Australia has banned foreign students from bringing their families along under stricter rules aimed at curbing immigration.
Revised immigration rules announced on Thursday mandate stricter processes for extending holiday visas, preventing international students from staying in the country indefinitely.
To get their visas renewed for longer stays, foreign students will now be required to choose a higher qualification to study for.
The rules, announced by home minister Tony Burke, come at a time when high immigration rates are becoming a political flashpoint in the country, not least because they are being blamed for the worst housing shortage in decades.
The hard-right One Nation party, which has been surging in recent polls, said this week it would slash the number of temporary migrants by 750,000 over three years to give Australians “breathing space”.
The party’s leader, Pauline Hanson, has campaigned against immigration for decades.
Mr Burke argued that immigration was Australia’s “strength”, but there needed to be a “high level of control”. He dismissed suggestions that the revised rules were politically motivated by One Nation’s rhetoric.
The far-right party has described its approach as “Australia first” and its policies have drawn comparisons to those of US president Donald Trump.
“It's simply demonstrably wrong to suspect that somehow this is a recent bit of work done to deal with a political climate," Mr Burke told reporters. “It's not.”
Under the new rules, all visitor visas will carry a “no further stay” provision preventing holders from remaining in Australia while applying for another visa category such as partner visa. The changes will not apply to working holidaymakers from the UK as agreed under the bilateral free trade agreement.
While the rules bar most international students from bringing their families, there are exemptions for foreigners already in Australia as well as those from the Pacific and Southeast Asia.
Mr Burke said that secondary applicants wouldn’t be allowed on most student visas.
Currently, spouses and partners of foreign students can work in Australia, although the number of hours they are permitted varies depending on the course of study.
"We will no longer be adding to the stock of students automatically being able to bring family members over," Mr Burke said.
He said that the government would implement new compliance measures, introduce 100 compliance officers, and repurpose a former quarantine facility in Melbourne as a detention centre.
“This is not the sort of operation that some people have seen on TV happening in other countries,” Mr Burke said in an apparent reference to the American immigration enforcement agency ICE.
The tougher rules are expected to bring annual net migration down to 225,000 by 2028 from around 300,000 now. The cost of living and immigration are consistently ranked among the top concerns for voters in Australia.
The government said dodgy migration agents would face new penalties for helping visa hoppers.
“Once they get here, and if they apply onshore, the process has been that they stay, and they’re put on a bridging visa,” Mr Burke said.
“It’s a double standard that really has no logic attached to it. But the consequence of that sort of double standard has been deeply problematic.”
He added that processing times for working holidaymaker visa applications would be stabilised to three months.
International education contributed A$53.6bn (£28.4bn) to the Australian economy in the year to June 2025, making it the country's fourth-largest export. Despite this, foreign students remain a key focus of the centre-left Labour government's migration reduction efforts.
Australia in 2025 issued over 337,000 international student visas, of which about 45,000 went to dependents or family members of the applicants.
Student visa application fees have risen by nearly 300 per cent to A$2,500 over the past four years, while English-language requirements and minimum savings thresholds for graduate visa applicants have also been tightened.
Migration surged after Australia reopened its borders in February 2022 following nearly two years of Covid-19 closures, driven largely by international students, backpackers, and temporary workers.
