A Sydney-based migration agent has failed in her bid to have a decision to cancel her registration overturned, with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) confirming the decision by the Office of the Migration Agents Registration Authority (OMARA). 

A spokesman for the Department of Immigration and Border Protection said the cancellation of registration of Ms Weiming Qian followed a number of complaints about applications for protection visas.

The Authority found that Ms Qian had failed to competently and diligently assist her clients and act on their instructions, manufactured or encouraged the manufacture of claims for protection visas, failed to attend with her clients at the Refugee Review Tribunal and the former Federal Magistrates Court for appointed hearings and prepared applications for judicial review when not qualified.

“A migration agent has a duty to act in the lawful interests of a client and this agent’s conduct was clearly not in her clients’ interests,” the spokesman said.

Migration Alliance’s Liana Allan recently had a ‘Thank you’ card returned with a letter from the APS officer suggesting that the card is somehow a breach of the APS Code of Conduct and as such the card had to be returned as the officer needed ‘not to be seen to be biased or impartial’.

Click here for a copy of the returned thank you card plus the letter from DIBP

The officer from the FOI and Privacy Section stated in the letter enclosing Liana Allan's 'Thank you" card that, “I am bound by the APS Code of Conduct which requires that as an APS employee I must at all times behave in a way that upholds the APS Values and APS Employment Principles.”

The APS Code of Conduct, The Public Service Regulations (1999) and the APS Employment Policy and Advice Guide do deal with the issue of gifts and benefits (There is no mention of cards). However, the APS guidelines recognise that issues in these areas are “not always straightforward” and in effect allows some discretion.

Such discretion fortunately has been exercised with some common sense business etiquette in mind in several other instances. Liana Allan points out, “Over the past 12 months I have sent around 10 of these thank you cards to various sections of the DIBP.  The other cards have not been returned in this way. This is absolutely ridiculous.”

And actually quite insulting, let alone the waste of time and cost by the officer involved in drafting that letter and returning the card by registered post with the suggestion that Liana write to the Global Feedback Unit with her compliments, which now of course has to be a complaint.

Migration Alliance members can rest assured everything that you write on this site is being taken into account by DIBP. However, it would be interesting to see if anything is being done about all this feedback.

DIBP hires private sector contractors who can monitor more than ‘half-a-billion pieces’ of social media each day on sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Flickr and blogs, reports The Canberra Times. It however remains unclear what DIBP does with the information as a veil of secrecy surrounds DIBPs dealings in these matters. Nevertheless, it certainly would be useful if their monitors could take into account all this feedback and let us know what is being done about the concerns that are being raised.

According to The Canberra Times, “Several commercially available social media-tracking platforms, some of them in routine use by public service online media teams, can easily track the web activities of protest groups and their individual members".

The newspaper reported that a pro-asylum seeker campaigner, Vanessa Powell said she was intimidated and threatened when DIBP tweeted her about an ‘offensive remark’ it said should be removed from her Facebook thread immediately or the government would ‘consider our options further’.

DIBP’s unfortunate approach in responding to enquiries by registered migration agents (RMAs) has been stifling RMAs ability to properly advance the case of prospective migrants. Applicants have been paying higher DIBP fees in recent years only to have poor service standards dealt out to their professional advisors.

It would seem that the solution to all of this is simple enough: that case officers provide their phone numbers to a migration applicant’s professional advisor, namely the RMA, or provide quicker responses via the Agents Gateway. However, neither have been forthcoming.

The Migration Alliance is concerned that DIBP's Agents Gateway has failed to live up to any respectable service level standards. This has a serious, detrimental, and unfair effect on prospective migrants whose applications are being processed.

RMAs have long complained of DIBP's slow responses, which can take between 2 to 4 weeks for what could very well be straightforward clarifications. But RMAs complaints have fallen on deaf ears. Given this, RMAs in urgent need to attend to genuine concerns have had to rely on DIBP's general phone enquiry line. However, RMAs says that DIBP's operators on these lines have displayed a reckless attitude amounting to contempt for the migration advisory profession.

Under pressure from the hospitality industry which is facing labour shortages in the order of some 56,000 workers, DIBP is finally re-evaluating its position on the salary threshold and language requirements for cooks and chefs.

According to The Australian, DIBP is evaluating an industry request to fast-track thousands of work visas for foreign chefs and cooks as well as review strict language requirements that require workers to have ‘functional English' under the 457 visa.

Speaking to The Australian, Restaurant and Catering Australia chief executive John Hart revealed that the hospitality industry wants the review to cover waiters and bar staff, as well as skilled chefs and managers.