The Joint Standing Committee on Migration has commenced an inquiry into the Business Innovation and Investment Programme.  Migration Alliance received an invitation to participate and inform other organisations, groups and individuals. Please find below a copy of the letter we have received:

New-Inquiry-into-the-business-innovation-and-investment-programme.pdf

Below is the submission by Christopher Levingston in his own personal capacity, which you may wish to use as a terms of reference:

Dr Caroline Hong is the face of modern Australia.

Malaysian born with Chinese Ancestry, Caroline Hong has lived, worked and built her career in Australia for over three decades.

Armed with several Australian tertiary qualifications, she is well known in Australia for her passion, commitment and advocacy for the SME sector, notably in her role as International Ambassador of the SME Association of Australia, Ambassador of Australia China Business Week and President of China HR.

Over the past 15 years, she has held three CEO roles of leading industry associations in the healthcare and business sectors, and is widely recognised and admired as an Australia-Asia SME Expert.

Cyber-risk management for Migration Alliance has become an important factor for our organisation, especially during this important growth and development phase. 

Last year, as many of you would be aware, Migration Alliance suffered from a serious and sustained hacking attack and multiple cyber-intrusion attempts.  The pointed and targeted attacks on our website were so bad that the Australian goverment Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) became involved and assisted Migration Alliance over a period of about a month to counter the most severe intrusion attempts we had ever faced.  The CEO of the Office of the MARA was involved, the Data Security team at DIBP in Canberra were involved and the situation soon escalated to nothing short of an online data security 'code red'.

Whilst MA had online data security infrastructure in place at the time, we did not have an effective data-breach incident management plan.  We also did not have a Privacy Officer in place to manage the events as they occurred, in particular events which led to the theft of data.  As such we have spent time looking deeply into the Privacy Act.  We have also looked into Cyber-Risk and mitigation strategies to prevent this occurring into the future.

Scott Morrison’s announced that taxpayer funded immigration advice for IMA’s would be cut as of today.

I’ve attached a copy of the Dept’s media statement, and here’s a link to the article at news.com.au:

http://www.news.com.au/national/asylum-seeker-handouts-scrapped-australian-taxpayers-to-save-25-million-a-year/story-fncynjr2-1226869251116

The office of the MARA have sent out an email to the profession titled 'Update from the Office of the MARA CRM:0033861' on Thursday March 27th at 5:20 pm.  Within it is the following information:

Raising consumer awareness - New video 

(Note from me: the video is not new it was uploaded to Youtube last year in December 2013)

One of the roles of the Authority is to ensure that consumers are aware of their rights.  Of course an important way they can look after their own best interests is to use a registered agent.  We have released a YouTube video called Do you need help applying for an Australian visa? This is available through the news carousel on the homepage of our website and encourages people to choose only registered migration agents. You may wish to place a link to this video on your own webpage if you have one. Here is the link: https://www.mara.gov.au/news-and-publications/news/videos/

By increasing community knowledge of the registration scheme, we will not only provide a better service to consumers, but help discourage the use of unregistered agents.