Higher visa fees may boost government revenue, but they do little to fix Australia's growing immigration challenges, writes Dr Abul Rizvi.
FROM 1 JULY 2026, the Government has significantly increased visa application fees.
No clear rationale for the increases, which generally average 25% on top of existing very high fees, has been offered. While the Coalition and One Nation will not object to these, the fee increases will do little to address the three main immigration risks the Government faces. It needs to address these more directly.
The application fee increases are significant (see Table 1).
The three key immigration risks facing the Government are failing to:
- hit the net migration targets the Prime Minister has now publicly committed to (245,000 in 2026-27 and 225,000 from 2207-28);
- reduce the rapidly rising and illegally engineered partner visa application backlog, which would now be approaching 120,000; and
- increase removals/returns of the rapidly rising backlog of unsuccessful asylum seekers. The backlog of asylum seekers refused at the primary stage and not departed is now around 108,000. Those refused at the primary stage and the Administrative Review Tribunal now number over 68,000.
The fee increases will do little to address these risks and could indeed make things worse. They do nothing to address problems in visa design, skills targeting or visa integrity.
I have found no evidence that the increased revenue from the fee increase will be used to address any of the massive backlogs or help reduce net migration. The fee increases reflect lazy government taking advantage of the current anti-immigration sentiment.
Dr Abul Rizvi is an Independent Australia columnist and former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration. You can follow Abul on Twitter @RizviAbul or Bluesky @abulrizvi.bsky.social.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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