A few years back, DIBP has made a major announcement to overhaul Australian visa framework to align this framework to our international counterparts. The goal was to make certain visa requirements redundant for example, the requirement for an applicant to be in or outside Australia on lodgement or grant of the visa, the need for original documents and of course, paper based applications.
Since the announcement, we have seen visa subclasses collapsed and condensed into different categories. We now have visas with different streams such as the 400 visa which and the 402 visa (rather than separate subclasses for each activity), we have seen the removal of the onshore/offshore requirement for ENS applications and so forth. This process has in turn benefited both agents as well as visa applicants as it has become much easier to understand and more importantly meet requirements for a particular visa.
Public consultations were instrumental in this simplification process and the consultation process concluded last week on the 15th September.
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