At 31 August 2026 there were 2,878,973 people in Australia on temporary visas. Take out New Zealand citizens, visitors and crew, and 1,825,403 remain. New research out this week says nearly half of Australian cybersecurity employers have already handed the junior analyst's job to a piece of software. Nobody has gone back and resized the visa pathway that was built to fill that exact job. The country keeps importing people for work a machine now does for less, on a permanent visa, for a shortage everyone agrees is shrinking.
What did the new research actually find?
Barracuda Research surveyed 2,000 IT and security decision-makers across 16 countries for its 2026 Cybersecurity Skills Gap Report. Among the 200 Australian respondents, 45 per cent said their firm had already replaced entry-level security staff with AI.
That is a higher share than anywhere else surveyed. Globally, AI-driven job cuts hit entry-level and senior roles about evenly. In Australia, entry-level workers took the hit more often than senior ones did.
How deep do the cuts actually go?
This is not a handful of firms trialling a chatbot. 64 per cent of the Australian respondents said they had seen workforce reductions linked to AI somewhere in their security team.
One vendor named in the report, Arctic Wolf, says AI agents now resolve 60 per cent of its customers' security investigations without a person touching them. A junior analyst's first job, triaging alerts, used to be exactly that work.
Is this one of the jobs the visa pathway was built for?
Yes. Cybersecurity is a listed skilled occupation, and it is also one of the degrees international students are steered into on the promise of a graduate visa at the end.
Roughly 542,204 people are in Australia right now on a Temporary Resident (Skilled Employment) or Temporary Graduate visa with full, uncapped work rights. See the full breakdown on our temporary visa population page. A 22-year-old Australian IT graduate applying for their first security job is in the same queue as a graduate-visa holder with a finished degree and two years of local experience, for a job AI has already started doing instead of either of them.
Does automation taking the job mean the intake caused the problem?
No, and the honest answer matters here. AI replacing the entry-level cybersecurity role is happening regardless of how many visas are issued. Cutting the intake will not bring that job back.
What cutting the intake changes is simpler: how many people are competing for whatever is left of it. Importing someone onto a permanent visa pathway, for a shortage that automation is actively closing, adds a second person to a queue that is already losing seats. That is a decision made at the visa office, not a side effect of the software.
What does this look like for young Australians generally?
Youth unemployment, ages 15 to 24, sits at 11.1 per cent, against 4.7 per cent for all ages, in the September 2026 figures. That gap has widened for three years straight. Full details are on our youth unemployment page.
Both figures are real and they move together. The data does not say the standing migrant population causes youth unemployment, and nobody honest should claim it does. What it shows is a country adding visa holders to entry-level occupations at the same time as software starts doing those jobs and young Australians struggle to get a first one.
So what should actually change?
The intake should come down, on a schedule, and keep coming down while the figures say the shortage is shrinking rather than growing. One Nation is the party that has put a number on it: a cut of 750,000 to the temporary migrant population over three years, with net migration going negative during the reset.
The Liberals have moved toward a lower intake and the Nationals carry the regional cost-of-living case, but neither has published a schedule of its own. That is why One Nation should lead the next government, with the Liberals and the Nationals in support, not as a junior partner asking to be let in later. A graduate visa issued today for a job AI already does cheaper is a decision this country is still making, one visa at a time, and somebody has to be the party that stops making it.