Insights
Can Chinese citizens holding an Australian visa enter New Zealand visa-free? Everything you need to know about the NZeTA tourist visa — and why Bridging visas don’t qualify. Starting this month, Chinese passport holders with a valid Australian tourist, work, or student visa who enter New Zealand from Australia can travel visa-free and stay for up to 3 months. This
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The Department has today released the state nomination quota usage for this financial year up to 30 September. All states have so far received only a small allocation of interim quota, so Q1 of 2025-26 can be considered the coldest (and most meagre) state nomination data in history (see hero image). Now let’s look at each state in turn New
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Back from a hiking break — officially returning to work! Today we’re sharing a fairly complicated case that was granted in the past two weeks. Applicant’s situation The client lodged their Subclass 190 application back in 2023, with one or two rounds of further-information requests along the way. By the time they came to us, the Department had already issued
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Western Australia released its first invitation round for this financial year yesterday. As previewed, it was an interim quota round with a small number of invitations, and today’s official report confirms this — 420 pre-invitations in total (header image). All invitations went to the highest-priority occupations in the construction trades, including electricians, plumbers and carpenters. Only the Sch2 and local-graduate
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WA has just updated its state nomination policy for the 2025-26 financial year The good news is that the occupation list hasn’t changed significantly. Compared with Canberra, which removed nearly 50 occupations, WA has remained steady. To check whether an occupation is on the list, you can still use the Occupation Search tool on the WA website (Figure 2). What
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Early today — more accurately, last night — good news came out of the state-nomination quota campaign. The media reported that Victoria, Queensland and South Australia have joined Western Australia in petitioning the federal government for more quota allocations, so this time WA isn’t alone (header image). Both Victoria and WA had their Premiers speak publicly (image 2); in South
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This morning we attended the Tasmania 25-26 financial-year new-policy briefing. The focus was on filling in the detail. New-financial-year quota As of 14 October, the final quota has still not been confirmed. Only a small amount of interim quota is available, and the interim quota has already been used up (header image). Yesterday WA announced that its quota this year
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Last Friday, the Assistant Minister for Immigration announced at the MIA event that this year’s state nomination quotas would be cut. Only a few days later, WA has now received word — the federal government is slashing approximately 1/3 of its places, reducing the allocation from 5,000 last year down to 3,400. According to news reports, the WA Premier is
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Victoria announced early this morning that invitations would be issued today. This is the first round of invitations for this financial year, and also the second state to release pre-invitations this financial year. The previous round of pre-invitations was issued by Canberra in September. Overall, this round continues the policy of prioritising onshore applicants, and employment remains the key to
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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
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