Via The Guardian:
Labor and migration experts have questioned the integrity of the Coalition’s “crackdown” on permanent migration, suggesting ballooning numbers of bridging visas indicates longer waits rather than more rejections may be driving the numbers.
On Friday the Australian newspaper published home affairs department figures – still not publicly available – that reveal just 163,000 people permanently migrated to Australia in 2017-18, well under the 190,000 cap and down from 183,608 the year before.
