Minister’s Forecast of Visa Backlog With Drop of Outstanding Applications
In today’s blog, we will be talking about the decline of outstanding visa applications in Australia and the Immigration Minister’s predictions about visa backlog.
The massive visa backlog in Australia is dropping gradually with the Immigration Minister Andrew Giles saying changes had been made for speeding up the process.
The visa backlog in Australia has now dropped to 755,000 from about a million applications.
Andrew Giles, the Immigration Minister, told recently in a conference in Sydney that since 1 June, more than three million visas had been finalized.
Immigration Minister said that the government was on target for a 600,000 backlog by the year’s end, which is about half the number of applications when the Labor took over in May.
Mr Giles said that for processing visas, almost 300 more staff had been hired.
According to him, the simple tasks have been automated to give relief to the staff so they can work on more complicated applications for visas.
He said that the government was also working on simplifying the system which used to prioritize applications.
According to him, up to 45 extra minutes were spent processing each application for some skilled visas because of the complexity of the former prioritization system. He said that he saw staff working on sorting visas into groups rather than making decisions.
Andrew Giles during his speech said that for processing skilled visas, the median times had increased one month each year, from four months in 2015-16 until 2018-19, when the median time for processing reached seven months.
He said that the number of families and permanent skilled visas was also increased by the government this year. He further added that no migrant should be permanently temporary.
Martin Parkinson, a former top public servant, who is currently one of the three experts assigned to conduct an extensive review of the migration system of Australia said at the conference that the discussion paper was now available on the website of the Department of Home Affairs.
An interim report is expected by the end of February from experts and a final strategy by late March/April. Meanwhile, the submissions are due on 15 December.
Mr Martin Parkinson said that he didn’t want to anticipate the results but endorsed that the review would likely begin with a presumption that the smooth running of the assessment process for visas could give benefits.
For visa processing, the federal budget had $36.1 million to expand the staff capacity for nine months, by 500 people in order to reduce the backlog.
The Australian government has also notified that it will review the migration system of the country to ensure that it is keeping up with the times.
Mr Giles said that a system that attracts and keeps talent is needed, a simple and efficient system supportive of the existing skills in Australia.
He said that the importance of international mobility is already important for economic activity and its importance will continue to grow over time for Australia.
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