Australia tightened its migration rules yesterday in favour of English speakers and professionals, saying the country has been attracting too many hairdressers and cooks and too few doctors and engineers.

Immigration Minister Chris Evans blamed the overrepresentation of lower skilled immigrants on a system put in place by Prime Minister John Howard, whose government lost power in 2007 elections.

"Under the Howard government, we had a lot of cooks, a lot of hairdressers coming through," Evans told reporters. "We were taking hairdressers from overseas in front of doctors and nurses it didn't make any sense."

The new rules will favour applicants who already have job offers over those who merely have qualifications or who are studying. The measures are expected to dampen enrolment in Australian colleges by foreign students hoping to settle in the country.

Numbers of foreign students enrolled in Australian colleges exploded in 2001, when the government changed migration rules to allow them to apply for permanent residency while studying. Until then, skilled workers had to apply offshore for visas to fill jobs from a list of more than 100 trades and professions that were suffering shortages in Australia.

Australia continues to have a shortage of accountants, partly because many of the 40,000 accountants who immigrated in the past five years did not have the professional or language skills to find work, Evans said.

The new policy will favour applicants who score highly in an English language test. Moreover, immigrant numbers in certain jobs could be capped for the first time. The government has not identified which jobs.

Because of the higher standards and a revised list of which skilled workers are in short supply, 20,000 visa applications will be scrapped and their application fees totalling 14 million Australian dollars ($12 million) refunded, he said.