Since Australia announced their re-opening of their international borders on 7 Feb 2022, there has been a lot of complaints from Malaysians on how difficult it has been to get a Electronic Travel Authority to enter Australia as a tourist.
Me myself I know 3 people who were impacted in getting a Australian ETA. Like most people, they have not been able to meet their families living in Australia for most of the pandemic, and were hoping to meet up with relatives in Australia, only to be dissapointed with requests for employment letters to bank statements, leading to rescheduled flights and disrupted plans.
A quick search online will find many stories of people having trouble getting into many western countries for tourism and work.
So much so, that the High Commission of Australia in Malaysia "recommend that you do not finalise travel arrangements or commitments until you have received advice that you have been granted a visa".
So I decided to lodge a Freedom of Information (FOI) request with Australian Immigration, to get some stats, and to put to bed once and for all, is it just a Malaysian thing, or this is more widespread.
Like Malaysia, Immigration is under the Home Affairs Ministerial portfolio. So in Nov 2022 I felt enough time had passed, to see if this was just a Malaysian issue, or is Australian immigration broken after the pandemic.
(There are a lot of things broken with Australian Immigration post pandemic, from migration to passport applications to clearance at passports. Plenty of media articles on them)
It took about 3 months, if you ignore the Christmas-New Year shutdown, to get the data.
Essentially, what was released is a list of Australian ETA eligible countries, and the numbers of those pulled for additional processing:
Or to put it in percentage points, more than 77% of ETA applications from Malaysian passport holders are being pulled for additional processing.
This is much higher than the 3.13% average rate of additional processing numbers. If you exclude Malaysia as a data point, the average rate for additional processing for the other ETA eligible countries is 0.66%.
Looking at the rate of applications being pulled for additional processing, after Malaysia, it is Brunei, Malta, USA, and Hong Kong, which round up the top 5.
The question is, why?
