Editor's Blog

The Fair Work Ombudsman has targeted take-away food businesses across Australia and ordered a total of 565 employers to supply time and wages records for assessment.

As a result of the investigations a total of 223 businesses were found to have short-changed 929 employees a total of $582,410, Acting Fair Work Ombudsman Michael Campbell announced earlier this week.

The investigations found that two out of three businesses were not fully compliant with all payslip and record-keeping obligations and close to half of them were not paying their employees correctly.

Chris Bailey, co-founder of Disrupt, has been deported because the department of immigration has found that he did not complete three months of fruit picking as part of the requirement to get an extension on a working holiday visa, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Disrupt, which started-up in Bondi, offers customers the ability to design their own surfboards using 3D printing technology. The company reportedly has a turnover of over $1 million a year. The deportation of Chris Bailey who was arrested last week after returning to Australia from the USA, where he was trying to establish an American office and manufacturing partnerships, has put the company's future in Australia at stake.

Bailey’s Disrupt co-founder Gary Elphick wrote about his partner’s deportation on LinkedIn earlier in the week: “When our COO arrived back to Sydney he was pulled aside by Border Force, subsequently held in a detention centre/prison for two days before being deported to the UK, leaving his car, house, family, and most importantly our company here in Sydney,” Elphick wrote.

Given the increase in the number of student visa cancellations in recent months, the message from the department of immigration to student visa applicants and visa holders seems to be that although visas are granted quickly they are also likely to be cancelled easily.

In the seven months to March of this year, some 9000 student visas have been cancelled by the DIBP, according to a recent report in The Australian.  Compared to two years ago where the figures stood at between 8000 to 9000 cancellations, it is looking like student visa cancellations could hit 15,000 this year.

Student visas may be cancelled on various grounds, including plagiarism. The Australian’s report highlighted the case of Shaheryar Khan, who had his visa cancelled because he was reported to have copied a number of his assessments directly from internet sources without attribution.

Education Minister for South Australia Dr. Susan Close has announced that 457 visa workers earning a household income of more than $77,000 will have to start paying school fees of up to $6100 from next year, according to a report in The Daily Telegraph.

Now, the children of sc457 workers do not pay public school fees. The move brings South Australia into line with WA, NSW and the ACT.

According to the newspaper, for the first year, the new charge will only apply to people who arrive in SA from January 1, 2017. From January 2018 it will apply to all 457 visa holders living in the state, regardless of when they arrived.

There is hope for the hopeless although the process of reconsidering his visa cancellation left Ricardo Bolvaran with ‘thoughts about suicide’.

Despite having lived in Australia for 41 of his 42 years, Mr Bolvaran, a recovering ice addict, was deported to Chile, the country of his birth late last year following his imprisonment in Brisbane's Wacol prison for drugs-related offences. Given that s501 of the Migration Act allows for automatic cancellation, if he had refused to leave, he would have been detained on Christmas Island while the DIBP reconsidered the cancellation decision.

However, within some 6 months of his deportation, the decision to cancel his visa was revoked yesterday by the DIBP paving the way for him to return to Australia.