Australia news LIVE: International students forced to consider their future after Burke’s migration overhaul; University bodies, charities slam new rules

Updated September 18, 2026 — 10:04am,first published September 18, 2026 — 6:45am

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of national news this Friday, September 18. Here’s what is making headlines today.

• In an address to the National Press Club yesterday, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke revealed sweeping changes to Australia’s migration system that will ramp up deportations, close partner-visa loopholes, and introduce stricter rules to curb visa hopping. Burke said the plan would help the government’s reach its net migration target of 225,000.
• In response to the changes, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson suggested that both Labor and the Coalition had started to see that they’ve “done the wrong thing by the country”, while Greens senator David Shoebridge accused Labor of following One Nation’s lead.
• Net overseas migration for the March quarter was 101,005 – a 6 per cent fall on the same period in 2025 – according to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures released yesterday. But Coalition parliamentarians, including Matt Canavan and Andrew Bragg, said the figures were still too high.
• Thousands of high school and university students across the country held a second wave of national protests against Pauline Hanson yesterday, following a similar walkout in major cities in August.

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Greens spokesperson for home affairs and immigration David Shoebridge says jailing people in detention centres who overstay their visas is not the way to deal with an overwhelmed migration system.

During his address to the National Press Club, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said an expanded border force would be established to remove 77,000 visa overstayers.

The Greens flagged their concerns yesterday that the changes would bring ICE-style immigration raids to Australia, although the suggestion was swiftly dismissed by Burke.

“Before 2015, we had a routine process in Australia for overstayers where, when people had overstayed a visa, we would bring people in to detention centres … and within a few weeks they would organise their own flight and leave,” Burke said.

Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations Amanda Rishworth insisted this morning that the Labor Party was not using migration as a political football and that its overhaul to the migration system was a “responsible” approach to ensuring “compliance and integrity”.

She told ABC Radio National the changes would make Australia’s migration system more sustainable.

“We’ve got other parties out there that are putting forward ideas that will destroy the economy. This has been carefully calibrated to ensure that our migration levels are sustainable and that we do have important integrity and compliance measures.

“We are not doing what the Liberal Party and other parties are doing, sort of making this into a political football.”

Yesterday, CEO of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre Kon Karapanagiotidis said migrants and refugees were being used as “political punching bags”.

Abuja, Nigeria: At least 37 suspects arrested for alleged illegal mining were found dead in Nigerian security custody, officials said, claiming a suspected disease outbreak was to blame.

But Dauda Shehu, a survivor of the incident, told The Associated Press that 65 detainees were packed into a poorly ventilated cell, suggesting the dead may have suffocated.

Niger State Governor Farmer Mohammed Umaru Bago said the 37 detainees died in the custody of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defense Corps, or NSCDC, in north-central Niger state.

They had been in detention since the security agency carried out arrests on Tuesday and Wednesday over suspicion of illegal mining in the state, the NSCDC said.

Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs Matt Thistlethwaite says backpackers who overstay their visas will be “picked up” and thrown into detention centres under Labor’s new migration system.

“Anyone that overstays their visa, if you overstay a tourist visa, you overstay a student visa, you’ll be picked up, and you’ll spend a few nights in a detention centre. And we think that that will deter a lot of people from overstaying,” he told News24 this morning.

“This is the deterrence value... We think that once the word gets around, hey, ‘I overstayed on my tourist visa for a couple of weeks. I got picked up, and I spent a couple of weeks in immigration detention. It’s not a nice place.’”

The last time a government had the power to detain overstayers was during Tony Abbott’s prime ministership.

Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations Amanda Rishworth has rejected warnings from Australian farmers that the cost of food will rise as a result of changes to the migration system.

Asked whether the cost of food would increase, Rishworth told ABC’s News Breakfast:

“I don’t accept the premise of what’s being put forward. We have taken a responsible approach to migration, a sustainable approach to migration. I mean, what’s really clear is that we’ll still have access to backpackers. Indeed, backpackers in their second and third year will have to work in regional areas, there is also a number of other places that people can get agricultural workers.”

