Photo: 123RF
Australia's Pacific Engagement Visa (PEV) has been an "overwhelming success" with over 56,000 applicants from the Pacific Islands and Timor-Leste applying for the visa, the head of ANU's Development Policy Centre says.
The registrations for the online ballot to select participants opened on 3 June.
Those who have been selected in the ballot from the 10 participating nations, "offers have been made" and they can apply for the visa to migrate to Australia as permanent residents.
"If people were successful in an initial ballot, they would have received an email from the Department of Home Affairs," Australia's International Development and Pacific Minister, Pat Conroy said last month.
"If people are unsure, they can also log on to their ImmiAccount and establish it. Importantly, we don't send emails to people who weren't successful in the initial round because there may be a requirement for further rounds to make sure that we fill out the country allocations for each country."
Professor Stephen Howes said the lottery - equivalent to New Zealand's Pacific Access Category resident visas - was most popular in Fiji, Tonga and Timor-Leste.
"Demand for the PEV was highest in Fiji, where there were 102 ballot registrations - or primary applicants - for every visa. Tonga took second place, with 37 primary applicants for each visa, and Timor-Leste was in third spot with 23 per visa," he wrote for the Devpolicy Blog.
Professor Howes said PEV primary applicants could also register family members in the ballot.
"I assume that on average primary applicants registered 1.5 unique family members for the visa.
"On this assumption, 20 percent of Tuvalu's population applied for the PEV, 13 percent of Tonga's, and 8 percent of Nauru's and Fiji's."
He said in the three countries in which both the PEV and PAC visas are available, "Australia's PEV seems to have been more popular".
"For example, in Fiji, in 2019 (the last year for which I have been able to find the NZ data), there were 75 total applications for the NZ visa, compared to 254 for this visa (including the assumed number of family members)."
He said when the PEV was first announced it said country quotas would be proportional to population.
However, given the demand for the visa, "the aggregate 3000 visas in total could be increased", to cater for countries that have been "historically disadvantaged" under such schemes.
Professor Howes noted that the United States territories of Federated States of Micronesia and Palau were the only two places where the PEV ballot was unsuccessful, where there were fewer than 10 primary applicants for the 50 visas on offer in each.
"Both countries already have unrestricted access to the US labour market (though not to US citizenship), and I had advised against including them in the PEV. It is embarrassing that we could not even give away offers of permanent migration in these two countries, and they should be excluded from next year's ballot," he wrote.
"Overall, despite the FSM/Palau fiasco, the first PEV ballot was an overwhelming success in terms of the numbers applying," he concluded.