No one likes waiting, least of all to get paid. ASC Migration use Secured Signing to turn around agreements more quickly to get paid sooner. 

Given a choice between one marshmallow now, or 2 marshmallows in 15 minutes, 2 out of 3 kids take the sugar hit straight away. It seems an aversion to waiting is hard wired into most of us. But when it comes to running a small business, getting paid earlier is also good business sense. So it is not surprising that when John Kavanagh of ASC Migration found a business tool that allowed him to get paid 2-3 weeks more quickly, he grabbed it with both hands.

ASC Migration is a registered migration agent under the Federal Government’s Migration Agents Registration Authority. Part of the Code of Conduct for registered agents is to establish a written acceptance from their client before starting work and charging for that work. It typically took 2-3 weeks to turnaround a written agreement sent by post and usually required a lot of follow up to ensure the paperwork didn't get lost in the top drawer.

A Melbourne business operator has been fined more than $228,000 after admitting she underpaid a vulnerable migrant employee because she thinks Australia’s minimum pay rates are “just crazy”. The Federal Circuit Court has imposed a penalty of $35,496 against businesswoman Na Xu after she admitted responsibility for underpaying the employee $19,567 over a period of just eight months. 

Xu’s travel services company Grandcity (GW) Travel & Tour Pty Ltd, which operates the Grandcity Tours travel agency at Glen Waverley, was fined a further $192,840. The penalties are the result of an investigation and legal action by the Fair Work Ombudsman.

An FWO report said, its inspectors discovered the underpayment after receiving a request for assistance from a 24-year-old migrant from China.

The employee, who spoke limited English, was paid flat hourly rates of between $9 and $11 to work a casual travel consultant between January and September, 2013.

Under the General Retail Industry Award, the employee should have been paid more than $21 for normal hours, plus penalty rates for weekend and public holiday work. She was paid less than half of her total entitlements.   

Is it possible for a person who is married to, or the de facto partner of, an Australian citizen to get Australian citizenship even if the person lives overseas most of the time? And if it is possible, under what circumstances may the person qualify for citizenship?

These questions were presented to the Full Court of the Federal Court in the recent case of Minister for Immigration and Border Protection v Han, (2015) FCAFC 79 (4 June 2015). In its decision, the Court provided clear and unequivocal answers. And in the process, the Court adopted an interpretation of the Australian Citizenship Act that had previously been accepted in some judgments of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, but rejected in others. In other words, there was a “split”, or “difference of opinion” in the AAT about the requirements of the legislation. The decision of the Full Court in Han resolves that “split”.

The issue that was before the Court in Han was about the exercise of the Minister’s discretion to grant relief from the residency requirements that normally apply when a person is seeking citizenship on the basis of “conferral” – that is, where the applicant is not entitled to an automatic grant of citizenship as a result of being born in Australia with one or both parents holding Australian citizenship or permanent residency at the time of the person’s birth.

Background

PIC 4020 was introduced in 2011 to strengthen the integrity of Australia’s immigration program by detecting and preventing visa fraud.  PIC 4020 provides a ground to refuse to grant a visa where the applicant fails to satisfy the Minister of their identity, or where there is evidence that the visa applicant has given, or caused to be given, a bogus document or information that is false or misleading in relation to:

·         the application for the visa

by David KO Chin, Managing Director, Basis Point

The author of the 2013 best seller Crazy Rich Asians has launched China Rich Girlfriend.  His response to criticism that he is replacing one bad stereotype (of poor Asians) with another bad stereotype (of rich Asians) was that he was ‘opening up the range of stereotypes’.

One of the biggest challenges in digesting the information overload on ‘new China’ is that the extremes are interesting but not the norm.  We suggest the normal distribution curve be kept in mind to reclassify where the information sits in the larger picture.