Gathering momentum recently is a petition in change.org to allow the holders of the now defunct retirement visa (sc410) to be considered for permanent resident visas.

Currently, the estimated 3000 holders of this retirement visa have no rights to a permanent resident visa in Australia, regardless of how long they have been in Australia.

A media release from BERIA, a voluntary organisation for retirement visa holders estimates that many of its members have lived here for a long time with at least 100 retirees having lived here for over 20 years.

David Humphries, Policy Adviser for BERIA, said that BERIA is mounting a direct campaign and petition asking that the Government to allow retirement visa holders who have lived in Australia for at least 10 years to apply for permanent residency.

‘We believe that that this is a reasonable request,’ he said, ‘and totally in keeping with the spirit of the Australian notion of “a fair go”. Mr Humphries added that BERIA has been campaigning for 8 years but has only received assurances from both sides of politics that retirement visa holders would be granted permanent residency. “But we’re no nearer achieving permanent residency than we were eight years ago. Politicians have been willing to give words of support, but unwilling to take action,” he said.

The main argument against permanent residency is the cost of health care to which most visa holders are not currently eligible.

We’ll start with a clue: it’s in Australia. A report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), studied and ranked the 362 regions of its 34 member nations according to nine measures of well-being.

The result had Australia at the top in the country-by-country rankings, followed by Norway, Canada, Sweden and the United States. However, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Turkey and Mexico were judged to be the hardest places to live among O.E.C.D. countries, and all 10 of the bottom regional rankings went to Mexican states.

The report states that there is a growing awareness that we must go beyond GDP and economic statistics to get a fuller understanding of how society is doing. But it is also crucial to zoom in on how life is lived.

“Where you live has an impact on your quality of life, and in return, you contribute to making your community a better place. Comparable measures of regional well-being offer a new way to gauge what policies work and can empower a community to act to achieve higher well-being for its citizens” noted the report.

Used in the report were nine measures: education, jobs, income (measured at purchasing power parity to correct for cost-of-living differences between countries), safety, health, environment, civic engagement, access to broadband and housing.

In what circumstances will a fraud committed against a client by a migration agent be cause for an adverse decision by the Migration Review Tribunal to be overturned by the Federal Courts?

This issue was considered a few years ago by the High Court, in the case of SZDFE v Minister for Immigration and Citizenship (2007) HCA 35 (2 August 2007). It remains a timely issue. 

As we have seen in the article that I posted earlier this week, it was an important factor in the decision of the case of Singh v Minister for Immigration & Anor, (2014) FCA 2867 which was handed down as recently as December 2014 (in the Singh  case, it was held that an “innocent mistake” by a migration agent in filing an application that was different from the one that his client expected him to make was found to be conduct that was short of fraud, and therefore insufficient to prompt a reversal of an MRT decision.

The number of 457 applications surged 15.3% in the year ending March 2015 but the number of actual grants slipped by over 4.1% according to the latest statistics released by the department of immigration.

There were 40,870 subclass 457 primary visa applications lodged in that time, an increase of 15.3 per cent from 35,440 lodged in the same period in the previous year.

Developer Programmers represented the largest occupation of total primary visa grants (4.9 per cent), a 39.5 per cent increase from the same period in the previous year. Cooks recorded the second largest primary visa grants (4.5 per cent), followed by Café or Restaurant Managers (3.9 per cent), a respective decrease of 18.9 per cent and 11.8 per cent when compared to the same period.

The top three sponsor industries for primary applications granted were accommodation and food services (37%), IT (31%), and professional, scientific and technical services (27%).

India was the top country of origin for sc457 workers. Almost half the number of grants were to applicants from India (24.3 per cent), the United Kingdom (17.5 per cent) and the People’s Republic of China (6.7 per cent). According to the figures around 25% of 457 visa holders are foreign students and travellers.

Given that unemployment rate in Australia is sitting above 6%, the unions have led a campaign against foreign labour despite industry groups saying that the sc457 visa is used to fill actual skill gaps in Australia. The DIBP has however been steadily increasing its scrutiny of sc457 applications in recent times.

The AAT president has warned of delays and backlogs in the migration review decision due to the lack of members while an opinion piece in The Australian suggests that the purge of members may have been due to the tribunals overturning far too many of DIBPs decisions on appeal.

The amalgamation of the Migration Review Tribunal (MRT) - Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT) and Social Security Appeals Tribunal (SSAT) with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), is a move that has been described as the biggest shake-up of Australian administrative law in 40 years.

Under the new system, the AAT will hear challenges to government decisions on visa applications and social security benefits, in addition to its existing jurisdiction over workers compensation, disability support, freedom of information requests and veterans’ entitlements.

It is estimated that the new AAT will adjudicate 40,000 applications every year and yet save $7.2 million over four years in “shared back-office functions and property holdings”.

AAT president and Federal Court judge Duncan Kerr will retain leadership of the AAT