Some colleagues attended the MIA annual conference today, where someone asked Assistant Minister for Immigration Julian Hill about the continuing delay in this financial year’s state nomination quotas
Image 2 is his full reply in Chinese and English. The short version: there is a significant backlog of 190 and 491 visas from previous years, driven by a number of factors — for example, the floodgates opening in FY22-23 when the border first reopened, state nomination uptake being higher than expected, and so on. As a result, processing times are now long, so the strategy is to throttle intake at the front end and prioritise applications already lodged. Quotas will be reduced this year — “everyone’s gonna take a bit of a haircut, but I am working through it at this moment.” Whether that haircut is my 3 mm buzz cut or Ron’s flowing long hair, we don’t yet know.
This statement really came out of nowhere — here are my thoughts
Will this financial year’s state nomination quotas be announced very late, or perhaps not at all?
I don’t think so. It’s already late enough, and I see the flurry of activity from the states as a positive signal. The states have been in discussions with the Commonwealth for some time, and their messaging and actions follow a clear trajectory. In July and August I believe they genuinely had no information to share, so they stayed quiet; by September there were some early signs, with individual state nominations starting to move; and by late September / early October, policies and openings have progressively become clearer.
Julian talks about backlogs. I pulled the 491/190 backlog figures at 30 June over the past four financial years (header image). The past few years have indeed been spent clearing the FY22-23 debt, but it has been working: compared with end-of-FY22-23, the end-of-FY24-25 backlog is 36,000 lower. The backlog remaining at 30 June FY24-25 will need to be cleared using this financial year’s quota plus part of next year’s — which is actually a fairly normal situation. Grants and quotas roll over like this; in particularly extreme years in the past, it has taken more than two financial years’ worth of quota to catch up.
So why is Julian saying this?
I think it comes down to external pressure. Average processing times for 190 and 491 are currently around two years. A skilled migration PR taking two years to process is hard to accept anywhere. I also think this is probably one of the reasons for the leap-frog processing approach — to bring that average waiting time down.
How will state nomination quotas be reduced?
Taken at face value, overall quotas are likely to come down, but I don’t think it will be a 70% slash like FY23-24. Not every state will necessarily be reduced either — I’ve heard that, comparing each state against its own previous figures, there have been some adjustments this year, good and bad, rather than every state being cut uniformly across the board.
Right now, I just hope they release the numbers soon.
One more thing — I noticed a pretty funny detail: before answering the question, Julian actually checked with the moderator next to him whether “state nomination” meant 190 and 491. So you could say, the world really is just a……
