A recent internal review within the Department of Home Affairs of the Parent visa program has brought to light yet again the extraordinary wait times of up to 30 years for some Australian Parent visa categories. Foreign nationals who are parents of Australian citizens and permanent residents who want to join the family and reside in Australia must endure significant processing time.
The visas in the Parents migration program offer Contributory parent visa costing around $50,000 per parent and taking up to 12 or 14 years to process, and the standard Parent visa with application fee of just over $5000 per parent expected to be in the queue for around 30 years. These two parents visa options are processed while the parents are waiting for the visa outside Australia. They could travel here on other types of visas such as visitor visa but they need to be outside Australia for the processing as they fall in the offshore visa category.
There are aged parents visa options in the standard and contributory visa which are available as onshore category and allow parents to wait for the processing of their visa in Australia. The onshore categories of aged parent visas are only available to parents who prior to the lodgement of the application have reached pension age in accordance with the Australian Social Security Act, which at present is 67 years of age. However, not many parents are likely to still be in good health at the time when their Aged or Contributory Aged Parent application reaches the top of the queue when they are in their early 80s or close to their centenary birthday when they are invited to attend their health check. Whilst applicants for the onshore aged parent categories are granted bridging visas to remain in Australia, it is not looking like a feasible pathway for parents to achieve permanent residency.
In 2004 when the Contributory Parent visa program was introduced there were about 20,000 applications in the pipeline for parents visas. Twenty years later, Home Affairs has more than 151,000 applications on foot. The backlog continues to grow with the annual capping of visas granted in the parent visa categories. For the current year there are 8,500 places of which 6,800 are designated for the Contributory visas. The number of visas available are changing every year. In fiscal years 2021 the places available for the same parent visa categories were a total of 4500 per year.
The Australian Government introduced a Sponsored (temporary) parent visa which allows parents to travel to Australia and reside here for three or five years with the cost of the application being respectively at about $6,000 and $12,000. The Sponsored (temporary) parent visa requires that the parent is outside Australia for the processing of the visa and the maximum time allowed in Australia on consecutive Sponsored (temporary) parent visa is ten years.
The new Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, who replaced Clare O’Neil in July this year will need to consider relevant solutions for the overseas parents of first-generation migrants to Australia when reviewing the Australian immigration system.
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