PhD visa delays ‘harming Australia’s prosperity’

Australian home affairs minister Clare O’Neil has vowed to speed up the processing of foreign doctoral students’ visa applications, saying her country cannot afford to alienate intelligent people during a “fierce competition” for global talent.

“Having young people studying PhDs in our country on areas of significance to our nation is crucially important, and we are not going to continue to see that if we are forcing people to wait for visas,” Ms O’Neil told the National Press Club in Canberra.

“This is a driver of our productivity, our wealth, our prosperity, our future.”

Asked whether it was acceptable that doctoral candidates had been kept waiting as long as three years without resolution of their visa submissions, Ms O’Neil said some applications were “more complicated than others”, adding that her government had inherited a caseload of almost a million unprocessed visas when it won the election in May.

“We’ve got to get the system working for the country, and we are really trying to do that at the moment. But I can tell you it is turning the Titanic. Why wouldn’t we invite the best and brightest people from around the world to come and help us? Yet today, our immigration system doesn’t allow for anything of the sort. It’s complex, it’s bureaucratic, it lacks strategy, it’s expensive and glacially slow.”

She said that the immigration debate in Australia had centred almost exclusively on “how we keep people out, rather than what we do to get people here…in the middle of the biggest labour shortage we have experienced since the Second World War.

“We are in a fierce competition for global talent, but our competitors are well into the marathon while we are noodling around at the starting blocks.”

Last month Ms O’Neil announced that she had appointed Macquarie University chancellor Martin Parkinson, a former chief public servant and treasury secretary, to lead a comprehensive review of Australia’s migration system. His panel has been asked to provide “key priority recommendations”, including any proposals to reform the visa framework, by the end of February so that they can be funded in next year’s federal budget.

“Determining who should be invited to join us in our national endeavours is one of the most important things that the Australian government does,” Ms O’Neil told the Press Club. “We’re going to take a run at fixing it.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com