[Gollywobbler]

If your Parents opt for the Offshore CP 143 or 173 visa, one advantage would be that they need not leave the UK before they apply. You have been in Oz for a little over 2 months so far. In another 4-6 months time it might be possible to say that your lifestyle has become fully settled, and that therefore it is safe to make an application for CP or CAP visas for your Parents.

Once an application for an offshore Parent visa is in the pipeline (doesn’t matter which one) there is a special concession in the rules for the subclass 676 tourist visa. The guideline provided to DIAC COs is that in this scenario, the Parent visa applicant should be given an unbroken stay of up to 12 months in Oz if s/he requests it.

If that is not long enough to ensure that the CPV can be granted within the 12 months, no probs. Even if the visas are still taking about 18 months as at present, the meds can be frontloaded if need be and they can be done in Australia. (I’ve heard that it is cheaper to get them done in Oz than in the UK.) As long as DIAC are satisfied that the CPV will be granted once the POPC can deal with it, they are very accommodating about permitting a second stay of 12 months in Oz on a new tourist visa if requested.

They were very willing to do this for my Mum in 2006, when she was almost 86, though in the end we did not need a second tourist visa for her. They did it recently for SAVTA, and her thread is here:

http://www.pomsinoz.com/forum/migration-issues/25677-we-were-tram-melbourne.html

Savta lives in Melbourne so it was convenient for her to go to Auckland for a few days. However, the same facilities are available in both Bali & Singapore so in your Parent’s shoes I’d treat myself to 5 days (4 nights) at Raffles Hotel in Singapore (I LURVE Raffles!) go to the Australian High Commission in Singapore armed with a paper application for a new 12 month tourist visa, explain the situation to the staff there and they will almost certainly grant the new tourist visas on the spot, as they did with Savta and her husband.

I don’t actually recommend Bali for people as old as your Parents and my Mum. It is a dirty place, whereas Singapore is spotless. Also, my Mum went to Bali when she was about 82. She picked up a very nasty eye infection whilst she was there. She ended up with an emergency admission to hospital in Perth and was in hospital for about a week. For the first 3 or 4 days the doctors were muttering that they might have to remove her left eye in order to stop the infection from spreading into her brain and potentially killing her. Luckily they zapped her with huge doses of antibiotics and got rid of the infection, plus they put a stitch in the corner of her eye which they said would stop the infection from recurring. (Dunno how, but it has not recurred.) Nonetheless, she has lost most of the sight in that eye, so I would never let her go anywhere near Bali ever again. I don’t think one wants to take chances like this with such elderly folks and Mum would not have gone to Bali in the first place if we had realised that infections of this sort are about there and/or how serious they can be. Plus there are world-class hospitals in Singapore if need be, but I would not want to rely on a hospital in Bali for Mum. With your Parents, I’d defo say Singapore instead, both if their tourist visa might need to be replaced and also so that their CPVs could be granted.

Whether or not your Parents might actually be likely to need 2 tourist visas depends on the quota again. That should be clearer in the next day or two, I hope. But DIAC are definitely NOT in the business of forcing the every elderly to traipse back & forth between Oz and the UK unless they want to. (Mutter ‘English winter’ to anyone from DIAC and they always start shivering and crossing themselves I have noticed, which always makes me chuckle!)

The other immense strength of the offshore CPV route for elderly British Parents is Medicare. As British tourists in Oz, they would be protected by the Reciprocal Health Care Agreement between the UK and Oz regardless of their age. Please see here:

http://www.medicareaustralia.gov.au/public/migrants/visitors/index.shtml

The down side of the offshore CPV route for the elderly is that the health of one of them could fail unexpectedly during the processing period for the CPV. If they happens, the Parent concerned might fail the meds for migration. In that event, the visa would be refused and the ‘one fails, all fail’ rule would apply. It might be possible to appeal against a visa refusal on medical grounds, get the Review Medical Officer of the Commonwealth involved, adduce new or additional medical information if desired, and get the relevant Parent’s meds re-assessed from scratch by the RMOC. The RMOC has overruled the original MOC in a surprisingly high number of Appeals that the Migration Review Tribunal reports publicly, but only about 10% of MRT cases are reported publicly. Therefore I don’t know how often the MOC and the RMOC really disagree about a given visa applicant’s meds. But whatever the eventual outcome, the chances are that your Parents would have to return to the UK and stay here until the outcome of any Appeal would be known, which would usually be around 18 months later.

Continued/……