Tony Burke said international students will no longer be able to attach their families to student visas, as Australia’s Labor government unveiled a sweeping immigration crackdown tied to housing pressures and lower migration targets.
The Home Affairs Minister called the overhaul the “next stage” of migration policy on Thursday, 17 September 2026, and said the government now treated its net overseas migration forecasts as targets to meet. That’s the language of management from above: people, families and futures reduced to numbers on a ledger while the housing shortage gets used as the excuse for another round of control.
Who Pays for the Crackdown
Burke said there would be exceptions for PhD students and for citizens of Pacific and South-East Asian nations. He also said people who already had family attached to a visa and were already in Australia would not be separated. But for most international students, the door is closing. Family life gets sorted by the state, one visa at a time.
He said students who wanted to transfer between courses would have to apply for a new visa, part of a broader move against so-called visa hopping. The government is also changing the code governing migration agents so they can be sanctioned or deregistered for encouraging clients to lodge non-meritorious claims. The apparatus keeps tightening, and every new rule reaches down to the people trying to move, study, work or stay.
The government said it would keep net overseas migration at about 245,000 this year and 225,000 in the next financial year. Burke said the figures were now a target because of the housing shortage, while also arguing that lower migration would not solve the housing crisis on its own. He said migration needed to slow enough for housing supply to catch up, but also said the housing shortage was not caused by immigration. The contradiction sits right there, neat and bureaucratic.
Detention, Removal, and the Old Threat
Burke said the government would crack down on visa overstayers and increase its capacity to detain and remove people who remain in Australia after their visas expire. The package includes 100 additional compliance officers and 250 new detention beds, and the government is also examining whether the former quarantine facility in Melbourne could be repurposed. He said he wanted to restore a pre-2015 deterrent in which detention encouraged overstayers to leave.
That’s the state speaking plainly about coercion. More officers. More beds. More capacity to cage and expel. The language is clinical, but the purpose isn’t subtle.
The minister also said the government was considering legislation for an expression of interest mechanism to control student arrivals and for measures targeting disingenuous protection visa claims, but said Labor did not at this stage have a likely pathway through parliament for new laws. He said the reason the government would not simply introduce its preferred migration legislation and negotiate support later was that people would exploit the system before the laws passed. Even the reform pitch comes wrapped in fear of delay, as if parliamentary procedure were the only thing standing between the public and chaos.
Burke said applicants from countries where more than 85 per cent of protection applications fail accounted for about 80 per cent of the processing caseload. He said people who lodge weak asylum claims after exhausting other visa pathways were abusing the system and holding up legitimate claims. The state sorts people into worthy and unworthy, then calls that administration.
Backpackers, Business, and the Queue
The changes also include a redesign of the points test for skilled migration, with housing construction trades to receive the same recognition as a university qualification. Ministerial Direction 119 will be changed to give processing priority to construction, healthcare, agriculture, fisheries and teaching after business backlash to an earlier decision. Burke said the government had issued a sweeping directive in July that pushed offshore skilled visa applications to the back of the queue, and that processing times had since blown out from a few days to more than a year in some cases.
For backpackers, Burke announced a ballot system for second- and third-year stays. Processing will return to a faster pace for countries whose schemes require regional work to qualify for a second or third year, but eligibility for a second year will be capped at 45,000 places and applicants will still need to complete 88 days of regional work before entering the ballot. The third-year ballot will be limited to 5,000 places with a six-month regional work requirement. Burke said last year about 57,000 backpackers stayed in Australia for a second year and about 31,000 did a third year.
UK applications will be excluded from the faster processing because the scheme does not have a regional work requirement and is part of the UK-Australia free trade agreement. Burke said the number of UK backpackers in Australia had risen sharply since the agreement took effect during the pandemic, from about 17,000 to just under 80,000. Even the free trade deal gets folded into the machinery of sorting, limiting and delaying.
What Students and Universities Said
The announcement drew concern from universities, students and industry figures. ABC News reported that international education is worth about $55 billion to the Australian economy and that the sector feared the changes would damage Australia’s reputation abroad. Perth migration agent Manpreet Mann said he agreed with many of the measures but worried about what the family restrictions would mean for universities’ reputations and for “Australia as a brand.”
Universities Australia chief executive Luke Sheehy said Australia should be competing for the world’s best students and the skills, investment and ideas they bring, not competing to see who can drive them away fastest. Group of Eight Universities chief executive Vicki Thomson said there was a “race to the bottom” among political parties to see who could decimate the international education sector quickest.
Regional Universities Network chair and University of New England vice-chancellor Chris Moran said regional economies would be particularly hard hit and warned that previous tightening of visa allocations and success rates had already caused major funding gaps. He said universities would either have to shrink the higher education sector and the quality of the experience for Australians or replace the lost funds from other government funding.
International Students Representative Council of Australia president Weihong Liang said migration debates over housing and infrastructure should not blame international students collectively and should also consider social cohesion and the wellbeing of students and their families. Azizah Raihan, who is studying a Bachelor of Biomedicine at the University of Melbourne, said the news was pretty worrying and said she probably would not have come to Australia if she had not already had an uncle living here. Shilpi Jaiswal, an international student from Nepal studying in Sydney, said she had planned to have her parents visit for three months but was now very scared to apply for a visa. Sophia Stober, a design student from Sierra Leone and Nigeria, said her sister had planned to join her in Melbourne and that it was disheartening to hear she would not be able to come.
Burke rejected claims that Australia was a country of mass migration, calling them absurd, and said the country was on track to have 700,000 fewer people in 2030-31 than had been forecast before the pandemic. He said Australia’s migration peak after COVID was too high but was now 47 per cent lower. He also said migration was critical to the economies of the regions and cities, and defended foreign students as important job creators. He said there had been 15,000 construction workers enter Australia under Labor and zero yoga teachers, and said yoga teaching had been added to the migration skills list under the former Coalition government in a deal with India.
The debate came as One Nation unveiled a plan to push the country into negative net overseas migration for three years and then to 130,000 after that, while the Coalition was finalising a policy expected to target between 150,000 and 170,000 people. Burke criticised One Nation’s proposal to prevent skilled migrants from bringing spouses and children, saying about half of doctors and construction workers and two-thirds of nurses came to Australia with family. He said the government needed some control and certainty over migration numbers and that Australians wanted more control over different parts of the system.