A government decision to hike fees for prospective Australian citizens to help recoup costs has been questioned, with a former immigration official saying it could deter people from seeking citizenship.
Immigration Minister Alex Hawke on Thursday announced the standard fee for Australian citizenship by conferral
People applying for citizenship by descent or under other situations will also pay more, as will those seeking to renounce, resume or apply for evidence of Australian citizenship.
Mr Hawke said the pricing changes – the first since 2016 - would “more accurately reflect the cost of delivering the citizenship program”.
“The new fees are commensurate with the comprehensive approach to end-to-end processing of citizenship applications and reflect inflation costs, staffing costs and the increased complexity of applications, which take longer to process,” he said in a statement.
“Based on existing fees, the government is only recovering approximately 50 per cent of the costs of processing citizenship applications.”
But Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary in the immigration department, which is now part of Home Affairs, said the price hike will only act as a deterrent.
“It won’t help to encourage people to take out citizenship,” he told SBS News.
“If you raise the price of something, it will make people less likely to take that up and I can’t see how that’s good policy.”
Mr Rizvi said when he was working in the immigration department in the 2000s there was a deliberate strategy to encourage as many budding citizens as possible.
But, he said, the policy changed in September 2005.
“Until 2005 we went to the extent of running TV ads encouraging people to take out citizenship,” he said.
“For whatever reason ... ever since then successive governments gradually have made it harder and harder to get citizenship.”
Labor’s multicultural affairs spokesman Andrew Giles said the government needed to better explain why the changes were necessary.
Former deputy secretary of the immigration department Abul Rizvi Source: SBS
“It’s really concerning. It’s concerning because it is a very large increase - but it’s also concerning because the explanation the minister has given seems entirely unsatisfactory,” Mr Giles told SBS News.
“He talks about inflation - well, we know inflation is no explanation for any increase other than a nominal one. He talks about staffing and there is no evidence of additional staff.”
The path to Australian citizenship is "fundamental" to who we are given so many are born overseas, Mr Giles said.
“Making changes, particularly a big financial imposition in the circumstances we are in now where so many Australians are doing it tough, is something that requires a proper explanation,” he said.
Mr Hawke said the new cost of citizenship applications "remains comparable with other countries" and would still be lower than the UK, Canada and US.
It comes a month after another government cost-cutting measure affecting migrants was announced in the federal budget.
From 1 January 2022, under a move expected to save $671 million over five years.
