Immigration agents will have to undertake annual ethics training and regular reminders of their responsibilities if they want to continue helping people get Australian visas.
Labour’s new measures aim to improve fairness in a system where agents have recently been sanctioned for using template information and false information in visa applications, and charging applicants unlawfully the costs of their employer’s sponsorship.
Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs Julian Hill said stronger professional requirements would apply to registered agents from April. The government will also limit the number of hours of online training that agents can complete in a day.
The sharper scrutiny comes amid public concern about immigration levels: The latest Political Monitor poll, conducted for this masthead, showed that many Australians thought the numbers were too high, and that the Albanian government was managing the portfolio in a disorganized and unmanaged manner.
New migration data will be published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics later this week, but overall migration rates remain higher than they were before the COVID pandemic, although they have fallen significantly since their post-pandemic peak.
Voters in the Solution survey were asked what they thought about the latest immigration levels of about 316,000 new arrivals each year, and 185,000 permanent residents. About 58 percent said that was too high – up from 53 percent for a similar question last December and 49 percent in September.
Those most likely to be concerned were One Nation voters (86 per cent) and Unionist voters (70 per cent), although among Labor and Greens voters there were still more people who thought immigration was too high than those who thought it was the same or too low.
Among respondents who thought the number was too high, most (81 percent) cited housing shortages and affordability as the reason. Almost two-thirds also described pressure on services as well as their belief that mass immigration could lead to crime, anti-social behavior and poor social cohesion.
But there has been little improvement in how people see the government’s handling of immigration, even as more than half still believe Labor is managing the portfolio in a disorganized and unmanaged way.
Union and One Nation want to benefit from the issue; Opposition leader Angus Taylor took over the Liberal leadership last monthclaiming that the number of immigrants has been too high and the rates too low.
However, Taylor has yet to reveal the Coalition’s policies detailing how he intends to raise standards and tackle the “zero migration” hardline promoted by Pauline Hanson.
Labour, meanwhile, points to how it has been cracking down on dodgy immigration agents and reducing immigration numbers – although Home Secretary Tony Burke has declined to provide a target figureinstead directing the opposition to name which groups of immigrants it wants to cut.
Hill said the new requirements for agents are part of “the government’s overall work to strengthen the integrity of the immigration system and clean up the mistakes and policy arrangements we inherited”.
Several new measures implemented by the Labor Act on the recommendations of the Nixon review, which former interior minister Clare O’Neil ordered after the 2022 election. The audit found poor management of the immigration system it had allowed organized crime groups involved in human trafficking and drug trafficking to flourish.
Along with the new agent training requirements, the government will update its list of education providers offering courses for new agents and increase the number of providers that can assess agents’ English language levels..
These standards are maintained by the Office of the Migration Agents Registration Authority – the government regulator. Hill said Labor had tripled the agency’s staff because of the Nixon review, enabling it to increase enforcement.
The agency has sanctioned 14 agents this financial year and issued 61 penalties since 2021-22.
“While most registered immigration agents operate with professionalism and integrity, those who engage in wrongdoing will be caught – it’s not a matter of if, but when,” Hill said. “Anyone concerned about the agency’s behavior is encouraged to file a complaint.”
In one example, a 20-year-old agent received a five-year ban because he knowingly provided false information in clients’ visa applications, and used template statements that did not reflect the individual circumstances of each person.
In another, an agency that has been working for 13 years received a two-year suspension for an ethical violation discovered after a client complaint: the agency had illegally passed on the costs of sponsorship for temporary skills shortages to an applicant, when they should have been paid by the employer.
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Natassia Chrysanthos is a Federal Political Correspondent. He has previously reported on immigration, health, social affairs and the NDIS from the Canberra Parliament.Connect through X or email address.
