That's the problem with the current act. You can't stop it, because section 11 of the act--I think it is--says that if the people meet the requirements, they shall be accepted. As I said, prior to the 2001 act, there were many people who met most of the selection criteria, but we didn't take them because we didn't need them, or we thought we were getting too many people, so we turned the tap on and turned it off. That mechanism is missing in the current legislation.
I presume that underlying the change from “shall” to “may” is the minister's intention to be able to have some mechanism not to deal with the backlog, but to more effectively control the incoming flow, rather than simply letting everybody who meets the criteria into the country.