Australia’s migration system has entered uncharted territory. The number of people on bridging visas has now exceeded 400,000—a level described by former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration, Dr Abul Rizvi, as “an astonishing number of temporary entrants whose applications sit in a processing backlog”. Writing in Independent Australia, Dr Rizvi argues that this surge reflects deeper structural issues in visa design, processing capacity, and government priorities that stretch back nearly a decade.
Dr Rizvi’s assessment is a reflection of what happens when policy focus narrows to border protection while neglecting administrative management. “Former Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton and his Secretary, Mike Pezzullo, were asleep to the challenge of managing a complex visa system,” he says. “They thought immigration policy was just about boat arrivals.”
The accompanying chart of bridging visa holders shows how this backlog didn’t arise overnight. Numbers began climbing steeply from around 2015–16 and accelerated through the pandemic years, peaking above 400,000 by August 2025. Each bar in the chart represents a year-end total, highlighting the rapid rise in bridging visa issuance as processing delays deepened. The turning points align almost perfectly with policy shifts and administrative bottlenecks identified in Rizvi’s commentary.
The 2010 Migration to Australia Since Federation report by the Parliamentary Library offers useful context for understanding the roots of this complexity. It warned that migration data are often misinterpreted, particularly when temporary and permanent flows are conflated. “Australia’s recent population growth predominantly reflects a significant increase in temporary, not permanent migration,” the report noted, emphasising that net overseas migration (NOM) figures include both long-term and short-term arrivals. Even then, the report identified a “significant increase in the number of people entering the country on temporary visas”, especially students and skilled migrants.
That early caution now looks prescient. Rizvi argues that what began as a temporary administrative problem has become a structural one. “It reflects a combination of inadequate visa processing resources, poor visa design and the consequences of a huge blowout in net migration driven by students and working holidaymakers,” he says. In August 2025 alone, Australia recorded record highs for onshore higher education and temporary graduate applications, suggesting that the backlog is unlikely to ease soon.
During the pandemic, policy decisions to retain temporary entrants to fill labour shortages exacerbated the imbalance. When borders reopened, demand surged again, leaving the system struggling to cope. The Administrative Review Tribunal (A.R.T.) now faces a record migration-related backlog of nearly 60,000 cases, plus more than 40,000 asylum applications still pending review. Many of these applicants, as Rizvi points out, must remain in the country on bridging visas while they wait.
The government’s recent reforms, including legislation to allow more cases to be processed “on the papers”, are partial measures. They might streamline the tribunal’s workload but do little to address what Rizvi describes as “years of neglect”. “Simply approving those applications was never a long-term solution,” he says. “With onshore student as well as other temporary and permanent applications again surging, the backlog grew rapidly in 2024 and the first half of 2025.”
The deeper issue, according to both Rizvi’s analysis and the 2010 report, is the shift from planned, measured migration to reactive management. The report noted that, historically, permanent migration programs were carefully controlled, reviewed annually, and adjusted to match labour needs. Temporary migration, on the other hand, “is usually not determined by government, but rather is demand driven”. That demand-led expansion has made the system far more volatile, amplifying the kind of fluctuations now visible in the bridging visa data.
What makes bridging visas a telling metric is that they sit at the intersection of all these forces—administrative delay, temporary migration surges, and policy indecision. They reveal not just how many are waiting, but how the system has evolved to depend on uncertainty. Each bridging visa is, by definition, a promise deferred.
Dr Rizvi has long argued that Australia’s migration framework needs a holistic redesign. His call for “a long-term plan to manage the consequences of the blowout in net migration” suggests that patchwork fixes won’t be enough. The challenge isn’t merely clearing the queue; it’s ensuring that temporary entrants aren’t perpetually trapped between categories while the system resets around them.
The 2010 Parliamentary Library report ended with a reminder that migration statistics must be interpreted cautiously and in context. Fifteen years later, the same principle holds true. Data without design leads to drift—and Australia’s bridging visa surge may be the clearest signal yet that the drift has gone on too long.
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