One year ago, I lodged a Freedom of Information request to get some stats on the rate of additional processing for Australia ETA applications. Since then, there has been a Foreign Minister visiting Malaysia, and assurances that it was being looked into.
Also, in a year, Department of Home Affairs has created a new process for Data Requests, which is cheaper (and supposedly faster) than the FOI process.
On 21 Jan 2024 I put in a data request, asking for the number of visa subclass 601 (Electronic Travel Authority) applications, and the number of those which were flagged for further processing and such communicated to the application, by the list of countries eligible for visa subclass 601, between the dates of 28 Nov 2022 and 1 Jan 2024. Picking up from when I last did it.
The data was released to me on 15 Feb 2024. So 25 days, or 18 weekdays. So it is faster than my previous FOI process.
And, well, this is what I got:
Some observations:
1) The date range provided was 1 Dec 2022 to 31 Dec 2023, while I requested from 28 Nov 2022 and 1 Jan 2024. So I am missing about 3 days' worth of data from the previous release.
2) There are 270 applications from a "not specified" country. That does worry me a bit; how do you not know which country they're from when the list of ETA eligible countries is defined in legislation?
3) Interesting number of countries eligible for the eVisitor (subclass 651) (read: European Union countries) which is free, apply for the ETA (subclass 601), which costs AUD20. Why would anyone eligible for eVisitor apply for ETA?
To put the data in percentage points:
Easily 3/4 of Malaysian passport holders applying for the ETA are pulled into additional processing. When the average rate is 2.9% of applicants.
It is slightly lower than the 77.30% rate from the previous data.
If you exclude Malaysia, the additional processing rate is 0.61726615%
Essentially, for Malaysian passport holders who don't pulled into additional processing when applying for a ETA, they are in the lucky 1/4.
This is clearly a systematic issue.
I have no doubt there are a lot of career diplomats in Wisma Putra working tirelessly with the GoA to try and not have Malaysia downgraded.
I'm sure there is a South Korea desk also to add to the workload. This is why we can't have nice things.
