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On 17 September 2026 the Minister for Home Affairs, the Hon Tony Burke MP, announced in his address to the National Press Club that the Code of Conduct for Registered Migration Agents will be changed so that agents can be sanctioned and potentially deregistered for “encouraging” people to lodge non-meritorious Protection visa applications, which he (with considerable justification) characterised as “an unacceptable abuse of the system”.
The misuse of the Protection visa process has been an on-going source of concern for many for decades. In March 2023 Christine Nixon AO, APM focused upon this issue in her Rapid Review into the Exploitation of Australia’s Visa System, saying that the “particularly high” visa processing and review timeframes for onshore protection visa applications were “motivating bad actors to take advantage by lodging increasing numbers of non-genuine applications for protection” (p 24). Ms Nixon recommended that protection claims only be permitted to be made with the assistance of a registered migration agent or lawyer and that those assisting “should be required to attest that the onshore protection claim has merit and is based on genuine claimant’s evidence” (p 26). Ms Nixon went on to say that requiring protection claims to be lodged by lawful providers of immigration assistance relied upon strengthening the regulation of RMAs.
Section 314 of the Migration Act 1958 requires a registered migration agent to conduct himself or herself in accordance with the Code of Conduct. If an agent does not comply with the Code that can be a basis for him or her to be sanctioned under section 303(1). Potential sanctions include cancellation of registration, suspension of registration and a caution.
The current Code, which has been in effect since 1 March 2022, already has some provision relating to this. Section 18(1) of the Code already states that an agent must not act in a way that it is intended to defeat the purpose or evade a requirement of the migration law while section 19(1) of the Code says that an agent must not give immigration assistance to a client if they reasonably believe that giving the immigration assistance would be futile. However, section 19(2) says that an agent can still provide immigration assistance to a client if they advise the client it would be futile and the client gives the agent a written statement confirming they have received that advice and still wish to be given that assistance. From the limited information given by Minister Burke it appears likely that the “waiver” provision in section 19(2) may be removed or limited to non-Protection visa applications only. Some specific provision may also be added to the Code to the effect that advising and assisting people to lodge non-meritorious Protection visa applications is a particularly serious breach of the Code.
The Minister stated that 85% of Protection visa applications from certain countries get refused and those cases represent 80% of the overall caseload. However, the Minister did not provide any statistics as to the percentage of these applications assisted by migration agents or the number of agents assisting this cohort. We are not aware of evidence suggesting that the practice of assisting unmeritorious claims is widespread. Moreover, the Minister’s statistics indicate that even in country caseloads of high refusal rates 15% of applicants are found to engage Australia’s protection obligations, which means that the definition of an unmeritorious application must be nuanced.
The prospect of stricter regulation of migration agents is in line with the trend of the last few years of the Office of the Migration Agents Registration Authority being given greater resources to enable it to take a more active approach in policing breaches of the Code more aggressively than in it has been capable of doing in the past. The increased resources have included increasing the staffing numbers at the OMARA from 23 full-time equivalent in 2022 to 41 full-time equivalent in 2024 with 63 full-time equivalent as a goal, the establishment of a “monitoring team” in October 2025 to proactively monitor agents to identify and address non-compliance with the Code (as opposed to just investigating complaints), and OMARA being given access to systems across the Home Affairs portfolio as well as information sharing with other agencies within the portfolio.
David Brooks, Associate
Kinslor Prince Lawyers