Labor unveils migration cuts targeting students, backpackers and overstayers

Australia will crack down on visa overstayers, stop international students from bringing family and limit the stay of backpackers under a series of changes to drive down migration.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has outlined a raft of changes he said would restore the "integrity" of the migration program and give the federal government more "control" over the demand-driven components of the system.

In a speech at the National Press Club (NPC) in Canberra on Thursday Mr Burke described the overhaul as the "next stage" of policies designed to deliver the net overseas migration (NOM) figures in the budget of 245,000 this year and 225,000 next financial year.

He confirmed the government now considered these forecasts a target to meet due to the "challenges" Australia was having with housing.

Net overseas migration fell to 292,100 people in the year to March, according to new figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics released today.

Mr Burke declared claims that Australia was a country of mass migration were "absurd" and warned deeper cuts to the NOM — as flagged by opposition parties — would destroy the economy.

He said Labor's changes amounted to a "relatively simple proposition".

"If you want to come on a temporary basis to Australia, apply for a temporary visa," he said.

"If you want to come to Australia permanently, apply for a permanent visa.

"And if you no longer have a valid visa, you should leave Australia."

Labor's announcement comes as One Nation unveiled plans to push the country into negative NOM for three years and then 130,000 after that, while the Coalition is finalising plans for a policy expected to target between 150,000 to 170,000 people.

Asked how he would win the case with the public that the government's higher target was the right thing to do, Mr Burke said because the "lower levels will trash Australian services and trash the Australian economy".

In addition to immediate visa rule changes, Mr Burke flagged further areas Labor would like to legislate but could not do without the support of the parliament, including limiting unrealistic applications for asylum.

But he said he would not blame this limitation for any failure to achieve the government's NOM target because overshooting the number "won't happen".

Mr Burke also criticised One Nation's policy of preventing skilled migrants from bringing their spouses and children to Australia, arguing about half of all doctors and construction workers and two thirds of nurses came to the country with family.

"Imagine half of the construction workers who we have to build the houses that we need, not coming," he said.

"Imagine two-thirds of the people who we rely on in aged care or nursing not coming."

Housing and lack of control among problems with current system

Mr Burke said a key problem with Australia's current migration program was that too much of it was demand driven.

He said Australians wanted the government to be able to take a "higher level of control" over different parts of the system.

Mr Burke also identified "visa hopping" as an issue related to individuals who would "never" meet the qualifications to become a permanent resident.

"(They) effectively jump from visa to visa, use the appeals process to be able to stay here as long as possible until it eventually becomes absurd to not just let them stay," he said.

Mr Burke said migration needed to slow enough for housing supply to "catch up", but blamed falling household sizes and other issues for the shortage of homes in Australia.

"The housing shortage we have is not caused by immigration," he said.

"But immigration needs to be part of the solution for the housing crisis."

Changes to skilled work visas

Among the changes flagged in Mr Burke's speech was a redesign of the points test to increase the economic value of skilled permanent migration, with housing construction trades to receive the same recognition as a university qualification.

Mr Burke also announced Ministerial Direction 119 would be changed to give processing priority to construction, healthcare, agriculture, fisheries and teaching after business backlash to an earlier decision.

In July, he had issued a sweeping directive pushing skilled visa applications, lodged offshore, to the back of the queue.

The change meant visa processing times for visas blew out from a few days to more than a year in some cases.

Backpacker ballot for second and third year stays

Mr Burke unveiled a dramatic overhaul of the Working Holiday Maker program, also known as backpackers.

After a months-long go slow on applications, processing will return to the previous faster pace for countries whose schemes require regional work to qualify for a second or third year of stay.

However, a ballot system would be introduced to limit the number of backpackers who are able to stay in Australia beyond one year.

Eligibility for a second year stay will be capped at 45,000 places and applicants would still need to complete 88 days of regional work before entering the ballot.

For the third year, the ballot would be restricted to just 5,000 places with a six-month regional work requirement to qualify.

Last year about 57,000 backpackers stayed in Australia for a second year and about 31,000 did a third year.

Mr Burke said not everybody would get to stay in Australia beyond the first-year because the government needed to have "some control and certainty of what those numbers are".

UK applications would be excluded from the faster processing because the scheme does not have a regional work requirement and is part of the UK, Australia free trade agreement.

The number of UK backpackers in Australia has risen sharply since the FTA took effect during the pandemic when there were about 17,000 people to now just under 80,000.

