Reforms to Australia’s migration program are picking up steam, with multiple announcements recently.

Many have been aimed to bolster the integrity of the international education sector and involve:

• increasing the evidence of financial capacity for some student visa applications, which began at the beginning of the month and did not increase for many years,

• increasing funding for visa compliance and integrity, and

• increasing funding to scrutinise vocational education providers.

There are more on the way after a review into the exploitation of the visa system was released yesterday and already there will be more funding to process protection visa claims to stamp out vexatious applications. This includes more members for the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) before the AAT is abolished and replaced with a new tribunal, and federal court judges. 

Upcoming changes include a pathway for all primary subclass 482 – Temporary Skill Shortage visa holders, and faster processing for overseas workers with a salary of at least $120,000. There is no reference to what visa this refers to, but presumably these will be permanent employer-skilled visas.

Change to published processing time

While many changes are positive steps, one unannounced and unfortunate change has been to publishing global processing times.

Prior to the change, nuanced processing times for most visa subclasses including sponsorship and nomination applications were available and divided into 25, 50, 75, and 90 percentiles of how long it took for applications to be finalised by the Department of Home Affairs. This has been removed.

In its place are the median, 50 percentile, timeframes for multiple subclasses and programs. These are aggregated by visa category so are not for individual subclasses.

The issue with only listing median times is that processing times had a skewed distribution, also known as a “fat tail” distribution. These are caused by delays in finalising applications, which may be due to obtaining penal clearance certificates, missing information and documents, and visa medical issues such as needing to submit documents for a health waiver.

This is why a more accurate reading of processing times is best by looking at both ends of the distribution, and this is particularly so for accredited business sponsors as they are afforded faster processing.

New GSM visa program year; no new business skills visa applications

By now, all states and territories have opened their nomination programs for General Skilled Migration visas: subclass 189 – Skilled – Independent visa, subclass 190 – Skilled – Nominated visa, and subclass 491 – Skilled Work Regional (Provisional) visa.

Due to the high demand for nominations, many states are moving to a Registration of Interest (ROI) model, the latest of which is South Australia. The ROI model operates like the Expression of Interest (EOI) and SkillSelect model which is for 189 visas and 491 visas sponsored by an eligible relative. ROIs are not applications for nominations and meeting minimum eligibility requirements does not guarantee an invitation. One expects that a human reviews these submissions and not a computer as is the case for EOIs. Other states have their own points system. All models add further levels of complexity and uncertainty.

One category of visas guaranteed no new invitation this program year is for subclass 188 - Business Innovation and Investment (Provisional) visas.

This is because despite 1,900 places for this visa subclass there are enough on-hand applications to meet the 2023–​24 planning level. Therefore, instead of queuing visa grants for the next program year, ​the Department of Home Affairs instead decided not to allocate the states and territories any places. This will disadvantage any business skills applicant where age or recent time periods, such as assessing a business’s performance over a number of fiscal years, is of the essence.