At least 230 citizens of the United Kingdom applied for asylum in Australia in the last year, as Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke finalises a plan to deter non-meritorious claims and tighten the migration system around people the government says are staying longer than they should.
Who Pays for the Backlog
The numbers tell the story of a system built to sort, reject, and contain. During the last financial year, 21,600 refugee claims were made between July last year and June this year. Almost 28,000 claims were assessed in that same period, and about 85 per cent were rejected. The list of people now living in Australia with a failed protection visa claim has climbed past 111,000 for the first time. That backlog has become a headache for the Albanese government as so-called “visa overstayers” turn into a hot political issue for the Coalition and One Nation.
The people at the bottom of that pile are the ones who wait. There were 37,503 protection visa refusals being appealed in the Administrative Review Tribunal at the end of June, and those cases take a median of almost three years to finalise. In the last financial year, 8 per cent of asylum appeals were successful, while 75 per cent maintained the original visa refusal. The machinery grinds on. The people caught in it do the waiting.
What the State Wants
Burke proposed a tougher regime to his cabinet colleagues earlier this month. This masthead reported on Friday that he wanted to boost compliance by sending out more immigration officers to track down and deport overstayers exploiting the system. Other reports from the ABC also said Burke wanted to restrict the work and appeal rights of asylum seekers. Ministers were reportedly concerned about how that would look to migrant communities, not about the damage itself, with worries that it could be seen as an ICE-style, Donald Trump-like move or weaponised by the Greens in a similar light.
The Department of Home Affairs has already been laying the groundwork. Earlier this year, it issued warnings on social media saying it had seen indications that more UK and Irish nationals were being told to apply for asylum “just to extend their stay in Australia”. One post said, “This is seriously bad advice,” and paired the warning with a tongue-in-cheek graphic aimed at working holidaymakers. The post invited UK migrants to enjoy “an Aussie ‘winter’, WA sunsets, the Bondi to Coogee coastal walk, feeling ‘at home’ in St Kilda and travelling halfway across the globe just to flat-share with someone from the same zone”. What it said was not on the list: “abusing Australia’s visa system to extend your stay”.
Who Gets Squeezed
Burke’s prospective crackdown is being fiercely resisted by the Refugee Council of Australia, which warned that stripping work rights and due process from genuine refugees would jeopardise the country’s humanitarian program. The council said, “The answer to backlogs is better decision-making, not fewer rights.” It also said, “People seeking asylum must be able to work legally and support themselves while their claims are determined. Removing that right will instead increase the risk of poverty, homelessness and reliance on charities that are already under significant pressure.”
The council added that a wrong decision could have devastating consequences for someone fleeing persecution. “Removing safeguards that allow decisions to be challenged does not solve delays or backlogs: it makes it harder to identify and correct mistakes,” it said. That’s the part the apparatus never likes to say out loud. The delay becomes the punishment, and the punishment lands on people with the least power to absorb it.
Data from the latest financial year shows applicants from China, at 2,814, and India, at 2,786, continued to lead the volume of claims. There’s also been an increase in applicants from Indonesia, at 1,487, and Fiji, at 1,073, in the last two years. A small portion of applicants from those countries were deemed to be genuine refugees last financial year.
The UK numbers have become the latest political prop. The 198 applications reported from UK citizens in 2025-26 were presented as a sign the system remains susceptible to non-meritorious claims, especially since recent data suggests no UK citizens have been successful in their applications. An additional 32 people from the UK applied for asylum in July. An uptick in UK claims from September, October and November 2025, and March and April 2026, marked the first time that British applicants made enough applications to be publicly reported in department data.
There were also 105 protection visa refusals being contested by UK citizens in the Administrative Review Tribunal at the end of June, and 87 of those had been launched in the last 12 months. The Department of Home Affairs believes British and Irish people are being encouraged to apply for asylum by migration agents as a backdoor to stay in Australia longer. Abul Rizvi said the government’s investment in processing resources had helped reduce the asylum application rate, which is now lower than the 10-year average. But he said, “What they haven’t done is put more money into compliance.” He added, “The key is targeting the money well. This is a space where you can waste money easily and achieve very little – just ask Mr Trump.” He said neither Labor nor the Coalition had been able to get the situation under control while in government and pushed for targeted strategies for different groups of people. “The focus should be people who have most recently been refused because they have not embedded themselves into the community,” he said. “There’s also a balance between carrots and sticks here. If you can find a way of encouraging someone to depart, it’s less expensive than deporting them.”