Australian Immigration Daily News

What if a husband and wife have an “appalling relationship”?

Will that mean that a partner visa application will be “doomed to failure”?

Does the fact that the husband and wife have a “fundamentally flawed” relationship mean that they cannot, at the same time, have a “mutual commitment to a shared life together” – and thus cannot satisfy the criteria for a partner visa?

It is so incredibly important for a person who wishes to remain in Australia to lodge a valid application with the Department for a new substantive visa before their original visa expires. 

If a visa holder allows her/his visa to “expire” before applying for a new, or “further” visa, they may find themselves in a position where they and their family members have no choice but to leave Australia and then apply for the new visa from “offshore”.  Of course, the visa holder and her/his family may suffer from substantial inconvenience and upheaval if they have to go offshore to make another application.  Not to mention that they may have to “wait” offshore for an indeterminate period of time while the Department assesses the application. 

For these reasons, it is also essential that a person must take an active role in safeguarding her/his visa entitlements, and not passively hand the process of applying for a further substantive visa to “someone else”.  

In this day and age, we have all become incredibly dependent on our desktop computers, tablets, phones and other digital devices, haven’t we? 

And we tend to treat the information that we get in digital form as correct, reliable and even infallible, don’t we? 

Well, a recent decision from the High Court – Wei v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection (2015) HCA 51 (17 December 2015) provides a reminder of the accuracy of that old saying from the early days of computers: “Garbage in – garbage out”.  

One might think that once an applicant has been granted a subclass 189 visa for independent skilled migration, their future in Australia is all “blue skies” and “clear sailing”: at that stage, they would have a right to permanent residency in Australia and would likely be on a pathway to Australian citizenship, as would any family members included in their visa application.

Right? 

Well, a recent decision of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal illustrates that “it ain’t necessarily so”: 1509158 (Migration) (2016) AATA 3022 (11 January 2016). 

Sometimes, there are situations where it is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible, to get a visa application successfully “across the line”.  

That’s something that I don’t like to say (and perhaps I should have written that sentence in “invisible ink”!).

As lawyers and RMAs, we’re used to being able to find solutions and fix problems.