‘Baseless applications’: Biggest appeal backlog for migration and protection visa on record

Each month, about 1000 asylum seekers who are unsuccessful at the Administrative Review Tribunal fail to leave the country, analysis shows, as a former immigration department official warns “we don’t want to become like America on this”.

Attorney-General of Australia, Mark Dreyfus. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Huge numbers of migrants and asylum seekers are abusing the visa system through “unmeritorious applications” in attempts to stay in the country, experts say, amid a record number of appeals against Home Affairs’ visa ­denials.

Each month, about 1000 asylum seekers who are unsuccessful in their appeals at the Administrative Review Tribunal fail to leave the country, further analysis of its data shows, as former immigration official Abul Rizvi says “we don’t want to become like America on this”.

More than 82,000 people are currently contesting migration and protection visa refusals with the ART, the highest on record, with almost 18,500 cases added to the backlog in the last six months of 2024.

Consecutive governments have failed to get on top of the backlog. There were just 14,000 active migration and protection visa appeals 10 year ago, reaching 64,000 at the end of the 2019-20 financial year, before decreasing slightly, and then climbing to its peak of 82,060 at the end of 2024.

Former Immigration Department deputy secretary Mr Rizvi said the government needed to “significantly slow the (number of) unmeritorious applications” and deal with the growing ­numbers of unsuccessful asylum applicants.

He said it could use a ‘first-out model’ in which the most recent unmeritorious applications are processed first, reducing the amount of time people spend on bridging visas with work rights in Australia. It would also need to target the migration agents submitting the unmeritorious applications, by investigating and prosecuting where needed.

The median time to finalise a protection visa case was 4.5 years between October and December last year, and close to one year for migration visas.

Former Immigration official Abul Rizvi

“Then there’s the question of what to with all the people in Australia refused asylum who don’t want to go home,” he said, which could be done by “ramping up deportations”.

“But all of that would cost a lot of money and no one wants to pay. Neither of the major parties want to pay,” he said, adding that “you never want to run a system that rewards the unscrupulous”.

He said the number of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, including those who had been unsuccessful at the ART, was the “biggest we’ve ever had”.

The total number of refused asylum seekers who have not departed the country following an application with Home Affairs and the ART is likely to be about 48,000 at the end of January.

“Fundamentally, we don’t want to become like America on this … We don’t want to have the number of unsuccessful asylum seekers in the country getting into the millions,” he said.

A spokesman for Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, whose office oversees the ART, said the Tribunal had “experienced an increase in applications across many caseloads, particularly in migration, protection, and National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA matters), including a significant and sustained increase in applications for review of student visa refusal decisions from mid-2024 as a result of increased rates of processing of student visa applications by the Department of Home ­Affairs.”

The spokesman said the new ART had “enhanced powers and procedures to enable it to respond flexibly to changing caseload” and pointed to a $160m reform package announced through 2023-24 MYEFO “to restore integrity to Australia’s refugee protection system”, including tackling bad actors lodging non-genuine applications.

Some of the backlog over the last six months has also been due to more Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) visa holders and student visa holders applying for asylum, Mr Rizvi said.

Despite the number of protection visa claims with the Home Affairs Department decreasing significantly since its peak in 2019, the number of people appealing protection visas has continued to climb to 40,600 in mid-2024.

Senator James Patterson. Picture: NewsWire/Gary Ramage

Opposition home affairs spokesman James Patterson said the Coalition had a plan to stop people from abusing the system, but could not yet reveal what that plan was.

“(There has been) a massive surge in migration appeals under Labor as people try to game the system to extend their stay in Australia,” he said.

“It hasn’t helped that the Albanese government brought in a record one million migrants in their first two years in office. Tony Burke has no plans to fix the migration appeals rort. Only a Dutton Coalition government will stop people abusing the system to stay in Australia after their visas have expired.”