Chief Executive and Principal Registrar at the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART), Michael Hawkins, informed Senate Estimates that the ART was being overwhelmed by an “explosion” of international students appealing their visa rejections.
Senate Estimates was told that the ART is struggling to process a whopping 46,590 student visa decisions as of October 31, 2025, with student visa cases representing 38% of the ART’s total caseload, with more than 13,000 one to two years old.
Hawkins warned that the ART “simply don’t have the resources” to process the claims. And when asked whether staff were triaging student visa cases, Hawkins was blunt.
“Well, there’s not a lot of triaging going on because we simply don’t have the resources to attack the study visa cohort”, he said.
The latest temporary visa data from the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) revealed that a record 2,925,600 million temporary visa holders were in Australia as of end-October, up by around 500,000 from the pre-pandemic peak.
(c) Leith van Onselen
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