Doctors are effectively being left homeless by a migration policy designed to fix rural healthcare shortages, a parliamentary committee has been told.
A requirement for foreign physicians to spend 10 years working outside urban centres after arriving in Australia has resulted in doctors being dumped in remote areas without any consideration of how to settle them, witnesses said.
“They’re a pretty resourceful bunch, but couch-surfing isn’t a long-term recruitment and retention strategy,” Australian Medical Association president Danielle McMullen told the federal probe into skilled migration.
“We’ve got doctors essentially living in even short periods of homelessness.”
Areas where new doctors were needed most were also being misclassified, the committee heard.
More than half the rural medical workforce, including almost 60 per cent of rural GPs, are from overseas.
The Labor-led inquiry comes as major parties jostle over migration numbers, with the government aiming for 225,000 per year and the coalition proposing to tie the figure to housing completions as it fends off a One Nation surge.
The anti-immigration party has proposed slashing net overseas migration by more than half from about 300,000 to 130,000.
ABS figures show there were about 86,200 skilled migrants in the year to June 2025, about half of them permanent, representing a marginal drop from the previous year.
“Knee-jerk” decisions responding to public anti-immigration sentiment could have unintended consequences, migration agency chief executive Melanie Macfarlane told the inquiry.
“With offshore applications de-prioritised, there is a risk that applicants will do anything to remain onshore, including further protection visa applications, indeed also unlawfulness,” she said.
She described how a migrant chef refused to leave Australia despite being barred from applying for the visa he needed because he thought once he left the country he’d never come back.
“He’s too scared that he will never return,” Ms Macfarlane said.
“Bridging visas are also a complex nightmare and need to be overhauled.”
Debate about net overseas migration was drowning out discussion about fixing the country’s dilapidated skilled migration pathways, the inquiry heard.
“I’m not going to say that numbers are irrelevant, but there seems to be almost an attitude that that number should be cut for the sake of cutting it,” Law Council of Australia senior policy lawyer Alan Freckleton said.
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