A new law allows Australia to block entire groups of visa holders from entering the country – a sharp break from past practice with major consequences for asylum policy.

The Australian Government has legislated to prevent visitor visa holders from Iran from entering the country because some of them might apply for asylum. This is unprecedented. The reasoning behind it is hard to fathom.

Last month the Australian Government secured passage of the _Migration Amendment (2026 Measures No.1) Act 2026._ The new Act gives the government the power to issue an “Arrival Control Determination” that blocks the travel of a specified class of temporary visa holders to Australia for a period up to six months. The Determination can be renewed if the government wants to keep the relevant class of visa holders out of the country for longer.

There are limited exemptions – people who are spouses, de facto partners or dependent children of Australian citizens and permanent residents as well as parents of children under eighteen who are currently in Australia. There is also a legal facility to grant a discretionary certificate for travel for individual visa holders on a case-by-case basis (although how this will be applied in practice is yet to be seen).

On 26 March, the government issued its first “Arrival Control Determination” that said the new powers now applied to Iranian visitor visa holders.

So, a time when the world’s most powerful nation has been threatening them with the obliteration of their civilisation, Australia is preventing a relatively small number of people, already issued with temporary visas, from coming here, ostensibly because some of them might apply for asylum.

These are extraordinary powers power that Australian governments have never sought to have before in the face of overseas crises. There have always been powers to cancel visas of individuals who no longer meet Australian immigration requirements, but there has never been a blanket power to prevent the arrival of a whole group of visitor visa holders on the basis some of them might try to stay in Australia permanently by seeking asylum.

Australian governments did not try to do this in relation to external refugee crises and emergencies in the past such as Lebanon, the war in the former Yugoslavia, the war in Syria, Afghanistan or Ukraine. In complete contrast to this new approach, no one should forget the extraordinary effort Australia made only 26 years ago to actively go and rescue, at very short notice, 4000 Kosovar refugees (incidentally Muslims) and bring them to Australia for temporary protection with accommodation and support provided.

So why the panic on this occasion?

The justifications have been framed in terms of management, border control, “integrity” and “sustainability.” Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said that decisions about who stays in Australia permanently should be “deliberate decisions of the Government” rather than a “random consequence of who had booked a holiday” before an international conflict broke out.

And yet the Refugees Convention to which Australia is a party assumes that people who need protection will be able to get to a place where they can claim it. The very nature of international crises is that there are “random consequences” involving people.

The Department of Home Affairs has characterised it as “ensuring that the Australian government has the ability to respond to sudden changes in the international environment” and “allowing adequate time to better assess and manage risks associated with those non-citizens (temporary visa holders) travelling to Australia.”

The application of the first ever “Arrival Control Determination” to Iranian visitor visa holders outside Australia seems particularly bizarre in the light of the Australian Government’s trenchant criticism of the human rights record of the Iranian government. It is impossible to reconcile with the huge (and highly unwise as it turned out) public fanfare the government gave to the instant granting of asylum to members of the Iranian women’s soccer team.

The facts do not support the idea that Australia is protecting itself from some unmanageable tsunami of Iranian onshore Protection Visa applications.

The government has told us that there are about 6800 Iranians (located overseas) who hold Australian visitor visas. There are no publicly available details of the characteristics of those visa holders, their actual location or when the visas were issued. If they came to Australia, not all would apply for asylum. People have families, friends, jobs and attachments in their home country. Most want to return in the short or long-term. The usual approach in times of emergency is to extend temporary stay of visitors in Australia, pending the situation in the source country becoming clearer.

But let us assume for a moment that 80 per cent of the Iranian visitor visa holders did apply for asylum – that would be about 5400 new Protection Visa applications. There are currently approximately 70,000 unfinalised Protection Visa applications (30,000 at the primary stage in the Department of Home Affairs and 40,000 at the Administrative Review Tribunal). So, the worst-case scenario would only be a marginal 7.7 per cent increase in the caseload.

If the government were genuinely concerned about manageability of caseloads, why wouldn’t it use “Arrival Control Determinations” in relation to visitor visa holders of countries that rank the highest in annual Protection Visa applications?

One could speculate as to whether there was some security motivation for the government’s action. However, this is unlikely because all the people affected have already been issued visas by the Australian government and therefore have been subject to whatever level of security scrutiny that the government thought necessary. The affected people are not in any way the same as people arriving unauthorised by sea without identity documents.

In the absence of objectively justifiable reasons, one can only speculate about the underlying reasons for the government’s action. Is this just the reaction to the growing community unease about the scale of immigration and their inability to explain immigration policy effectively? Are there interest groups that have pushed for this? Having chosen to leave Australia’s immigration administration locked in the Department of Home Affairs, are they now feeling the weight of backlogs everywhere such that even a small surge of new applications is frightening?

The precedent set here is very concerning. Is Australia now going to prevent visitor visa holders from every country affected by a crisis from coming to Australia because some of them might apply for asylum? Now that the power exists, governments will be pressed to use it in relation to a whole range of current and future international situations. They will have to justify themselves if they do not use it. There is a high risk of being used for blatantly discriminatory reasons in future.

The history of immigration powers introduced for a limited purpose is that they gradually get used over time in a much broader way than ever originally spelt out. The excessive use of the deportation power for convicted criminals, which used to be legislatively limited to those who had spent less than 10 years in Australia, is a classic example. Now that the powers are in place, and a precedent has been established, Australian governments will have to consider pausing or stopping the arrival of temporary visa holders from any country that is in a conflict situation.

This is yet another complex and controversial power added to Australia’s burgeoning Migration Act. Does anyone remember Clare O’Neil’s completely non-credible commitment as the new Labor Home Affairs Minister in 2022 to radically simplify Australia’s immigration system?