Australian Immigration Daily News

The following information has just been received from the DIBP:

Hi Education and Migration Agents, 

Welcome to the Department of Immigration and Border Protection’s first Student Visa Programme newsletter the ‘Agent Digest’. We will use the Agent Digest to communicate updates for the Student Visa Programme and on areas where the Department is noticing issues that may have the potential to delay processing times. 

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!

In a year which has begun after the foiling of a Christmas terrorist plot in Melbourne and with the horrifying news of an Islamic State-backed massacre in a nightclub in Istanbul, it is both right and responsible for Australia to question and discuss the objectives of its citizenship test.

As Immigration Minister Peter Dutton pointed out as 2017 got underway, we have entered a “new age” of terrorist attacks, and should be vigilant about weeding out the minority of people that might act to “harm us or seek to rip us off.”

Dutton is proposing that the Australian government should take a low-cost, sensible and precautionary step to help ensure that the people who are allowed to take up citizenship in our so-far safe, free and egalitarian nation genuinely share the values of the vast majority.

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”?