Family members off most student visas: what Burke’s 17 September overhaul means for Indian applicants

On Thursday 17 September 2026, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke told the National Press Club that Australia “will no longer be allowing the attaching of family members for international students or for graduate visas”. The date was Citizenship Day.

What was announced

The family rule has exceptions. Burke said special visa conditions “will still allow it for the Pacific and for the ASEAN nations, and for certain courses, for example, PhD courses”. Families already attached to a visa and onshore keep their status: “Anyone who already has their family attached to a visa and is already here, we’re not going to be breaking up families onshore.”

The PIE News reported on 23 September, citing a Home Affairs spokesperson, that the changes will also prevent family members from subsequently applying for a Student or Temporary Graduate visa as a secondary applicant once the primary visa holder has been granted their visa, applying to “all current and future student and temporary graduate visa holders onshore and offshore”, including the exempt groups.

The second change concerns course changes. A student who transfers to a different course, at the same institution or the same level, will need to apply for a new visa, “so we’ll be able to test that it’s legitimate”. The visa hopping the Minister targeted is what he called progression: hopping “up and down to different institutions” to seek a migration outcome “will come to an end as a model”. In Burke’s words: “You can go up the qualification scale, but only up the qualification scale.”

The third concerns visitor visas, which will carry a “no further stay” condition. Burke said that where a partner arrived on a visitor visa and applied onshore, “the process has been that they stay and they’re on a bridging visa”. The condition will not apply to protection applications, and he said it “will have no impact on anybody who is already here because this is about the issuing of future visas”.

Second-year working holiday places go to a ballot limited to 45,000, against 57,000 people who qualified last year, and third-year places drop to a ballot of 5,000 from 31,000. There will be an additional 100 compliance officers and 250 detention beds, and, under the new points test on implementation, “anyone who is skilled in the housing trades will get the same number of points as though it were a university qualification”.

The numbers behind it

The Australian Bureau of Statistics published net overseas migration of 292,100 for the year to March 2026 on the morning of the speech; Burke said the figures had “just come out about an hour ago”. The peak was 556,000 in the year to September 2023. Burke said the figure was 47 per cent below the peak.

The figures the government is working to are in the 2026-27 Budget: 245,000 for 2026-27 and 225,000 for 2027-28, listed as forecasts in Budget Paper No. 3.

How many families does the student rule touch? ICEF Monitor puts last financial year’s student visa grants at 337,400, of which 46,000 went to dependants, and quotes Studymove managing director Keri Ramirez: South Asian countries “accounted for more than 70% of all dependent visas granted last financial year offshore, with 10,448 visas granted to student dependents from Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Sri Lanka”. The department’s own report to 31 December 2025 lists India as a source country for 23,665 student visa grants and 26,116 Temporary Graduate visa grants in the first half of 2025-26.

The India question

One journalist put it directly: Indian graduates get an extra year on the 485 visa under the free trade agreement with India, so is that carve-out going to stay “or is that under question as well?” Burke’s answer was that the government is “working within all free trade agreements in everything that I’ve said”, that such concessions were exchanged for benefits that “delivered Australian jobs”, and “we’re not about to undermine that”.

The date nobody has

No commencement date for the family restriction has been published. The Home Affairs page says the changes “have begun to be implemented and will be progressively rolled out over the next 12 months”. The Indian Sun reported on 18 September that the department’s Student visa page “still says applicants can include a partner and dependent children and that family members can subsequently join them”. On 23 September The PIE News reported that the government had “yet to confirm when the changes will take effect”, and listed the exceptions as PhD students, Pacific and ASEAN nationals, DFAT and Defence-sponsored students and foreign government scholarship recipients. Home Affairs told the same publication that students already in Australia will be protected by “grandfathering provisions” intended “to avoid separation of families”; nothing published so far explains how those grandfathering provisions will sit alongside the department’s statement that the bar on subsequent applications covers current visa holders.

Who said what

Tony Burke said “each of these measures had been developed way back in February”. He told the Press Club it was “simply demonstrably wrong to suspect that somehow this is a recent bit of work done to deal with a political climate”, that “no area of the immigration program is irrelevant to net overseas migration”, and described “the NOM version of NIMBYism”, where “people will say that they want immigration numbers to go down but they don’t want to mention which visa class, and they immediately want to rule out all the ones that they would rely on”.

The Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia, the national peak body for multicultural communities, warned against the family measure. Chief executive Prerana Mehta said: “Policies that force people to choose between their families and Australia will send that talent elsewhere.”

International Education Association of Australia chief executive Phil Honeywood said students from key source markets “understandably prefer to bring their partner with them if they are going to be away from their home country for three to four years”, and that “we will definitely lose talented young people as a result of today’s announcement”.

What to do now

If you are already here with family on a student or graduate visa, the Minister’s words are that you will not be separated, but The PIE News reports, citing Home Affairs, that a partner who has not yet applied will be prevented from applying as a secondary applicant. If you are offshore and planning to bring a partner, the exceptions announced or reported so far are Pacific and ASEAN nationals, PhD and certain other courses, DFAT and Defence-sponsored students and foreign government scholarship recipients.

Check the Home Affairs page for a commencement date. As at 28 September the department’s Student visa page, last updated on 21 September, still said applicants can include a partner and dependent children and that family members can also apply later as subsequent entrants.