The Refugee Council of Australia, in its submission to a government migration review, said the backlogs facilitated spurious applications for protection from people who could reside in the country for years because of protracted processes.

But Hannah Dickinson, the principal solicitor of the Human Rights Law Program at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, said the argument was a red herring.

"The Department of Home Affairs has always had mechanisms for dealing with unmeritorious claims, including prioritising them for faster decisions," she told AAP.

Ms Dickinson said some spurious claims were being confused with genuine ones from people who might have been trafficked or exploited.

"I don't think any question of unmeritorious claims is really relevant to the backlog," she said.

"There is no evidence to suggest any kind of large-scale intentional unmeritorious claims being made. We have application processes for visas because we require people to meet criteria."

However, the refugee council said that if applications were processed in a well-resourced, prompt and orderly system, there would be no incentive for non-refugees to lodge applications.

Sanmati Verma, the managing lawyer with the Human Rights Law Centre, said asylum seekers had always been politicised and demonised.

Those wrongly labelled had frequently been trafficked, didn't speak English and had their passports confiscated by intermediaries employing them on farms or in brothels.

"People are stuck with these claims. The bogus asylum seekers is an excuse. It conceals systemic problems the government shouldn't avoid," Ms Verma said.

What she and Ms Dickinson didn't dispute was the need for an overhaul to end delays in asylum application processes due to a lack of government resources, legal assistance and proficient staff.

"For those people with meritorious claims for protection, these long delays create significant stress and anxiety. Many people seeking asylum are denied work rights, and only a handful of them have access to income support," the refugee council said.

"In order to address this backlog, the Department of Home Affairs should increase and train staff and the Attorney General's Department should increase funding to the AAT (administrative appeals tribunal) to appoint additional members to hear asylum appeals.''

A major roadblock is the tribunal itself.

The Albanese government announced plans to abolish the review body late last year, saying the coalition had stacked it with Liberal MPs and supporters.

Ms Dickinson urged rapid changes such as appropriate resourcing, reforming or replacing the AAT, protecting its independence and having a transparent appointment process, and ensuring people had access to legal assistance.

"If that is done, these backlogs can be addressed. This can't wait," she said.

The refugee council also urged Labor to undertake its commitment to increase the humanitarian intake of 13,750 places a year to 32,000, but said doing away with the cap entirely would be best to clear the backlog.

It said visa processing delays meant applicants could wait eight years for the outcome of their applications. Investing more resources into speeding up processing times was essential.

Federal government statistics show 70 per cent of the 96,371 people in the onshore processing system are waiting for a decision from the Home Affairs Department, appeals tribunal or federal courts.

Figures for October 2022 revealed 26,425 people waiting for an initial decision on asylum claims.

"At the current rate, it would take the department over two years to process these claims," the refugee council said.

Graham Thom, a refugee adviser with Amnesty International, said the submission highlighted almost 100,000 people in the community "who this government doesn't want to look at".

"These are people who are at the very margins and some of the most exploited because of the delays with their processing," Dr Thom said.

"If you want to tackle trafficking and labour exploitation, you have to look at asylum procedures and the way they were under-resourced under the previous (coalition) government."

Increases in review refusals in past years mirrored the decline in government funding to legal services to assist people with asylum applications, thus diminishing the system's efficiency and fairness, the refugee council claimed.

Those slipshod processes meant many applicants, deprived of interviews and the knowledge they had the right to review, had applications refused, Ms Verma said.

Australian Associated Press