Dear All,

It is my view, that  policy measure requiring 6 month of  trading for start up business nominating  RSMS visa applicant is illegal. PAM 3 sets up additional requirements outside legislative framework. Has anyone challenged it before ?

 DIBP has obvious difficulties with interpreting their own policy refusing to answer simple question, asked via agent's gateway . See below :

Migration Alliance has received information from the MRT-RRT this afternoon.  The MRT-RRT have asked that Migration Alliance inform migration agents as follows:

Online lodgement of new applications for review by the Migration Review Tribunal and Refugee Review Tribunal (the tribunals) is available on the tribunals’ website.

Online lodgement is a convenient service available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Applications can be lodged online from any computer that has internet connection, an up-to-date browser and JavaScript enabled. Application lodgement by hand, post and fax is still available. The MRT application fee can also be paid when lodging online, through a secure online payment system that accepts MasterCard and Visa credit cards.

The Irish Echo reports that there has been an increasing number of Irish illegals in Australia in recent years who have been located by DIBP and deported. But this is only a small part of a larger and growing problem.

The number of people living in Australia illegally is steadily increasing at a rate of about 5% per year or about 3000 people a year. As at 30 June 2013, DIBP statistics estimate that about 62,700 people were unlawfully living in Australia compared to 2010 when the figure was about 53,900.

Freelancer.com chief executive Matt Barrie has described a federal government report asserting there is no skills shortage in the information technology sector as “rubbish”, reports the Australian Financial Review.

In a scathing attack of the 2012-13 Skills Shortage report which concluded there is no shortage of seven specific types of IT workers, including analyst programmers, developer programmers and software engineers, Mr Barrie asserts that the report is misleading

““What they’re talking about are technician level jobs, literally IT tech support roles. They’re not talking about software engineering or the real jobs that you need in a modern technology company,” he said.

“I would like someone to explain what the difference between ‘developer programmer’ and ‘software engineer’ is, because being an adjunct associate professor in the space and having hired hundreds of people in the industry I have no idea.

In concluding that no reasonable tribunal would have refused the adjournment request the primary judge found, the Tribunal’s decision that the Applicant should not be able to submit test results corrected following a re-mark “lacked an evident and intelligible justification”.

The Federal Courts have held that the Tribunals refusal to grant a short adjournment was unreasonable and stressed that it is critical that Tribunals act reasonably when reviewing cases.

The decision came in a case where the applicant requested from the Tribunal an adjournment to seek a review and re-mark of the applicant’s IELTs score. The applicant who failed several times to achieve the English proficiency standard for a sc485 application was also at the same time scheduled to sit several more IELTs tests.

However, the Tribunal decided to proceed to make its decision because it formed the view the applicant has had a reasonable period of time to obtain evidence of competent English – he made his visa application in June 2010 and had sat the IELTS test several times.

The Federal Court however referred to the High Court’s decision in Minister for Immigration and Citizenship v Li (2013) 297 ALR 225; [2013] HCA 18 (Li) and noted that there is a presumption of law that Parliament intends an exercise of power to be reasonable.