Temporary migrant numbers to fall next year, says minister Alan Tudge

International student numbers are expected to decrease and fewer humanitarian visas are likely be granted next year.

Minister for Human Services Alan Tudge. Picture: AAP

International student numbers are expected to decrease and fewer humanitarian visas are likely be granted next year — with the Syria intake finalised — driving a downturn in temporary migrant numbers, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs Minister Alan Tudge said.

Figures released by the Home Affairs Department earlier this month show there has been a 5 per cent rise in the number of people holding a temporary visa in June this year compared with the same time last year.

The government is under pressure over the issue as Labor argues student and working-holiday visas are being misused.

Mr Tudge has previously said the main growth in short-term visas came from international students in the lucrative university sector and he told The Australian this week this was likely to change.

“It’s likely the temporary migration figures will come down over the next 12 months because it’s likely student numbers will come off, that fewer temporary skilled migrants, as well as we will no longer have the peak obviously with the humanitarians with the extra numbers (who were) coming in from Syria,” Mr Tudge said.

In 2015 the government said Australia would agree to resettle an additional 12,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees who were residing in camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. In March last year, immigration authorities said 10,000 of these people had arrived with the rest to arrive in following months.

As recently as April, the government was talking up healthy international student figures, with 542,000 students from more than 190 countries enrolling in Australia as of April — 13 per cent more than for the same period last year.

But opposition employment spokesman Brendan O’Connor has said there needed to be a crackdown on people working on student and working-holiday visas, arguing a cap for those visas should be considered as “a last resort” because they were being misused too frequently.

Bill Shorten has said there has been an “out of control increase” in temporary work visas, playing on community concern they were costing local jobs. “What they don’t tell everyone is that under the Liberals the number of people coming here temporarily with visas that give them work rights in Australia has blown out,” Mr Shorten has said. “This is at a time when you’ve got youth unemployment, when you’ve got young people (who) can’t get apprenticeships and you’ve got wage stagnation.”

After The Australian revealed the government had lowered the permanent immigration rate earlier this year, Mr Tudge said the figures were the lowest in a decade and likely to stay that way.

“Last year the permanent migration came in at about 162,000, and this year it may well be a similar figure,” Mr Tudge said. Amid leadership tensions in Canberra, a government source talked down previous expectations of an imminent announcement of a new population policy — which the government has said could force new migrants to stay in a regional area for a number of years — saying it was more likely to be revealed in the next few weeks.

While Mr O’Connor said in July it was “worth examining” proposals to encourage migrants into the regions, there are doubts about the policy within Labor.