Australian Immigration Daily News

Would anyone (especially anyone like me who has suffered a computer “melt-down”) argue with the proposition that:  “The Internet is wonderful until it is not!”?

Likewise, we could say that the ability to apply for a visa through the Department’s on-line systems is a fantastic convenience both for applicants and the Department.

Until it is not!

How would you like to do a little mental exercise to get yourself back into the swing of things now that we’re getting into mid-January, and the summertime joys of beach, sun and sky are giving way again to days at your desk and the joys of the migration legislation?

Is you’re a.c. working on this brutally hot day (in Sydney!)? Are you completely up to date on the amendments that came into force in November 2016? If so, ready, steady, go!!

Suppose you are dealing with an application for an Orphan Relative visa, Subclass 117.

Do you ever feel when you are dealing with the Department of Immigration that, like Alice in Wonderland, you have “stepped through the looking glass” and into a world where the normal laws of physics and reality have been suspended?

Or that you have ventured into a bureaucratic labyrinth that reflects the dark scenarios portrayed in the works of Kafka or Orwell? Or the “Brave New World” of “Trump”, where fiction has become fact, fact has become fiction, and the dividing line between the two has become blurred beyond all recognition?

Or that dealing with the Department is sometimes an exercise in “Catch-22”?

Remember the agreement that was reached late last year between the Turnbull Government and the Obama Administration to resettle asylum-seekers who are currently being held in detention on Nauru and on Manus Island in the US?

Remember that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull confidently asserted that the agreement was one between Australia and the US, and that the agreement would therefore surely be honoured by the incoming “Trump Administration”?

Even though many of the people who are being held on Manus and Nauru are from Iraq and Afghanistan and are Muslim?

The Federal Circuit Court handed down a decision earlier this week that should give all of us in the migration advice profession another reason to celebrate and be thankful during the holiday season!

This decision, Pokharel v Minister for Immigration & Anor (2016) FCCA 3295 (19 December 2016) shows that it is not the end of the story when a Medical Officer of the Commonwealth makes a determination that a member of an applicant’s family unit does not meet the health requirements contained in Public Interest Criterion 4005, or when the Tribunal concludes that it is bound, under regulation 2.25A, to accept the opinion of the MOC to be correct, or when the Tribunal refuses to adjourn a hearing to enable up-to-date information concerning the health condition of an applicant to be collected.

When it comes to cases where there are issues involving the health criteria, it doesn’t get much better than that, does it?