"It's a level of growth that means we are just, at the moment, going to continue to be processing that one slowly," Mr Burke said.

Labor to tackle international student 'visa hopping'

Another major change impacts international students, who would largely no longer be able to attach family members to their visas.

Existing families already in Australia would not be separated, and exceptions would continue for Pacific and ASEAN nationals and certain courses, such as PhDs.

To tackle "visa hopping" students who wanted to transfer courses would have to apply for a new visa.

Meanwhile international students who complete from a course would only be able to move into a new course of a higher qualification level.

For example, Mr Burke said a bachelor's degree graduate could apply for a master's course.

"To hop around, up and down, to different institutions, and claim that what is actually just seeking a migration outcome as part of Australia's export of international education will come to an end as a model," he said.

Mr Burke also flagged changes to visitor visas so they would all generally carry a "no further stay" condition.

He said this would prevent people from arriving as visitors and then applying onshore for another visa and moving onto a bridging visa.

Crackdown on visa overstayers

In a section of his speech about who would be required to leave Australia, Mr Burke announced a crackdown on migration agents encouraging baseless claims.

The code governing this sector would be changed so agents could be sanctioned or deregistered for encouraging clients to lodge "non-meritorious" claims.

"We cannot have people with some sort of official, formal status, using that official formal status to encourage people to make something which, by any definition, is an unacceptable abuse of the system,"

Mr Burke said.

He also announced the government would increase its capacity to detain and remove people who remain in Australia after their visas expired.

The extra resources included 100 additional compliance officers and 250 new detention beds.

The government is also examining if the former quarantine facility in Melbourne could also be repurposed.

Mr Burke said he wanted to restore a pre-2015 deterrent where detention was used to influence behaviour and encourage visa overstayers to leave.

"When people had overstayed a visa, we would bring people into detention centres, give them a bridging visa, tell them to leave," he said.

"If they hadn't left, you'd bring them into the detention centre, and within a few weeks they'd organise their own flight and leave."

Mr Burke said the "behavioural change" was "actually the biggest outcome".

Burke flags legislation wish list

Mr Burke outlined two gaps in the migration package he said would require legislation to implement, noting Labor at this stage did not have a likely pathway through the parliament for new laws.

The first would be the creation of an expression of interest mechanism that would allow government to control student arrivals rather than simply processing demand.

Mr Burke said this would directly address the broader "demand driven" problem but could not happen without legislation.

The second area to tackle would be disingenuous protection visa claims.

Mr Burke said he wanted changes aimed at people who lodge weak asylum claims after exhausting other visa pathways in order to remain in Australia during lengthy review and court processes.

"That's not a legitimate reason for the protection system," he said.

"It actually holds up the processing of the legitimate claims."

He revealed applicants from countries where more than 85 per cent of protection applications fail accounted for about 80 per cent of the processing caseload.

Mr Burke said the reason Labor would not simply introduce its preferred migration legislation and try to negotiate Coalition or crossbench support was because it would immediately cause people to exploit migration pathways before the laws passed.

"If people see something you're doing that you're closing down a visa-hopping process, and the legislation is then before, you'll get a behavioural change completely against the national interest that would happen immediately," he said.

Burke hits out at 'absurd' migration arguments

Mr Burke made the case against what he said were a series of "absurd" claims, including that Australia was a country of "mass migration".

He said the country was instead on track to have 700,000 fewer people in 2030-31 than had been forecast prior to the pandemic.

Mr Burke described Australia's migration peak post-COVID as "too high" but argued the country was now 47 per cent lower.

Mr Burke said migration was "critical" to the economies of the regions and cities, defending foreign students as an important job creator.

"For all the talk about student visas, it is also the case that there are people who work and have jobs in Australia as a result of international education being an incredibly important export," he said.

"Drastic cuts, wherever you make them, hurt the economy in every part, in every area."

On Australia's need for extra housing, Mr Burke said in both Sydney and Melbourne almost two-thirds of plasterers were born overseas.

"It's pretty hard to get a house built without having a plasterer involved," he said.

"We need immigration."

Mr Burke said the "silliest of all" the arguments made about migration was the "endless refrain" that Australia was "bringing in yoga teachers and not construction workers".

He said under Labor there had been 15,000 construction workers enter Australia and "zero" yoga teachers.

Mr Burke said yoga teaching had been added on the migration skills list under the former Coalition government in a deal with India.