Breaking Australian immigration news brought to you by Migration Alliance and associated bloggers.
Liana Allan is probably Australia's best known migration agent. Liana is the owner of Legal Training Australia Pty Ltd which is a professional development firm training Australian migration agents and owner of Visacorp Pty Ltd migration agency. Liana's main passion is serving the needs of the migration agent community and providing migrants with information that can truly assist them as they seek to create a new life in Australia. Liana plays netball twice a week and enjoys great food and the occasional glass of Shiraz. Liana lives in Sydney, Australia and has two children. Liana is married.
I received the following email today and the former agent has given me permission to publish:
Dear Liana
I would like to thank Migration Alliance for the support and representation of Registered Migration Agents’ issues. I am sad to advise you that I have resigned as RMA and I didn’t renew my registration due to personal issues.
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Interestingly the online newspaper 'The Ethics Daily' has picked up Migration Alliance's story about OMARAs random audit emails. It would appear that if an Online Ethics Paper is running a story on OMARA's 'random audit' emails then there may be a problem.
Now, with respect to the overall security of the Qualtrics surveys that OMARA uses, it would appear that anyone with access to the nominated email address or who has been forwarded the email by the RMA, could complete the survey for and on behalf of the RMA. We have tested it and found that there is no mechanism for an RMA to actually “prove” their identity prior to completion of the survey. A 12 year old child could complete the survey if their parent left the email open and the RMA would be none the wiser.
Just as an RMA needs to log into the OMARA website to complete certain formal processes, so should they have to log into the website and have their ID captured and verified properly before they complete a survey, where the information is gathered and could later 'incriminate' them and lead to S308 and S309 notices.
I have written to the OMARA on more than one occasion about this glitch, and suggested that a solution to this problem would be that the OMARA ask agents to log in before completing the survey, and that access to the survey can only be obtained after login.
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All visa applicants who have been patiently waiting in a queue for the Skilled Independent subclass 175, Skilled Sponsored subclass 176 and Skilled Regional Sponsored subclass 475 are now subject to cap and cease.
Cap and Cease starts today 22 September 2015 and the total has already been reached.
Any applications for these visas which were not finalised before today are taken not to have been made.
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At the end of July 2015 I wrote an article titled 'Refuse, refuse, refuse: 457 nominations and visas refused'.
The DIBP kindly responded to my tweets on the above article, stating that DIBP approval rates sat at over 90%.
Mistakenly, I should have cited the 'most-popularly-refused' occupation, and asked for the approval/refusal-rate for that particular occupation. That 'popularly refused' occupation is none other than Customer Service Manager.
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