The Points System

Most borders hide their preferences. Australia prints them. The Migration Regulations 1994, Schedule 6D, is a public table of what the country pays for: youth, English, degrees, years in the job. Every applicant reads the same table and scores themselves against it. I have built companies across twelve countries. Not one of them ever handed me a written statement of what it valued. Australia does. That is an unusual kind of honesty, and it is worth reading closely. The points-tested family has three visas. Subclass 189 is the independent one. No sponsor, no state, no address anyone can hold over you. Subclass 190 needs a state or territory nomination and pays 5 points for it. Subclass 491 is the regional provisional visa, five years on arrival and permanent through subclass 191 after three years of regional residence, and it pays 15. Read those two numbers against each other. The country pays 15 points for going where it needs people and 5 for going where it is already full. The probability that a country publishes a price list it has no intention of paying is not zero. It is close to zero. The table is the demand curve, printed.

Sixty-five points is the minimum to lodge an Expression of Interest. That figure is quoted everywhere and understood by almost nobody. It is not a target. It is a door. Behind the door is a queue, and the queue is sorted by score, highest first. In recent 189 rounds the invitations clustered between 85 and 95 points. An applicant sitting on 65 is not competing. They are standing in a room where the invitations stopped being handed out. The published waits make the shape of it plain. At 95 points or above, applicants were invited in the same round. Between 85 and 94, one to three months. Between 75 and 84, six to eighteen months. Below that, often never, and the outcome turns entirely on which occupation you claim. That is what a points system does. It does not reject you. It sorts you, in public, by a number you can still change.

The table is short and every line in it is priced. Age, at the time of invitation. 18 to 24 pays 25 points. 25 to 32 pays 30, the maximum in the table. 33 to 39 pays 25 again. 40 to 44 pays 15. Skilled employment outside Australia. 3 to 5 years pays 5. 5 to 7 years pays 10. 8 to 10 years pays 15. The same years inside Australia pay more, up to 20 for 8 to 10 years. Qualifications. A doctorate pays 20. A bachelor or masters pays 15. An Australian trade or diploma pays 10. Then the smaller line items. Two years of Australian study, 5 points. A masters by research or a doctorate in a STEM field, 10. A NAATI community language credential, 5. Study in regional Australia, 5. A partner with competent English, 5. A partner with a skills assessment and competent English, 10. Being single, 10. Read that last one again. A country that has argued about family migration for decades prices being single at 10 points and prices being married to a skilled partner at 10 points. The table is not romantic. It is arithmetic.

Nothing else in the table moves that far for that little. Competent English is the entry requirement and pays nothing. IELTS 6.0 in every band. Proficient, 7.0 in every band, pays 10 points. Superior, 8.0 in every band, pays 20. The gap between competent and superior is 20 points. Set that against the employment line, where 8 to 10 years of your working life buys 15 points outside Australia and 20 inside it. A test you can sit again in three months moves the same distance as a decade of work. The test is valid for three years from the date you sit it. Competent is PTE 50. Proficient is PTE 65. Superior is PTE 79. The TOEFL equivalents are published band by band alongside, and they do not move in step with each other, so a score that clears the bar in one test can miss it in another. The obvious move is to book the test before anything else, because the score it returns sets the ceiling on everything you do afterwards. The probability that an applicant with a decade of experience and a 6.5 IELTS is outscored by a 27-year-old with an 8.0 is not zero. It happens in almost every round.

The country pays 15 points for going where it needs people and 5 for going where it is already full.

Subclass 491 pays 15 points for regional sponsorship. It is the largest single bonus in the table and it is the one applicants work hardest to avoid. The mechanics are plain. Five years provisional, then three years of regional residence and income compliance, then a transition to subclass 191, which is permanent. Processing on the 191 sat around four months at the fiftieth percentile. States and territories run the nomination side, and they are not equally quick. New South Wales publishes 6 to 12 weeks and is invitation-only. Victoria 6 to 8. Queensland 4 to 8. Western Australia 4 to 6. South Australia 4 to 6. Tasmania 4 to 6. The Northern Territory 6 to 8. The Australian Capital Territory runs a matrix and takes 12 to 14 weeks. Every one of those windows exists because a state has to decide whether it needs you. The points are the country speaking. The nomination is the state speaking. They rarely say the same thing in the same month.

Applicants plan for the visa. The wait that hurts is the invitation. Post-lodgement processing for the 189 was, in one April snapshot, 6 months at the fiftieth percentile and 7 at the ninetieth. In a May snapshot the ninetieth percentile for the same visa read 15 months. Those are not two different systems. They are two months of the same volatile statistic, and averaging them produces a number that describes nothing. For the 190 the published figures were 14 months at the fiftieth percentile and 18 at the ninetieth. The 491 splits by stream. State-sponsored, 4 months at the fiftieth and 23 at the ninetieth. Family-sponsored, 22 and 26. A range-based read is more honest. The 189 appears at 5 to 11 months. The 491 at 6 to 14. The 190 at 7 to 16, state-dependent. Now look at the comparison. A 190 nomination alone can run longer than the visa that follows it. The invitation queue and the processing queue are two different queues, and most applicants plan for one of them. Every occupation family also has its own assessing body and its own queue. Engineers Australia for engineering. The Australian Computer Society for ICT. CPA Australia, CA ANZ or the IPA for accounting. Trades Recognition Australia for trades. AHPRA and the relevant health board for nursing. None of them award points. All of them gate the points. The practical move is to walk the whole sequence backwards. Skills assessment first, because that queue takes weeks to months and every later step depends on it. Then the English test. Then the Expression of Interest. Then wait, and keep improving the number while you wait. I took a company through a Frankfurt listing once, and the lesson transfers. The price is set by who else is bidding, not by what you think the asset is worth. A points table is the same instrument with the names changed.

A points system is an unusually transparent thing. Most countries select migrants through a process nobody can see and then describe it afterwards in language about values. Australia writes the values down as integers and publishes them. What the table reveals is not what the country says it needs. It is what the country is willing to pay for. Youth at 30. English at 20. A doctorate at 20. Regional residence at 15. Ten years in a job, 15. Read those against each other. The country pays more for a regional move than for a decade of professional experience. It pays the same 10 points for being single as for marrying someone with a skills assessment and competent English. It pays 30 for being 27 and 15 for being 42. None of that is a moral position. It is a demand curve with a public price. The mistake is treating the score as a verdict. It is a shopping list, and every line on it is buyable with time, except one. Age is the only irreversible term, which is why the whole strategy is about sequencing the reversible ones faster than the clock moves. The 189 round closes. The state reopens. The test can be retaken. The nomination can be switched. What does not reopen is 25 to 32. The probability that the system is fair is not zero. The probability that it is legible is 100, and that is a better offer than most countries make. What follows is public regulation, summarised. It is not advice, the cut-offs move every round, and the single authority worth reading is the one that publishes the invitation data.