In a drive to promote Australian education to China, Minister for Education, Christopher Pyne has embarked on a five day visit to China and Laos to strengthen Australia’s commitment to education cooperation.

Mr Pyne said international education is a core element of Australia’s economic prosperity and social advancement, and China continues to be Australia’s most important education partner.

In a speech yesterday at Peking University, Mr Pyne sought to strike a balance between openness to international students and the maintenance of standards stating that the government was “committed to ensuring Australia maintains its position as a top destination for Chinese and other international students”.

The Australian however reports that there is a concern on about how best — and how broadly — to judge risk within the student visa system. In particular, the report has questioned the effectiveness of the Streamlined Visa Processing system for student visas (SVP) which generally makes it quicker and easier for students to obtain visas provided they enrol in one of the education providers approved under the system.

The report states that with the grand total of universities, private providers and public TAFEs with access to the streamlined visa processing system now edging towards 130 after the government offered entry to another 79 providers, international education leader Phil Honeywood has questioned the effectiveness of SVP.

The Australian dream is turning the traditional ‘dowry system’ for marriages on its head in India. Brides in Punjab who are undertaking or willing to undertake nursing courses are getting popular and being enticed with the promise of a fully funded education in nursing, reports the Indian newspaper, Hindustan Times.

The high demand for nurses — as brides and otherwise — has caused a spike in the number of private nursing institutes in India the last decade, notes a recent report in The Hindustan Times. According to the report, the Punjab Nurses Registration Council statistics revealed that the number of private institutes offering nursing courses like ANM, GNM, BSc, post-basic BSc and MSc jumped from around 138 in 2006 to 559 in 2014.

The report notes that nurses from Punjab are heading for jobs in as many as 27 countries with the top 3 being Canada, Australia and the United States of America. Other destinations include Tanzania, Botswana, Georgia, Ireland, Norway, Denmark and Finland.

“Not surprisingly thus, the state council and the mushrooming nursing institutes have become a common haunt for wannabe grooms,” notes the report.

"Punjab, a state with poor sex ratio and female literacy figures unlike Kerala, is also increasingly taking the nursing route to foreign shores. And this lure of settling overseas is turning the system of “contract marriage” on its head. In exchange for sponsoring courses and visa fee, women are taking ‘husbands’ to countries like Canada, Australia, US and New Zealand, after getting the NRI tag,” notes the report.

In India, a dowry is an agreed payment and forms part of a traditional ‘marriage contract’ where cash or some kind of gifts are given to a bridegroom's family along with the bride. The dowry system is thought to put great financial burden on the bride's family. It has been cited as one of the reasons for families and women in India resorting to sex selection in favour of sons. This has distorted the sex ratio of India (940 females per thousand males) and may have given rise to female foeticide. The payment of a dowry has been prohibited under The 1961 Dowry Prohibition Act in Indian civil law and subsequently by Sections 304B and 498a of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

Migration Alliance queried the status of Priority Group 5 applications last week.  The DIBP have responded as follows:

Dear Ms Allan, XXXXXXX [name removed for privacy reasons] passed your e-mail to the Skilled Migration Policy branch as the issues raised by your members are handled in this branch. 

As you would appreciate, Australia runs a demand driven skilled migration program to meet the current and emerging skill needs of the Australian labour market and to strengthen the whole economy.  Skilled migration policies are tailored to meet this objective and have always changed to reflect the prevailing economic conditions of the time. 

Migration Alliance members might be interested in the verifications checks being used by case officers at the DIBP in relation to Training Benchmark B applications:

UNCLASSIFIED

To Whom It May Concern,

DIBP admits that it has used an RMA secret list in the allocation of applications to case officers but makes no apology for the use and insists that it has been for the purpose of ‘triaging’ applications.

In a recent statement DIBP says that the “list was previously used within the temporary or provisional Partner visa caseload to help triage and streamline the allocation of applications to officers of appropriate seniority, depending on the complexity of the case.”

The statement suggests that right up to October 2013, applications for partner visas were allocated to case officers according to the list. According to the statement the list was ‘removed from use between August and October 2013’.

This contradicts a news report that quotes an email from the director of the department's Migration Agents Policy section in March to a concerned migration agent that said "Lists A and B go back nearly 10 years so it is unfortunate that this has been dragged out again as they are really old ...".

The statement contends that, “Triaging applications based on complexity did not impact on visa decision-making”.