Australian Immigration Daily News

Sometimes, when I’m looking at Austlii to prepare an article for this blog, the case that I am reading is so bizarre, outlandish, weird and downright crazy that I nearly fall out of my chair! 

And then I find myself thinking: “Did I really read what I just read? Are my eyes deceiving me? Did my wife sneak something (hallucinogenic?) into my sandwich? What was in the mushrooms that I was grilling for dinner last night!” 

Yep, sometimes you just can’t make this stuff up! And yep, sometimes life, as it plays out in migration cases, is “stranger than fiction”. 

The Federal court has heard that 99.21% of applications on immigration matters were thrown out on the first court date, by federal circuit court judge Alexander ‘Sandy’ Street.

Judge Street is facing a judicial review on claims of ‘apprehended bias’. The court has heard that the judge rejected over 252 appeals of the 254 migration cases he considered over a period of six months. Applicants are presenting these statistics to show that those seeking a judicial review of migration decisions had virtually no chance of succeeding in Judge Street's court.

Barrister Jay Williams has told the chief justice, James Allsop, Justice John Griffiths and Justice Susan Kenny there was “a one in 10 chance before other judges and a 1 in 100 chance before this judge” of having an immigration ruling overturned, according to a report in The Guardian

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Does it matter when “family violence” has occurred? 

Is it open to the Department, or the Tribunal, to consider whether a “genuine” spousal or partner relationship existed at the time that the incident(s) of family violence occurred?  

Is it the case that if a person has been granted a provisional partner visa (Subclass 309 or Subclass 820) that they should be “conclusively presumed” to be in a genuine spousal or partner relationship? 

Recently, two cases were reported to the Migration Alliance where RMAs unexpectedly discovered that the visa status on the record on the department of immigration’s Visa Entitlement Verification Online (VEVO) database were later held to be ‘incorrect’ by the case-officer, thus resulting in refusals of their applications.

An RMA in Perth was shocked when the case-officer in a parent visa application produced a different set of VEVO results for an applicant from the one the RMA initially found on the department’s system which claims to provide ‘a fast and convenient way” to check “current visa details and conditions”

“This is intriguing” the RMA wrote to the Migration Alliance recently, “We did a VEVO check before lodging [the] application. It [did] not show condition 8503 on the entitlement…the only condition listed was No work (8101).” The condition 8530 means that the holder will not, after entering Australia, be entitled to be granted a substantive visa, other than a Protection visa.

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What is the correct interpretation of Regulation 1.20J, which limits the number of times that a person may sponsor another person for a prospective marriage, partner or “extended eligibility” visa?

Suppose, for example, that someone has sponsored two previous spouses to come to Australia prior to the effective date of Regulation 1.20J (1 November 1996): do those previous sponsorships “count” against the limitation (stated in Regulation 1.20J (1)(a)) that a sponsor may have sponsored no more than 1 other person who has received a “relevant permission” to enter Australia?

Can you have sponsored 2 or more previous fiancés/partners/spouses so long as those persons were granted their “relevant permissions” before the effective date?