Australia's migration system is no longer creaking under pressure — it is buckling. What should be a straightforward, rules-based program for genuine international students has mutated into a sprawling, self-sustaining rort that now threatens to swallow the entire visa framework. The latest testimony from Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) chief Michael Hawkins, who told Senate Estimates that international-student appeals are "overwhelming" the system, is not simply an alarm bell. It's confirmation that the patient has already bled out and the doctors are still arguing about the diagnosis.
This crisis didn't appear overnight. It is the predictable endpoint of a decade of governments too timid to enforce their own rules and too addicted to international education revenue to admit that parts of the sector were degenerating into diploma mills. And into this vacuum stepped thousands of visa-holders who discovered that Australia's bureaucracy is slow, cautious, and paralysed by its own good intentions. Once you understand the incentives, the behaviour writes itself: arrive on a student visa, barely attend classes, work cash-in-hand beyond legal hours, and when the Department finally moves to cancel the visa, lodge an appeal or an asylum claim, not because you fear persecution, but because you know you've just bought yourself another year or two in the country.
Frank Chung's reporting made it explicit months ago: the asylum system is being clogged with claims from international students who suddenly "discover" they are refugees the moment compliance officers come knocking. Former Immigration Deputy Secretary Abul Rizvi estimates up to 50,000 people may already be living unlawfully in Australia after exhausting every avenue of appeal. Add that to the tens of thousands of cases trapped in the tribunal backlog and the picture is clear: this is not a system anymore; it is a holding pattern for those who should have departed long ago.
What makes the situation almost farcical is that everyone involved knows exactly how the game is played. Education providers turn a blind eye because student numbers mean income. Migration agents quietly advise clients on delay tactics. Employers benefit from cheap, compliant labour. Students themselves operate rationally within the perverse incentives Australia has built. The only party not benefiting is the Australian public, which is left with an immigration system whose integrity has been systematically hollowed out for years.
And through it all, the government maintains the polite fiction that this is simply "pressure on the system," as though we were dealing with high-performing students trapped in administrative delays. No. This is a deliberate, predictable exploitation of a broken mechanism, one made possible by the refusal to distinguish between genuine applicants and opportunistic ones. The moment the asylum process became a de facto extension of lawful presence, the exploitation became inevitable. No country with a functioning border policy would allow the humanitarian system to become a stalling tactic for visa overstayers. Yet Australia continues to do exactly that, then feigns surprise when the backlog explodes.
Meanwhile, the ART is now drowning. Cases drag on not because of complexity but because of sheer volume. Every frivolous appeal consumes the tribunal's time, pushing legitimate cases further down the queue — genuine refugees, hardworking students, real skilled migrants all shoved aside so the system can process wave after wave of delay-based appeals that everyone knows will eventually fail. Procedural fairness has been twisted into procedural paralysis.
The political class likes to pretend that compassion and enforcement exist in opposition. They don't. A humane system must also be a credible one, and a credible one cannot tolerate serial abuse. Right now, Australia has the worst of both worlds: an immigration program that rewards gaming the system while punishing the innocent through endless delays and eroded public trust. The longer we avoid confronting the rorts, the nastier the correction will eventually be.
The truth is brutally simple. Australia must enforce its visa conditions or accept that it has surrendered effective control over its borders. There is no middle-ground fantasy where illegal work, bogus asylum claims, and endless appeals are tolerated indefinitely without consequence. The system is already off the rails. The only question is whether the government has the courage to put it back on track.
Until then, the rorts will grow, the backlogs will swell, and the notion of "international education" will continue to function as a polite euphemism for a migration free-for-all. The scam isn't on the fringes anymore — it is the system. And unless someone breaks the cycle, Australia will wake up to find that the borders remain open not by policy but by dysfunction.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2025/12/international-student-appeals-overwhelm-visa-system/