He is one of the most vocal Labor MPs advocating for migrants, and a former member of the Joint Standing Committee on Migration.

He began by supporting the prioritisation of offshore skilled permanent resident applicants, calling it “clearly the right decision at this time”.

But he warned that one measure alone is not enough —if execution capacity is not increased, “the Department will continue to be the one responsible for causing human suffering and economic hardship”.

“Businesses, the international education sector, and families across Australia are desperate because of the black hole that is the visa and entry processing system. My office sees many sad, angry, and desperate people in our correspondence every single day.”

We needmore staff to process visas, in order to clear the backlog and cut waiting times — that much is obvious.

He toowelcomed the new Albanese Labor Government’s attention to permanent residence grants.

But he urged the governmentnot to forget those who are onshorethey quietly contributed throughout the pandemic. “We are hearing the frustration of onshore applicants , who made sacrifices, staying in Australia during COVID without any support.”

*A note of clarification here: the vast majority of pandemic-era support payments went to citizens and permanent residents, though some schemes — such as the widely available Disaster Payment — were open to non-PR holders.

“We have heard from skilled migration applicants who already met the eligibility criteria,but have been waiting for two years (referring primarily to Subclass 887 applicants’ complaints) — without the certainty that PR provides,they cannot plan their lives, and they carry an enormous psychological burden. Being trapped onshore in a cycle of bridging visas for an extended period can mean delaying their children’s schooling, continuing to pay expensive international student fees, and facing all sorts of barriers when it comes to housing.

This order of priorityis only the very first step in dealing with the enormous backlog.

“When we are talking about close to one million cases in the backlog, this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

And with the backlog of nearly one million visa applications, roughly one third are family stream visas.

“(Prioritising offshore skilled permanent residence applicants) may mean having to redirect resources away from processing temporary migration, family, or humanitarian visa applications —if I were sponsoring a spouse or applying for a humanitarian visa, I would be furious about this.”

*Anna Boucher made this point about partner migration waiting a long time because she was likely looking at the Department’s official website, which shows that 90% of applications in the processing queue have been waiting 20 months or more. While visa applications are assessed case by case, in practice, based on what we have seen, partner migration is still moving at a fairly fast overall pace — essentially no slowdown since the start of the pandemic. We have seen multiple offshore Subclass 309 and onshore Subclass 820 applications granted within six months.

In addition, her comments on the migration discussion at the September Employment and Skills Summit were quite balanced.

Migration numbers will certainly be one of the key issues at the summit. Rather than simply echoing business and employer groups who have long pushed for more migrants, she believes it is important tofind a middle ground in the debate — otherwise it risks stoking xenophobia.

“It is like a picture where you not only need to enlarge its size,you also need to improve its resolution, building broader public awareness of migration plans,about how important it is, and also about how complex it is just to make it work for everyone’s benefit.”

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