As Australia’s Home Affairs minister between June 2022 and July 2024, Labor MP Clare O’Neil regularly lamented that the nation’s migration system was too temporary and held the nation back.
“Today, really for the first time in our modern history, our uncapped, unplanned temporary program is the centrepiece and driver of our migration system. This simple fact is the source of huge problems”, O’Neil bemoaned in February 2023.
“In 2007, we had about one million temporary migrants in Australia, excluding visitor and transit visas. Today that number is 1.9 million”.
O’Neil repeatedly blamed the former Coalition government for the “negligent” growth in temporary visas.
“It happened not through thoughtful planning and strategy, but by negligence and continental drift. And, this reliance on temporary migration is having enormous economic and social consequences”, O’Neil claimed.
“This focus on temporariness means that migrants cannot truly flourish”.
The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) has released temporary visa data for the March quarter of 2026, which is presented below on a calendar-year basis to remove seasonality.
According to DHA, the number of temporary visa holders in Australia, excluding visitors, hit a record high of 2,615,947 in the year to March 2026, up by 92,800 on the prior year’s record.
Temporary visa numbers were tracking nearly 560,000 above the pre-pandemic peak under the Coalition. Therefore, by Clare O’Neil’s own admission, Labor has failed dismally on immigration by allowing the number of temporary migrants in Australia to soar by more than half a million above the Coalition’s peak.
The following chart from Justin Fabo at Antipodean Macro shows that people from India have overwhelmingly driven the growth in temporary visa numbers:
The following chart plots the change in temporary visa numbers by major category as a time series:
The table below presents the change in temporary visa numbers by category between Q1 2020 and Q2 2026:
Bridging visas (175,771) and graduate visas (162,155) have been the two largest drivers of the growth in temporary visa numbers.
Justin Fabo’s chart below shows that people from India have driven the explosive growth in bridging visas:
According to former senior immigration department bureaucrat Abul Rizvi, bridging visas are “the most important barometer of the health of the visa system”.
Rizvi frequently lambasted the former Coalition government for allowing the number of bridging visas to exceed 100,000 before the pandemic.
Rizvi claimed that the increase in bridging visas was indicative of “administrative incompetence”.
When borders were blocked during the COVID-19 pandemic, temporary migrants with expired visas were unable to depart, leading to a significant increase in the number of bridging visas issued.
However, with borders fully open, the Albanese Labor government has overseen the highest number of bridging visas in history, with 432,300 issued as of 31 December 2025.
If bridging visas are “the most important barometer of the health of the visa system”, then the Albanese government must be the most incompetent immigration manager in the nation’s history.
Rizvi argued in December 2025 that Australia’s visa system was “unable to cope with the volume”:
“Just about everything is up — there’s nothing that’s fallen over the last decade,” said Dr Abul Rizvi, former deputy secretary of the Immigration Department. “The only one that hasn’t really gone up is visitors. We’re not getting the tourism numbers we did pre-COVID”.
Dr Rizvi, who served at the Immigration Department from 1991 to 2007, said Australia’s visa system was more overloaded than ever and “unable to cope with the volume”, particularly of bridging visas…
Rizvi said the government must urgently “slow the rate at which temporary visa holders in Australia are growing”…
Rizvi criticised the Albanese government for walking back on its commitment to “rein in the flood of temporary visas”:
Dr Rizvi said Labor appeared to have walked away from its promise rein in the flood of temporary visas.
“The Labor government promised before the 2019 election that it would significantly reduce reliance on temporary entry visas,” he said.
“The Migration Strategy it issued in 2023 said it would reduce reliance on temporary entry visas. I think it’s a reasonable question to ask, what happened to the promise?”
Prior to the 2022 and 2025 federal elections, Anthony Albanese promised that Labor would run a smaller, less temporary migration system.
Instead, his government has delivered a significantly larger, lower-quality, and more temporary migration system.
