Fact: Australia’s immigration system is perverse. It’s clunky. It’s a maze of paperwork. It encourages people to temporarily work here and then stay forever with no rights. We have a system that just doesn’t work.
According to an inquiry into this system, “The migration system is neither fast nor efficient and is often perceived as unfair. Users, current and potential migrants, and businesses find the system unnecessarily complex and difficult to navigate at all levels.”
What’s more, Australia’s immigration system:
- Doesn’t help women score enough employment opportunities
- Doesn’t help our humanitarian immigrant communities excel
- Makes some migrants wait 40 years for their parents to permanently join them
Fortunately though, the Australian Government wants to fix this broken system. Better yet, they have a plan to do so.
At a speech for the National Press Club, our Minister for Home Affairs, Clare O’Neil, detailed how she wants things to change.
“Part of our work will be simplifying our visa system, with the aim to strongly reduce the number of visa categories,” said O’Neil. “There is just no need for things to be this complicated.”
What’s more, Clare O’Neil wants there to be better pathways in place to turn some of our temporary workers into permanent citizens. She doesn’t believe anyone in Australia should be in a strange immigration limbo.
As O’Neil said, “We need to avoid policies and conditions that create ‘permanent temporariness.’ This means clearer pathways for the skilled workers we need and clarity for the migrants that have less of a prospect of becoming a permanent resident.”
But what about migrant women? Will the government provide them with more employment opps? Well, that’s the plan. Clare O’Neil thinks that if Australia makes certifying certain overseas accreditations easier, then more migrant women will be able to slay.
“We can see really clearly in the data that partners of skilled migrants are not engaging with the labour market to the degree that their qualifications suggest that they should be… Particularly for migrant women,” said O’Neil. Often the problem is they have skills and qualifications they earned overseas, and we have this very cumbersome process of recognising those qualifications.”
However, Clare O’Neil didn’t discuss how we can help our humanitarian immigrant communities flourish. She also didn’t talk about how we can get the parents of some migrants here faster. So, there are still some issues that might need more platforming. There’s also a long road to fixing this mess.
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