Is Australia's Immigration System Fit for Purpose?

ABC Radio National Breakfast put the question plainly. As skilled worker shortages continue, is Australia's immigration system fit for purpose.

Jackson Taylor, Principal Lawyer at Roam Migration Law, spoke about what employer sponsors experience day-to-day when they try to fill skill gaps, and why the current debate often misses the operational reality.

"The system's incredibly complex. I've been doing this for 18 years now, and even we get it wrong sometimes."

Where employers are seeing the biggest needs

Demand remains broad and consistent across the economy, Jackson said. Public healthcare and aged care continue to need staff. Multinationals are still moving people between countries. Shortages also show up across hospitality, mechanics, trades, and professional and managerial roles.

He added a reality check on construction. Occupation lists do not always translate into meaningful pipeline volume. Carpenters appear prominently in skilled migration settings, but the number coming through is small relative to the overall program. Sponsors trying to deliver projects on time feel that gap.

"Aged care, we still see a lot of demand from multinationals, just moving people around between countries."

Complexity is the commercial problem for sponsors

Jackson's key point was that the system often fails employers in avoidable ways. Many refusals do not come down to whether a role is genuine. They come down to technical requirements, and technical errors. The cost of getting it wrong is high, and large parts of the spend are non-refundable if an application is refused.

This is why many employers do not manage sponsorship internally, even when they have strong HR teams. The process has legal risk, financial risk, and timing risk.

"Many applications... are refused on technicalities rather than on substantive matters."

Processing times and planning risk

Processing volatility is another problem for employer sponsored visas. Even after lodgement, decision timeframes vary widely depending on the occupation and triage.

For sponsors, uncertainty is the core issue. Hiring plans, mobilisation windows, project start dates, and workforce retention settings all depend on predictable decision cycles. When timing stretches, employers either lose candidates or carry unfilled roles for longer than the business can absorb.

"It's taking anywhere from a month or two if you're lucky... the 50th percentile is four months, and then the 90th percentile is around seven months."

Where integrity should sit

Jackson's view is that integrity is necessary, but the system leans too heavily on front-end friction. He argued that stronger integrity outcomes come from what happens after approval. Monitoring, auditing, and post-decision enforcement are where misuse is detected and corrected. Without that, more paperwork at the start does not solve the underlying problem.

This is also where resourcing matters. If the audit function is small relative to the size of the program, enforcement becomes sporadic and public confidence drops, even when most sponsors are doing the right thing.

"Unless someone is actually doing the follow up investigation, auditing, monitoring, post decision, a lot of the applications are not going to be checked again."

What gets misunderstood in the headlines

Public debate often relies on raw movement numbers without context, Jackson said. Australia sees large annual movements in and out of the country across all visa types, and seasonal peaks can inflate how those figures look at a point in time. Those numbers are easy to use for alarmist narratives, especially after the post COVID rebound.

His point was that context matters. Trend lines matter. And the policy conversation needs to separate skilled migration and employer sponsorship from broader movement categories if the goal is serious reform rather than politics.

"It is easy for those seeking to make populist rhetorical points to use these sort of statistics and make it all sound very scary and dangerous."

A fit for purpose system

Taken together, Jackson's interview points to a simple balancing act.

Sponsors need a system that is easier to comply with, less prone to technical refusals, and more predictable in decision timing. The public needs confidence that integrity is enforced through real monitoring and auditing, not only through front end administrative burden.

A fit for purpose approach would look like this:

• Clearer decision criteria and fewer technical traps.
• More predictable service standards for employer sponsored processing.
• A better risk based model. Faster for compliant sponsors.
• More scrutiny where risk is higher.
• Stronger post decision monitoring and enforcement resourced at scale.

Closing thought

Australia's migration settings will stay in the political spotlight. Employers still need to hire, deliver, and retain talent while the debate runs. Jackson's message was that the system needs to match operational reality, and that starts with reducing technical failure points and investing in enforcement where it counts.

"The level of detail, the level of administration here is really overlooked, and when you just point to a raw number and start saying, oh, this is too many, if you don't have the context, then that's quite scary for people."

Roam Migration Law works with Australian employers on sponsorship strategy, visa delivery, and ongoing compliance.

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