Australia and New Zealand Immigration News

The Australian Industry Group, (Ai Group) a pressure group that lobbies on behalf of Australian industry, has called on the country's Coalition government to raise the number of immigrants admitted each year from 190,000 annually to 220,000 with immediate effect.

The Chief Executive of Ai Group, Innes Willox, has written to the Australian immigration minister Scott Morrison urging the government to increase skilled immigration in particular.

The veteran rapper Snoop Dogg has been issued with an Australian Temporary Work (Entertainment) visa despite a campaign by feminists to bar him from the country. Mr Dogg was therefore able to perform at the Big Day Out festival on Australia's Gold Coast in Queensland on January 19th 2014.

On Wednesday 15th 2014, Australian immigration minister Scott Morrison told journalists in the capital Canberra 'Snoop Dogg has a visa'.

Sam Dastyari, an Australian Labor Party senator from New South Wales, has written an article in Australian newspaper The Australian calling for a 'big Australia'. Mr Dastyari says 'I believe in a big Australia. We need the best and the brightest to come to Australia.

Mr Dastyari was born in 1983 in Iran to an Iranian mother and a father who was from Azerbaijan. His parents took him to Australia when he was five. He joined the Labor Party at 16. He was appointed to the Senate, the upper house of the Australian parliament, in August 2013.

As we reported on 16th December, the Australian government was recently defeated in its attempt to reintroduce Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs).

These visas were used by the last Conservative government of Australia before 2007 to confer to asylum seekers the right to reside in Australia for three years; The government would then reassess the circumstances of the applicant to see if he or she was still at risk. Only if he or she was still deemed to be at risk in his or her homeland would the visa be renewed beyond the initial three year period.

The New Zealand immigration minister Michael Woodhouse has announced that his department is to scrap the Long-Term Business Visa and introduce a new visa, the Entrepreneur Work Visa, to replace it. The new visa will assess applicants using a points-based test and require them to invest NZ$100,000.

New Zealand's High Court has rejected a claim that a Kiribati man was effectively a refugee because of climate change. Ioane Teitiota was appealing against the decision of an immigration tribunal to deport him from New Zealand where he has lived since 2007.

Justice John Priestley told the court that the claim was 'novel' but dismissed the appeal saying 'By returning to Kiribati, he would not suffer a sustained and systematic violation of his basic human rights such as the right to life…or the right to adequate food, clothing and housing'.