International students could soon face stricter limits on bringing partners and children to Australia, under a sweeping Labor crackdown targeting temporary migration and long-term visa switching.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke is due to detail the delayed migration overhaul at Canberra’s National Press Club on Thursday. The government wants to bring net overseas migration down to 245,000 in 2026-27, before reducing it further to 225,000 annually in the years that follow.
Of the 337,427 student visas approved in the last financial year, nearly 46,000 were issued to secondary applicants, including the spouses, partners and dependent children of international students.
Labor is also set to take aim at “visa-hopping” — a practice in which temporary migrants repeatedly shift between student, graduate and other visa categories, allowing them to stay in Australia for years without gaining permanent residency.
The announcement follows the abrupt cancellation of Burke’s planned National Press Club address more than a month ago, when cabinet divisions emerged over the size and structure of the proposed reforms.
Ministers are additionally considering measures to reduce the large number of people living on bridging visas and to accelerate the removal of migrants who no longer have legal permission to stay in Australia.
There are more than 400,000 bridging visa applications sitting in the backlog, with many involving people who initially arrived through Australia’s temporary migration program.
Options under review include removing work rights after a protection visa claim has been refused, while also speeding up review processes to prevent unsuccessful applicants from remaining in the country for years during appeal proceedings.
Burke has previously indicated he supports bringing back a more stringent framework, used until around 2015, for managing people whose visas have expired or become invalid.
Under the former model, migrants could receive a bridging visa that gave them a limited window — reportedly around two weeks — to depart Australia, after which they could face detention and deportation.
‘Before about 2015, Australia had a really simple way of dealing with it. It was never an ICE-style operation,’ Burke told the Sydney Morning Herald.
‘Effectively, people who didn’t have a visa would be contacted.
‘They’d say, “OK, we’re going to give you a bridging visa for a very brief period of time. If you don’t leave during that time, we’ll take you into detention, and you’ll be deported.”
‘And you just turn over people fairly quickly.’
Changes are already under way elsewhere in the migration system, with skilled visa applicants who are already in Australia being prioritised over people applying from overseas.
The shift has pushed some offshore applicants further down the processing queue and is expected to reduce the number of new arrivals in the short term.
Working holiday visas are also being processed more slowly.
The government had considered tougher requirements for British backpackers before Prime Minister Anthony Albanese ruled out changes that could breach Australia’s free-trade agreement with the United Kingdom.
Burke has acknowledged Labor needs to bring migration down after the post-pandemic surge in arrivals put growing pressure on housing and infrastructure.
‘We do need to get net overseas migration down,’ he said.
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‘We need to make sure that we deal with the numbers overall and do so in a sensible, targeted way that provides the easiest pathway through for the Australian economy.’
Burke said one of the government’s biggest problems was that large parts of Australia’s migration system were demand-driven, leaving ministers with limited control over the number of arrivals.
‘Since the Hawke and Howard years, a whole lot of our immigration system has been demand-driven, and processing speeds are one of the only things, along with planning levels, we currently have available,’ he said.
‘The more tools that are available, the better we can target the system.
‘The best outcome will be, if we are able to sort our way through, [to have] a legislative option.
‘In the absence of that, there are still more levers the government will be able to use, and I’ll be making those announcements tomorrow.’
Burke has also singled out international student visa-hopping as an area requiring action.
‘The challenge that we have is when somebody comes, studies in an area that’s not experiencing a skill shortage, then goes to a graduate visa and works in an area that’s not experiencing a skill shortage, and then tries to hop around other visa classes and ends up here for a long period of time,’ he told the Sydney Morning Herald.
‘At no point would Australia have made an active decision saying, “We want you to be here,” but 15-16 years later, they’re living here.
‘If infrastructure kept up, then that’s OK. If housing kept up, it would all be OK. You just have business doing what business needs. But when we have a gap so significant between housing demand and housing supply … that means immigration needs to be part of that answer.’
Australia has recorded a net overseas migration gain of more than 1.4 million people since Labor came to government in May 2022, with temporary visa holders accounting for a significant share of arrivals.
There are now more than three million temporary migrants in Australia, while the permanent migration program has been set at 185,000 places for 2026-27.
The rise in popularity of One Nation, which announced its own migration plan on Monday, has increased pressure on Burke to bring down the migrant intake.
One Nation’s migration plan would keep the existing working holiday visa intake unchanged while cutting 750,000 student and family visas.
The party wants net overseas migration to fall below zero for three years before settling at 130,000 people a year.
The Coalition is working on a plan to tie net overseas migration to the number of new homes built, currently about 173,000 per year.
Opposition defence spokesman James Paterson said he was sceptical about Labor’s ability to deliver its migration plan.
‘As for our own policy, we are close to releasing it, but we’re actually going to do the work to get it right because we are not the government,’ he told reporters in Canberra.
‘We’re not going to put out a half-baked policy like One Nation has that hasn’t even been costed, the budgetary impacts of which they have no idea.’