International students refused a visa will no longer be guaranteed an in-person appeal hearing after migration reforms passed Parliament last week.

The Labor government said the reforms were necessary to address an “extraordinary” bottleneck at the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART), where the number of student visa refusal appeals being heard has skyrocketed by nearly 1,500 percent in three years.

Currently, international students who have been denied a visa while already in Australia have the right to challenge this at ART and to have an in-person hearing as part of the appeal.

But under the legislation passed last week with the support of the Opposition, ART will now be able to decide these matters based just on written decisions, significantly speeding up this process.

While the government said this was needed to address a major backlog of cases, the Greens raised concerns it was “taking away basic rights” and wasn't the answer to the rising number of appeals.

Caseload surge

Attorney-General Michelle Rowland told Parliament the reforms strike a balance between fairness and efficiency.

“Efficiency review procedures are important to reduce delays in decision-making, provide genuine applicants with the benefit of a timely and effective remedy, and strengthen the integrity of the migration system,” Rowland said.

“Backlogs and extended wait times at the tribunal stage create incentives for non-genuine applicants to apply for a review in order to extend their stay in Australia.”

Rowland said there has been a “significant surge” in student visa reviews lodged with ART since 2024.

“Oral hearings are time and resource-intensive,” she said.

“A one-size-fits-all approach that requires that oral hearings be conducted in all matters is unnecessarily rigid.

“The bill would give the tribunal additional flexibility and ensure that review procedures are proportionate to the circumstances of the case.”

In 2022-23, just over 2,000 student visa refusal reviews were lodged with ART.

The following year, this jumped to more than 11,500, and in 2024-25 more than 32,000 reviews were lodged.

In the first two months of the 2025-26 financial year, nearly 6,000 reviews were lodged.

These cases now account for more than a third of all cases heard by ART.

And as of late last year, there were nearly 50,000 student visa cases still to be heard by ART, with the median time taken to finalise these now at one year and four months.

Visa churn

Speaking in the Senate, Greens Senator David Shoebridge said that one of the reasons for the huge rise in appeals being lodged is that Home Affairs is “churning” through decisions, and that the set aside rate at ART is nearly 50 per cent.

“The historical norm is that one-quarter of refusals get overturned and visas get granted, but Home Affairs are now churning them through at a massive rate,” Shoebridge said.

“They are not applying due diligence and they are often refusing matters because a document is missing.

“Rather than giving the opportunity for the document to be provided, they’re just refusing them, in the tens of thousands, and passing the buck to the under-resourced, understaffed ART.”

Independent Senator David Pocock also pointed to this figure, saying that it “alone should give us pause”, and that the debate was about “how we balance efficiency in government decision-making with fairness, accountability and access to justice for individuals”.

The Liberals and Nationals supported the bill, with Liberal Senator Paul Scarr saying it was needed because ART is “absolutely overwhelmed” with student visa reviews.

“We have a crisis in terms of dealing with this workload,” Scarr said.

“It’s actually a crisis. These cases need to be resolved, and they need to be resolved efficiently and effectively.”

Some legal and migrant rights groups have raised significant concerns with the reforms.

In a submission to government, the Migrant Workers Centre said it was “deeply concerned that the bill will undermine the review rights of temporary visa-holders and applicants and normalise a culture of poor decision-making”.

The Law Council of Australia said that an oral hearing can often be the “only procedurally fair way to resolve an application for review”.

The Labor government in 2024 set a limit of 270,000 new international student visas, and has increased the cost of these applications on a number of occasions.

Last year the student visa fee was increased by 25 per cent to $2,000.