to control the immigration debate as One Nation surges in the polls — and it lands a week after Labor premiers joined business groups in warning the government against cutting too hard. Mr Burke's own framing was gentler: "Almost everyone who comes to Australia is a good guest in our country. These reforms are to ensure that our migration system can be better targeted to the current needs of Australia."