We need a holistic long-term plan to manage immigration

Although the number of temporary arrivals is still high, pressure to expand the permanent migration program will become greater. Doctor Abul Rizvi reports.

After months of delay, the Government hastily announced the 2025-26 migration program two days after the first anti-immigration march in September. The delay in announcement (the immigration program is usually announced alongside the annual budget) is likely to be due to the Government’s indecisiveness about how to manage the growing collective visa backlog and the increasing politicization of immigration levels.

Instead of addressing the backlog, the government has decided to address the problem once again by keeping the program size, composition and common quota allocation at the same level in 2025-26 as in 2024-25; this was a cut-and-paste job that did not take into account changing circumstances, application rates, backlogs or legal requirements.

In fact, the planning level for shared spaces has been kept at around 40,000 for four consecutive years, despite rapidly growing backlog and workload. Immigration Law the requirement that these visas be processed on a demand-based basis. Although it is clear that partner visas are not managed on a demand basis, the Government continues to acknowledge this in a footnote on the levels of planning for these visas.

Emerging common accumulation and its illegal management are not new (see Table 1).

Home Affairs Website, Immigration Program Reports

The backlog, which stood at 27,900 at the end of June 2010, started increasing at least in 2009-10. That year, there were 54,013 new partner applications with 44,755 visa grants (the rejection rate for partner visas is very low). In 2012-13, the number of applications rose steadily to 70,123, while the backlog rose to 57,870. Although the application rate slowed over the next few years, the backlog continued to grow because the Government did not provide sufficient joint visa slots.

Minister of Internal Affairs in the three years between 2017-18 Peter Dutton It has reduced the number of associate vacancies by almost 10,000 per year, despite increased workload, which reached 96,361 at the end of 2019-20. What Dutton did was clearly illegal.

When the Auditor General belatedly accepts an agreement to request From the opposition MP Julian Hill new ministers will undertake supervision of joint visa procedures Karen Andrews And Alex Hawke They quickly increased the number of associate places to an all-time record 72,376 in 2020-21 (though they also reduced skills flow and humanitarian program places).

This reduced the backlog to 64,111. A drop in partner applications to approximately 44,000 per year during COVID has resulted in the backlog continuing to decline to 56,168 by the end of June 2022.

With international borders reopening and the Coalition Government cracking down on the student and working holidaymaker visa accelerator, there has been a surge in the arrival of young Australians going abroad as well as those entering Australia temporarily. Inevitably some of these young people formed relationships and applied for partner visas.

The number of new partner applications increased to 65,160 in 2023-24 and 68,105 in 2024-25. By the end of June 2025, the backlog reached a record 96,839 (exceeding the Dutton record).

As the government has allocated only 40,500 places to partners in 2025-26, the backlog is expected to rise to around 120,000 by the end of June 2026, assuming around 68,000 new applications. Given the large stock of long-term temporary entrants in Australia, including record or near-record numbers of New Zealand citizens, students, working holidaymakers, temporary graduates and skilled temporary entrants, there could be more than 68,000 new partner applications in 2025-26.

The government basically has three options to deal with this situation. First, it could increase quotas for partner visas and keep quotas constant for other visas (noting that demand for employer-sponsored visas and state/territory government-nominated visas is also increasing). But this will be met with howls of protest from the usual anti-immigration advocates that the Government feared in the first place.

A second option would be to reduce quotas for other permanent visas, both skilled visas and offshore humanitarian visas. But this will be strongly opposed by business groups, state/territory governments and humanitarian advocates.

The third option would be to continue brushing the issue aside. The risk of this is a large enough class action that it would lead to the courts forcing the Government to process joint applications in accordance with the law. The political consequences would be dire. The longer the government delays addressing this issue, the more inevitable a major class-action lawsuit will become.

The fourth proposed option is to remove partner visas from the immigration program and offer them separately. This may solve a presentation issue, but it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. Everyone will know how to add their partner visa to the immigration program to reach the overall number. This is a bit like the Government excluding 3,000 permanent resident Pacific Accession Visas from its migration program calculations. He did this for no logical reason.

Whichever option the government chooses, it needs to understand that this is not a one-time issue. While the stock of temporary entrants remains large, there will be inevitable influx pressure to expand the permanent migration program to accommodate both partners and other permanent visa categories.

The truth is that the Government needs a long-term holistic approach. plan managing migration. This means managing BOTH net migration and the permanent program. Managing only the permanent program on an annual basis while considering net migration as a purely ‘statistical’ phenomenon means not managing migration at all due to the flow of consequences of net migration for the permanent programme.

Failure to manage net migration has real-life consequences.

Dr Abul Rizvi Independent Australian columnist and a former Deputy Secretary of the Immigration Service. You can follow Abul on Twitter @RizviAbul.

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