Chinanews, July 27th. According to a report compiled by Australia.com, despite the impact of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, the number of naturalized Australian citizens hit a record in the last fiscal year.
SBS reported on the 25th that between 2019 and 2020, nearly 204,800 people became Australian citizens. This is the largest increase in the number of new citizens on record, an increase of 60% over the previous fiscal year. Due to the previous severe epidemic, the Federal Ministry of the Interior has launched an online naturalization ceremony since March, and about 60,000 people have obtained citizenship. In this regard, Federal Minister of Immigration Alan Tudge said that even in the case of the spread of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, the government has made reducing the backlog of citizenship and shortening the waiting time its top priority. He said: "We have invested more resources to solve the problem of the number of people waiting for the naturalization ceremony, and we have been innovating during the implementation process."
The top five countries of origin for the latest naturalizations include India (38,209), the United Kingdom (25011), China (14,764), the Philippines (12,838) and Pakistan (8821). Victoria has granted the most citizenships with 60081 people, followed by NSW (58833), Queensland (31714), Western Australia (30394) and South Australia (14135).
At the same time, the small-scale offline naturalization ceremony will be restarted on June 3, but the government stated that for security reasons, the online ceremony will also continue. Currently, this record number of naturalization applications has also reduced the backlog of naturalization applications from 85,000 in April this year to 50,000. In this regard, Tucci promised that by the end of this year, this number will be reduced to zero. (Gao Jiawen)