Immigration officials have put up the shutters against students from the subcontinent, causing the first setback in the education sector’s comeback from its 2009 crash, notes a report from The Australian

Student visa grants to these countries fell in the June quarter, after the crackdown on students from India, Vietnam and Nepal by the department of Immigration (DIBP).

Inadequate visa applications by unqualified brokers which fail to properly address the genuine student criteria is often cited as the reason why so many applications from these countries are failing.

Student Visa grants to these countries fell last year by 13 per cent, 18 per cent and 16 per cent respectively. In addition to these refusals, the DIBP cancelled a record 11,000 student visas in the last financial year, which is a 30 per cent increase in the number of cancellations from the previous year.

Is there anything you can do if the Administrative Appeals Tribunal refuses to grant your client an adjournment which would make it possible to provide information which demonstrates that the client satisfies the criteria for the grant of a visa? 

What if the issue that is of concern to the Tribunal only comes up during the Tribunal’s hearing?

And what if the Tribunal refuses to grant an adjournment not because it is unsure that the applicant can supply the information which would satisfy the particular criterion for grant of the visa, but instead, the Tribunal refuses to grant the adjournment because it harbours “doubts” about whether the applicant satisfies a different, unrelated criterion?

Already facing a current shortage of 38,000 workers, the tourism industry woes are set to drift into dire straits if it doesn’t find an extra 123,000 workers - including 60,000 skilled workers - by 2020, according to a report by Deloitte Access Economics commissioned by Austrade.

A key recommendation of the report was to relax working-holiday visas for tourism sector work so that visa holders have no restrictions on staying on with the same employer beyond six months and are allowed to extend their stay for a further 12 months for working in the industry.

Former ACTU president cabinet minister Martin Ferguson told The Australian Financial Review (AFR) that the government must be flexible and allow temporary skilled workers when and where they are most needed.

"…with such an unprecedented pipeline of new hotel development and with record international demand, it will be important for governments to be flexible and allow temporary skilled workers when and where they are most needed,” said Mr Ferguson.

Tourism and Transport Forum chief executive Margy Osmond, told the AFR that the report should ring "alarm bells" about the need to attract and retain workers in the tourism industry.

"The Australian government recently announced that they will extend working-holidaymaker visas from six months to 12 months with one employer in Northern Australia – this reform needs to be expanded to cover the entire country," she said.

Michael Jeremy through Legal Training Australia is kicking off Summer with a series of afternoon CPD at the University of New England Futures Campus in Parramatta.

The first in the series will be The Health Criteria.

The 3-Point CPD will cover the following.

Following the governments swift action to deport hundreds of non-citizens with a ‘substantial’ criminal record, media reports say the ‘outlaw bikie gang members are rushing to file citizenship to avoid being deported.”

It is estimated that some 400 people linked to organised crime on the federal government’s National Criminal Threat Database are non-citizens, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph. DIBP is in the process of cross-referencing people on such databases to determine if they could be deported.

The government has already cancelled the visas of over 500 foreigners, since July last year. The cancellations have given little or no regard to the length of time they spent in Australia nor the effect of the cancellation on their Australian born partner and children. All it seems to take for the minister to make the call to deport them is if they had been sentenced to a year in jail or were the subject of criminal intelligence suggesting they were a threat to the community.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said in just June he cancelled the visas of 57 criminals and had them removed from Australia or prevented them from returning to Australia.

DIBP figures revealed that New Zealanders make up more than half of the foreigners who have had their visas cancelled. This is followed by citizens of the United Kingdom.