‘Trust is key’: crackdown on migration lawyers launched
Lucinda Garbutt-Young |
Lawyers who lodge visa applications they know are unlikely to succeed will be penalised as part of a federal crackdown on Australia’s migration system.
Registered migration agents and unregistered operators have been put on notice over the potential exploitation of vulnerable travellers.
Agents who assist with applications they know, or reasonably ought to know, have no legal basis will be banned under proposed government changes, Assistant Citizenship Minister Julian Hill said in a speech to the Migration Institute of Australia on Friday.
“Australia is and will remain extremely kind and generous to genuine asylum seekers, and part of the social licence to do so is to reduce the abuse of the system,” he said.
“Trust is key. If Australians sense that a government is not in control of our nation’s borders or the system, then anger rises and trust falls.”
The government’s changes to provisional standards would replace a protocol that allows agents to proceed with applications likely to be futile if the client acknowledges in writing that they understand the risk.
About 90 per cent of protection applications are refused, which he said wasted resources and left people in limbo.
The government announced a long-anticipated overhaul to migration settings in September, which will change the way students can access visas, the number of working holiday makers let into the country, and prevent visa hopping.
The plan includes reducing the roughly 77,000 unlawful non-citizens in Australia.
Also announced in September, roughly 250 beds will be added to detention centre capacity, which Mr Hill said would “improve overall compliance by many thousands of extra departures each year and stem the growth in overstayers”.
“We are sending a signal to everyone and giving firm meaning to a visa’s expiry date,” he said.
Greens Senator David Shoebridge, who was the immigration spokesman at the time and became party leader this week, accused the government of taking a hard-line approach that would harm vulnerable migrants.
”This is where Labor has sunk to, reheating Tony Abbott’s immigration attacks, with a 2026 Donald Trump twist,” he said at the time.
It comes as Pauline Hanson’s right-wing tactics continue to capture the imagination of voters.
The coalition, which is polling near record-lows as One Nation’s popularity has surged, has also proposed to slash the net overseas migration number.
A crackdown on student visas unveiled by Mr Hill will mean there are only three ways people can jump to another study progression: an extension to their visa if they get sick, an onshore transfer, or progression to further studies after finishing a course.
“The community’s view has changed and Australians now want and expect governments to more tightly control temporary flows,” Mr Hill said.
AAP