A survey of 3,000 Chinese international travellers by the Hotels.com accommodation booking website has found that more holidaymakers from China want to go to Australia over the next year than anywhere else.

This is important news for Tourism Australia. The number of Chinese tourists in Australia surged some 19% over the last year, and they spent about AU$6 billion during their stay making them one of the most important markets for tourism, says Tourism Australia (TA) managing director John O'Sullivan.

Tourism Australia’s aims is to attract over 1 million Chinese visitors and see them spend at least AU$13 billion each year, by 2020.

Given the latest figures, Mr O’Sullivan is confident it’s on track to do that.

"Over the last four years the Chinese market has been our fastest growing source of visitors to our country as well as the fastest growing in terms of value", O'Sullivan told a tourism trade show in Shanghai citing that Chinese market has been (growing) at 18 percent on average in terms of both number of visitors and how much they spend in Australia.

One of the most confounding aspects of Australia’s migration laws is the requirement that applicants for student visas demonstrate that they “intend genuinely to stay in Australia temporarily”.  This requirement is a common criterion for all categories of student visas – ranging from the Schools Sector (subclass 570) right through to the Post Graduate Research Sector (subclass 574).

Nonetheless, it is well known to everyone that one of the most common pathways to permanent residency and citizenship in Australia is for students to come from overseas and then to obtain a further visa after completing their educations, enabling them to remain here to work and live. Without even looking at statistics, once can be confident that many hundreds of thousands of people have followed this exact course.  And, in view of Australia’s ongoing “skills shortage”, one would think that Australia would want people who get their educational qualifications here to stay and participate in the Australian workforce and the advancement of the Australian economy. Viewed from this perspective, the “genuine temporary entrant” criterion for student visas seems to be a strange one indeed.

Given how attractive Australia is, there can be little doubt that a large number of people entering Australia on student visas would say that they would like to stay in Australia after finishing their studies if an opportunity existed for them to do so. It is therefore very legitimate to ask whether possessing a desire to stay in Australia on a permanent basis, if possible, would disqualify an applicant from obtaining a student visa, on the grounds that they fail the test of being a “genuine temporary entrant”.

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.