Private colleges will find it easier to benefit from Australia's booming international student business, under the new student visa system which is set to be introduced mid-2016, notes a report in The AFR. Details of the new system were broadly set out in the Coalition government’s report: Future directions for streamlined visa processing.

Under the proposed new student visa system, foreign students will have to deal with a simpler student visa regulatory environment which will see a reduction of the number of student visa subclasses from eight to just two subclasses.

Rod Camm, CEO of the Australian Council for Private Education and Training (ACPET), told the Australian Financial Review that Australia’s student visa system is currently so complex that colleges attending education fairs end up spending half their time explaining the visa system instead of talking about the quality of education, noting, “Australia is open for business and visa complexities make it so hard.”

One the key concerns of many is the two tiered risk assessment framework. Under the new system applications are expected to be assessed on a single immigration risk framework: the Simplified Student Visa Framework (SSVF).  It will replace both the Streamlined Visa Processing (SVP) arrangements and Assessment Level (AL) Framework.

The SSVF will essentially rank education providers and countries each year ‘based on the immigration risk outcomes of their international students over the previous 12 month period’. Apparently it is expected to give education providers ‘a strong incentive to recruit genuine students’ and slowly squeeze out the high-risk education providers.

The records of an estimated one million temporary visa holders, their sponsors and migration agents are expected to be scrutinised by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) as part of a broad tax compliance campaign targeted at the industry, according to a recent statement issued by the ATO

RMAs are among those being targeted by the ATO to “detect, and deal with compliance risks within the visa holding population...Data from DIBP will be used in ATO risk detection models to select populations for administrative action relating to tax return integrity, income tax and goods and services tax non-compliance and fraud,” the statement noted.

It says that an analysis of previous data indicates that there is an elevated level of risk relating to non-compliance and fraud associated with this population. Based on those identified risks, the ATO intends to acquire visa information for visas granted in the period 1 July 2013 to 30 June 2015 and future periods between 1 July 2015 and 30 June 2017. This means previously acquired data for the period 1 July 2013 to 30 June 2014 will be refreshed in the new table structure in an effort to take advantage of opportunities with new risk detection models.

The investigations are expected to cover 457 visa-holders and sponsors, students and education providers as well as migration agents.

“These records will be electronically matched with certain sections of ATO data holdings to identify non-compliance with registration, lodgment, reporting and payment obligations under taxation laws,” the ATO said.

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The pressure is on for both applicants and tribunal members to help ensure that migration and refugee review cases are dealt with quickly.

Last month, AAT President Duncan Kerr warned that “Without sufficient numbers of members being appointed to the new Social Services, Child Support and Migration Review Divisions of the AAT, the work required in those divisions will suffer delayed hearing and backlogs.”

In a move to help clear the backlog of cases in the migration and refugee division of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), the AAT’s President has issued practice directions to encourage quicker decisions.

The President’s directions on Conducting Migration and Refugee Reviews ‘encourage’ members and staff of the tribunal ‘to facilitate accessible, fair, just, economical, informal, quick and proportionate conduct’ of cases.

The directions specifically encourage oral decisions where possible but require that a record of the decision and reasons must be subsequently issued to both the applicant and the DIBP.

Police have seized $8.5 million worth of assets, including a 2014 Ferrari, a 2015 Range Rover, six properties and $180,000 in cash; and arrested and charged three men with a series of offences relating to an alleged immigration racket involving Australia Post delivery drivers.

The raids across Melbourne yesterday led to the arrest of Baljit 'Bobby' Singh (pictured right), Rakesh Kumar and Mukesh Sharma (pictured left) who now face charges of “defrauding the Commonwealth and falsifying documents including police checks and student records, in relation to two training colleges.”

“The AFP alleges St Stephen Institute of Technology, owned by Singh and Kumar, and Symbiosis Institute of Technical Education, owned by Sharma, are not providing education, but are in fact being used to source student visas for Indian students who then go to work as posties and parcel deliverers for Australia Post through Singh's labour hire companies. The colleges charge international students fees of up to $10,000 despite allegedly not providing any training,” said the ABC report.

The AFP estimates that students were charged over $9 million in fees while the colleges claimed approximately $2 million in government funding because of their Registered Training Organisation status.

Australia Post management has been implicated and under questioning for contracting the company which apparently had ‘at least a hundred workers…about 60 of them being on student visas’ according to  Joan Doyle, Victorian secretary of the posties' union the CEPU. The company had 16 Auspost contracts, four of which the ABC estimates to be worth $60,000 a month.

New permanent migrants are more highly educated and have better incomes than both their predecessors and the average Australian, according to a report by the Migration Council of Australia.

Many Australians have not been keeping up with the shift in Australia’s economy away from manufacturing and resources toward a high skilled service economy that is diversified. Australia’s migration policies over the last 2 decades has helped fill this gap “enabling structural changes to unfold relatively seamlessly and supplying the human capital needed for the expansion of technology driven sectors,” noted the MCA paper.

This paper analysed the latest ABS statistical information to gain an in-depth picture of how Australia’s migration program is performing and provides an overview of the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of recent Australian immigrants.

It concluded that, “English language proficiency is the primary determinant for migrants in the labour market, more important than both work experience and formal qualifications…improving English language proficiency is the single most effective method to increase the economic benefit [for new migrants]”.

It notes that migrants with low or no language proficiency have historically faced a 10–20 per cent earnings gap. In contrast, the paper notes that newer migrants with very good English proficiency are thriving in the labour market, outperforming even their native English peers who have been in Australia for decades.

The report warned that the gap between those who can and those who cannot speak English well is growing as the economy prioritises skilled work and high tech service industries and noted that due to both skills and English language ability, there is growing gender disparity with female migrants lagging well behind.