There will be winners and there will be losers. What I'm afraid of is that there might be some winners on the backs of others who would have been winners in the past.
We should do everything we can, obviously, to better the system. I think the 1% or 2% you referred to is really not going to do much. Some of my former colleagues who were dismissed from overseas posts would tell you that even if we bring back the complement of staff that was there five or six years ago, we would have probably three to five years of processing this backlog. This backlog is going to grow unless we seriously look at it and throw in some serious resources. I'm talking about manpower to deal with it.
We can't just have the minister issue a letter to 800,000 or 700,000 saying, “Thank you very much for applying. You can now leave the queue. By the way, I'm not refusing you, so you can't appeal this to the Federal Court; it's just one of those administrative things. But I thank you for waiting eight to ten years. Thank you very much.”