Australian Immigration Daily News

The purpose of the instrument is to clarify that Somali passports are a class of passport that an applicant cannot hold in order to satisfy Public Interest Criterion 4021 when applying for a visa.

This is a clarification of the previous determination (IMMI 14/073) which specified that “Somali travel documents” are a class of passport that cannot be held to satisfy Public Interest Criterion 4021, and “travel documents” includes “passports”.

 Source:

Recent tightening of the sponsorship requirements is forcing employers to seek alternative options to enable them to sponsor overseas workers.  Labour Agreements (LA’s) may offer a solution in circumstances where standard sponsorship requirements cannot be met by an employer.                                                                                           

Briefly, a labour agreement is a formal arrangement negotiated between an Australian employer and the Australian Government.  Applying for a visa under a labour agreement is the only migration pathway for employers seeking to recruit overseas workers for semi-skilled positions, or skilled positions where concessions to mainstream visa requirements are sought. 

Whilst LA’s offer some concessions including the ability to sponsor workers in semi-skilled positions, an employer must nonetheless ensure Australian workers get priority.  In addition, an employer must ensure: 

Six Malaysian nationals and two from Nepal were detained and taken to the Kununurra Police Station for interview.

Acting Superintendent Anthony Spadavecchia from ABF's Enforcement Command said three of those detained are suspected of higher level involvement in worker exploitation and are being held in detention ahead of their removal from Australia.

“The remaining five individuals were conditionally released, contingent on their immediate departure from Australia,” Acting Superintendent Spadavecchia said.

Source: DHA-targets-illegal-workers.pdf

How unusual is it for the Minister to seek judicial review of a decision of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal? 

How about: “Incredibly”? (“The Incredibles” would probably like that answer!) 

I have been closely reading the migration decisions of the Federal Courts for the last 5 years and I have never seen a case involving an application by the Minister. 

Leesha McKenny from SBS is interested to hear from practitioners who may have experienced problems with the quality of the services provided by some interpreters  at the AAT and in the Courts.

I think it is fair to say that interpreters do a difficult job but if you run into an interpreter who is not properly interpreting the questions that are asked and the answers given it can create problems for the client who may then be cast as a person whose evidence is unreliable.