In his own words: Immigration Minister Andrew Giles
A transcript of Capital Brief's interview with Andrew Giles ahead of the release of a new migration strategy for the nation.
This transcript has been edited for length, clarity and readability.
Immigration Minister Andrew Giles:
On the visa backlog
We've got the backlog down. The temporary skills visas on hand is down by 70%. So that number that was around about a million is roughly down to the number we've roughly wanted to be - the 500,000 to 600,000 mark. A million is too many. Obviously zero on hand would represent another significant problem for the government.
Why 400,000 net migration is too high
If you look at our budget figures we’re looking at a trajectory back towards 235,000. That’s what the budget papers show, and that would be the historical number of what we would be looking for.
What we have been seeing is something that's more than just a catch-up from COVID. One of the issues that we have been looking at is how strong the demand for, for example, international student visas has been. And a big piece of work for our government is looking at what has been happening and the sort of policy interventions that we can apply to this. It's really interesting to see this is not the phenomenon that's exclusive to Australia - the UK and Canada in particular are dealing with very similar issues where the demand for these forms of visas in particular has been much greater than we've seen.
It requires a whole of government policy response, particularly bringing together not just as we've often talked about since coming to government, the immigration function and the skills function, but looking at how our education policy settings are working, and to ensure that they are always operating in the national interest that we're supporting that critical export industry, but maintaining its integrity at the same time we’re maintaining the integrity of the visa system.
