Lately the Australian Government has been announcing changes to the immigration program, focusing now even more on the regional areas. The whole idea is to attract international migrants to those cities with lack of people and with problems to fill all it’s workforce gaps.

Among the changes, immigration minister David Coleman announced that the trial of the Global Talent Scheme would be made permanent and expanded to include the Global Talent Independent program to recruit 5,000 highly skilled migrants, with fast-tracked visas.
“Within our annual migration plan, skilled migration is the lynchpin of our approach, accounting for close to 70% of the intake,” he said, adding the education sector would play a key role.

Talking about new visas, Australia will have 23,000 places allocated to it’s provisional residency stream including a fast-tracking permanent residency within three years for migrants living and working in regional Australia. International students will also benefit from those changes, they will now be eligible to have a 3 year post graduate visa if studying in Regional Australia.

Shortly after the visa and migration announcements, education minister Dan Tehan launched the Destination Australia scholarships program. The scheme, which replaced the Endeavour Leadership Program, will provide $19.5 million in funding per year over four years for scholarships encouraging domestic and international students to undertake regional study.

Different from the Endeavour Leadership Program, the new Destination Australia offers the opportunity for education providers to ask for the scholarships and it can be used for Higher Education and also for VET courses.

The first round of Destination Australia scholarship funding is open and will close on September 12, 2019.