She said farmers should consider using the Pacific Labor Mobility Scheme (PALM) – a program allowing eligible businesses to hire temporary workers from Pacific Island countries – to access agricultural workers.

“It’s a really important scheme that’s potentially underutilised,” Rishworth said.

“But more broadly, when it comes to migration, it is about taking a response that ensures that we have integrity in the system, that we have compliance in the system.”

The Commonwealth Bank says it has resolved a problem that delayed some payments and transfers appearing in customer accounts.

Tracking site Downdetector noted a spike in reported issues earlier this morning.

In a message on its service update page at 6am, the bank said it was working to fix the problem. It advised at 6.50am that the issue had been resolved, with customers advised they did not need to take any action.

Health Minister Mark Butler has said the government’s cuts to backpacker visas are “pretty reasonable controls” despite concerns farmers would struggle to find workers to harvest their crops.

The new migration policy unveiled yesterday includes significant cuts to second- and third-year visas for working holiday makers, dropping from 57,000 to 45,000 in the second year, and 31,000 to 5000 in the third.

“We’ve had to do that to be able to focus our efforts and target workers, the skilled workers that are in very high demand in sectors like construction, in healthcare, those doctors and nurses, ... in agriculture, in resources, and law enforcement,” Butler told Seven’s Sunrise this morning.

“That really was the plan that [Home Affairs Minister] Tony [Burke] laid out yesterday to get better balance in the system – a system that’s given this country just so much, our migration system – and also to improve the compliance. I think Australians recognise there’s too much visa hopping, there’s too many people overstaying their visas. So it was a very comprehensive package that Tony outlined.”

Butler pushed back on claims the government had not done enough to bring migration into line, saying it had reduced net overseas migration by almost 50 per cent since a post-COVID peak, and was putting additional funding into compliance measures to encourage overstayers to leave.

“This is a very broad package that we announced yesterday, and I think it’s the right balance for the country,” Butler said.

The Coalition is seeking to “totally reform” the skilled visa system and will tighten the nation’s rules for temporary exclusion orders when it unveils its migration policy, opposition spokesman for home affairs Jonno Duniam said this morning.

“We think there needs to be a tightening around the availability of temporary graduate visas. We think there needs to be a complete reformation of the skilled visa list and the processing system around the issuing of skilled visas in line with actual need in this country,” he told ABC TV.

“We think that there also needs to be some tightening around elements of the law relating to who comes into this country, especially as it relates to the temporary exclusion order regime that goes to national security, and also third-party repatriations of people who’ve been charged with or could be charged with terror-related offences.”

Pressed on why it had taken so long for the Coalition to announce its plan, Duniam said:

Burke also said last night that he was consulting closely with Minister for Agriculture Julie Collins to work through the concerns raised by farmers following Labor’s migration changes.

He told the ABC farmers were right to be concerned about the agricultural workforce, but that there “there is no part of the economy where you can have an impact on immigration without having some tension”.

Farmers have flagged their concerns about Australia’s food security and warned Labor’s migration plan could drive up prices in supermarkets.

Yesterday, Nationals leader Matt Canavan said:

“The government is now resorting to using our farmers, service industry, other regional industries as whipping boys for their failure to bring down migration. The targeting in Tony Burke’s speech of the farm sector is an outrage.”

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has argued his migration overhaul is critical for the Australian economy even as his government’s migration targets are “on track”.

Speaking to ABC’s 7.30 program last night, the minister was asked why Labor had decided to put migrant groups and international students offside if the government’s targets were tracking in the right direction.

“It’s what’s within the number that determines the economic impact,” he said.

“You could have net overseas migration of 225,000 with no skilled workers, or with all skilled workers ... How you get there determines the impact on the Australian economy.”