International students whose visas are refused will no longer be able to appeal the decision with an in-person hearing as the government moves to speed up tribunal reviews after being swamped with almost 50,000 cases of students already in Australia contesting their visa rejections.
Laws passed on Wednesday will allow the government to require that the Administrative Review Tribunal no longer hold oral hearings for certain migration appeals. It will be allowed to consider only written submissions in an effort to shave about an hour off each case review.
Attorney-General Michelle Rowland said that student visa refusals would be the first caseload targeted by the Albanese government. “These new measures are an important step towards enhancing the tribunal and ensuring that it uses its resources effectively,” she said.
The review system enables people to contest faulty bureaucratic decisions. But it has also become open to exploitation, by creating a backdoor for some people to extend their stays in Australia after their temporary visas run out. That’s because processing times are so long – several years, in the case of asylum claims – and starting an appeal enables people to remain in the country longer, even if their case is not meritorious.
This has been a significant issue with asylum seeker claims – more than 100,000 people live in the country with rejected refugee claims, about 40,000 of whom are still at the tribunal stage – but after the post-COVID student visa boom, there has been a sharp uptick in people contesting failed student visas as well.
Latest published figures from November 2025 showed there were 48,826 active student visa cases waiting to be heard in the Administrative Review Tribunal – a more than doubling of the caseload in under a year after the backlog hit 20,000 for the first time at the end of 2024.
The rate of freshly lodged cases is also far outpacing the tribunal’s ability to deal with them – in the five months between July 1 and November 30, there were 15,582 new cases launched, but only 4823 resolved. About 44 per cent of cases were set aside, 25 per cent were upheld, and 29 per cent were withdrawn.
The bottleneck means student visa appeals are taking a median time of one year and four months to run through the system – up from a less-than-11-month wait time at the end of 2024.
The boom in student appeals is a recent phenomenon that has escalated in the past two years, coinciding with an uptick in visa rejection rates for people who apply for student visas while already in the country on temporary visas.
In January 2024, there were only 257 appeals in a month at a time when the onshore student visa rejection rate was about 10 per cent. But appeals have soared to average about 3000 students a month, according to the latest data, alongside an uplift in onshore visa rejection rates that now typically hover between 20 and 30 per cent.
Former immigration department official Abul Rizvi said most cases came down to whether a person was a “genuine student” and so he didn’t expect the outcomes to change too much. “But it should enable the ART to make decisions more quickly,” he said.
“More students may, however, take the matter to the Federal Court arguing they didn’t get a fair opportunity to put their arguments.”
A government spokesperson said tribunal members were expected to save about one hour per case by eliminating oral hearings.
The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre raised concerns that paper-based decisions increase the risk of mistakes and were less accessible to people with language barriers. However, the government said asylum appeals were excluded from the new laws because of their complexity, and would continue to be heard orally.
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