Parents are waiting more than 30 years for an Australian visa. The new home affairs minister needs to act

If overseas-born Australians want to sponsor a parent to join them permanently in Australia, they can go down one of two routes.

The expensive path is a contributory parent or aged parent visa with a price tag of close to $50,000 per person. The cheaper option is a standard parent or aged parent visa, which costs “only” $5,125, but takes much longer.

The government sets an annual cap of 8,500 parent visas, with about eight in ten granted to “contributory” applicants. This is 4,000 more places than the Coalition granted in its last year in office, but is still way too few to meet demand.

As a result, the logjam grows. On June 30 2023, Home Affairs had 140,615 parent visa applications on hand. A year later, it was 151,596.

A year ago, Home Affairs advised new applicants that a contributory parent visa “may take at least 12 years to process”. Now it says the time frame is 14 years. This is ridiculous, but the wait for the cheaper, standard visa is beyond absurd — it’s now stretched to 31 years.

Many applicants will die before their cases are considered. They, and their Australian families, are condemned to live in limbo, clinging to forlorn hope.

“Providing an opportunity for people to apply for a visa that will probably never come seems both cruel and unnecessary,” said the expert panel reviewing the migration system.

Overhauling the system

Early in its tenure, the government commissioned the panel that found the migration system “not fit for purpose”.

A second report by former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon revealed “grotesque” visa abuses.

Former Home Affairs minister Clare O’Neil declared the system broken and unveiled a new migration strategy that aspired to wholesale reform instead of further tinkering.

She and then immigration minster Andrew Giles set in train significant work, including an overhaul of the points system used to select permanent skilled migrants and a review of settings intended to attract them to regional Australia.

But they prioritised fixing skilled migration ahead of addressing family migration, particularly the dysfunctional system of parent visas. It’s a long-term mess that keeps getting worse.

Political distractions

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke says he was in almost constant briefings in the days after becoming home affairs minister, his focus on a pending High Court decision that could again declare government policy unlawful.

The opposition hammered the government over its handling of the November ruling that indefinite immigration detention was unconstitutional. Burke doesn’t want to be caught out if the court upholds a challenge to the legislation it passed in response.

Lawyers for stateless man known as YBFZ, argue imposing curfews and ankle bracelets on all released detainees breaches the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary.

But managing the political fallout from legal battles distracts from other profound problems in Australia’s migration system, including the tens of thousands awaiting parent visas.

What’s the solution?

As I wrote previously, the expert panel suggested shifting to a lottery system as New Zealand has in place. New Zealand grants 2,000 places annually to parents who entered its immigration processing queue before October 2022. Applications submitted after that date go into a pool with 500 spots up for grabs in a ballot. Once New Zealand clears its backlog, it can implement a lottery for all parent visas.

Australia could do something similar. It could grant 7,500 visas a year to parents waiting in the queue and offer 1000 by ballot. At that rate, though, it would still take two decades to clear the backlog.

Drawing names from a hat would at least remove the inequity of allowing those who can stump up $50,000 to jump forward in the visa line. But tens of thousands of families would still be denied a visa.

Canada introduced to a lottery system in 2015 and its parent program offers 20,500 places.

The chances of winning remain slim — about one in seven. More than 100,000 applicants miss out and disappointed families will probably keep trying, year after year. They may not be stuck at the back of an endless queue, but they too are left hoping against hope for a visa that may never come.

An alternative is to scrap permanent parent migration altogether. Extended families could still come together using temporary parent visas. While expensive and problematic, the temporary parent visa allows an initial stay of three to five years, time to be in Australia while grandchildren are very young or to provide support in times of need.

Scrapping permanent parent migration would be the honest approach, since neither Labor nor the Coalition will expand the parent visa program to meet demand. Skilled migration is their top priority. They see parents as a drain on the system, consuming more in services than they contribute through work and taxes.

Politics vs policy

But Labor and the Coalition know scrapping permanent parent migration would upset overseas-born voters in marginal seats. This is central to the parent conundrum: the major parties’ immigration policies sit in tension with their electoral strategies.

Whatever government decides to do in the long-term, as a new minister, Burke has an opportunity to act decisively and stop the problem getting worse. He could freeze new applications for permanent parent visas pending a thorough review of the options while Home Affairs nibbles away at the backlog of 150,000 applications.

It is unconscionable to let the queue grow longer, fostering hope for a visa that will never come. Eventually hard decisions will have to be made.

Previous ministers have kicked this can down the road for more than a decade. Now it’s at Burke’s feet.

Peter Mares received funding from The Scanlon Foundation Research Institute to research and write The Parent Conundrum, an extensive narrative on parent migration to Australia published in July 2023, but the views in this article are the views of the author alone and do not represent the position of the Scanlon Foundation. Peter Mares is a fellow at the Centre for Policy Development, a sessional moderator with Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership, and sits on the advisory committee to the Centre for Equitable Housing. He is a regular contributor to Inside Story magazine.