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Immigration Daily News Response from NSW Trade and Investment's Director of Policy and Migration re online lodgement fiascoAustralian Immigration Daily News
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Response from NSW Trade and Investment's Director of Policy and Migration re online lodgement fiasco
EMAIL TO NSW STATE GOVERNMENT
Hi XXXXXXX (name witheld for privacy reasons)
RMAs are not satisfied with the response provided by NSW Government.
Is the NSW Government (Skilled) going to fix the botched application process that cost so many applicants the opportunity to apply? By this I refer to the unannounced application window, huge technical problems resulting in many people getting half way through applications and then being blown out of the system by crashing servers, etc and then having no opportunity to start their failed application again, etc etc.
The huge demand for applicants was perfectly predictable given the many months of closed applications prior to that. Lots of human cost to this mess, yet NSW officials seem relatively ok with their “new” system and are downplaying the major technical problems as glitches, etc. In short, this was a disastrous rollout of a fatally flawed system that resulted in a great amount of frustration and disappointment from people who only wanted the opportunity to apply for sponsorship.
And even if NSW Government spends millions of tax dollars to upgrade the servers and bandwidth, under the current plan what would that reduce the application window from an hour last time to – 10 minutes?
How are RMA’s supposed to ethically decide which of multiple sc190 sponsorship applications goes in first, and what of an RMA’s legal liability if they agree to lodge this type of application and are prevented from doing so by NSW’s technical problems and/or not having time in the tiny window of opportunity to get all of their clients’ applications lodged?
Some RMA’s are taking the view that it is not ethical to recommend NSW state sponsorship at this point, given the random nature of who was able to get through or not during the 14 July debacle given all the problems.
MA takes the lead on this issue and complaints are coming in that as usual the MIA has simply repeated the lame NSW response (that doesn’t address most of the important issues) without commentary. Members of the MIA and MA have turned to Migration Alliance to contact the NSW Government in and ask the hard questions.
Thank you for your time and I look forward to a response that I can send to all 5200 agents across the profession.
Liana Allan
RESPONSE FROM DIRECTOR OF POLICY AND MIGRATION SERVICES, NSW GOVERNMENT
Hi Liana,
As you would be aware, NSW has grown its Skilled Migration program from a limit of 600 places in 2011-12 to the current 4,000 places negotiated with the Commonwealth. The purpose of the program is to deliver on the economic and skills needs of NSW and it is managed to ensure it delivers on this purpose. NSW now has the largest program amongst the States and territories and is extremely popular. Even at the country’s largest state skills program of 4000 places, not all potential applicants will secure nomination. This will lead to disappointment for those who are not within the cap.
In order to manage, and efficient processing of, applications to best deliver on NSW’s skills needs we are staggering applications into 4 intakes of a 1000 a year. This approach was explained on the website prior to opening the 2014/15 skills program.
The online system was extensively tested before going live in conjunction with the migration community. Since going live, we sought out and received feedback from clients and agents which will help us continually refine the system.
Our technical teams are also assessing the performance of the system and putting in measures to deal with expected high volumes of online applications.
As advised on our website, the details of the next intake for 2014/15 will be published on the website in due course.
Thank you for your email.
Regards,
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (name witheld for privacy reasons)
Immigration blog
Hi Liana.
It probably wouldn't be the "done thing", but maybe send a reply to thank the sender for his reply, but maybe s/he could ATFQs? :-)
Best regards.