It has almost become a (depressing) annual ritual: assisting with extended family members and friends on getting a Australian ETA to visit Australia. Honestly, for some of them, if they didn't have relatives in Australia, they wouldn't bother doing this. Most people would just find it too hard, and give up.
It has been a year since I got the last batch of stats. So on 15 July 2025 I put in an updated data request, seeking 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 1 Jan 2024 to 30 June 2025.
Was billed for the data request (AUD30) on 16 July, paid on 17 July, and acknowledged on 18 July 2025. Then silence. Technically their KPI is to have data requests fulfilled within 30 days.
Received the data on 22 August 2025. A wait of 5 weeks, or more accurately 1 month 4 days, or more specifically 35 days. 25 weekdays if you're counting that way.
This is what was released to me:
The annoying thing is when they release the data, the release it in a non machine readable PDF. I'm pretty sure this is deliberate. Sure, nothing that can't be made machine readable with good old OCR and running everything through AI these days, but this is a bad sign for accountability.
This time I got 3 columns:
- Number of ETA applicants
- "Computer Assisted Grant"
- "Manual Grant Non-Grant"
As usual, Malaysia stands out like a sore thumb. For the period of 1 Jan 2024 to 30 June 2025 there were 183,365 applications by Malaysian passport holders for an Australian ETA. The data seems to suggest that only 49,439 of them was approved 'automatically'.
Basic maths (ie. 183,365 / 49,439) would indicate a automatic approval rate of 26.9621% for Malaysian passport holders. In other words, 73.0379% of Malaysian passport holders applying for a Australian ETA will be pulled for additional processing.
At least it is consistent with the last time I got the data: 73.69% of Malaysian passport holders applying for a Australian ETA were pulled for additional processing between 1 Dec 2022 to 31 Dec 2023.
It does get interesting once you take a closer look at the numbers:
- 183,365 applications
- 49,439 of them was approved 'automatically'
Basic math will tell you that 183,365 minus 49,439 equals 133,926.
But the "Manual Grant Non-Grant" column gives a number of 108,476.
108,476 is not 133,926.
And this is where I get into a weird world of a matter of interpretation. There are 2 ways of looking at this:
- 183,365 Malaysians applied, 133,926 were pulled for additional processing, 108,476
were approved after additional processing, 25,450 rejected after manual processing - 183,365 Malaysians applied, 133,926 were pulled for additional processing, 25,450
were approved after additional processing, 108,476 rejected after manual processing
It could really go either way. I mean, look at Brunei passport holders:
- 3,379 applications
- 3,353 of them was approved 'automatically'
- That leaves a difference of 26 applicants
- And 19 were "Manual Grant Non-Grant"
Does this mean that out of that 26 pulled for additional processing, 7 of them were eventually given the ETA, or 19 of them were given the ETA?
What is clear is that the automatic grant rate for the ETA's are in the 99% range, until you come to Malaysia:
The message is clear from Australia: you're not welcome. In between hiking up visa fees, capping the number of international student enrollments, reducing the number of places in the permanent migration program, and high cost of living, this is not the time to be coming to Australia.
Its not North Korea, or pandemic times, where the borders were closed, but the sentiment is there.
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