Les Mighalls

As well meaning as the 'advice' you've been given on this thread is, it is simply a case of the blind leading the blind. I am inundated with cases where people have tried to do applications themselves, have been rejected and want me to haul their backsides out of the fire. Telling DIAC you were a naughty boy and you've since changed your ways will not cut the mustard, and whatever you tell them can and will be used against you in any future application if you try blagging your way through. If you insist on doing the application yourself read the Migration Act 1958, s501 and Ministerial Directive 41 very thoroughly several times and make sure you understand every nuance of them and do not construe things in a favourable manner to fit your circumstances. A lot of RMAs will not tackle s501 cases themselves and simply refer them on. If you seriously want that visa seek professional assistance.

I should just point out here that a business visa is not often one that a self employed professional can use because no more than 50% of the proferssional's working hours can be working IN the business, which is not usually the case for most. A professional must calculate how many hours are spent generating fee income and how many hours are spent managing the business. If the latter exceeds 50% then a business visa MAY be possible.

Ian Harrop in Oxford is one RMA with a good reputation as far as I'm aware.

Am I missing something here, but have you considered a prospective marriage visa? However... do not gloss over or minimise your 'disability' whatever that is. Seek professional advice (not just migration, but informed medical as well, or in conjunction) first.

These days, to be enrolled to vote you must be an Australian citizen. However, prior to 1980 a UK citizen was entitled to be enrolled to vote etc once they were granted PR. In 1980 I had not only served 6 years as a Commissioned Officer in the RAAF but was also on the electoral roll, all with PR, not citizenship.

Not true. Until 1980 a British citizen with permanent residency status in Australia was entitled to be enrolled vote, join the Australian military, be liable to be called for jury service etc etc in the same manner as an Australian citizen. In the first instance the OP should call the Citizenship Information Line. I had one client who came out to Australia as a child in the 1950s and had never been outside of Australia since, but wanted to travel back to the UK for a holiday. No documents survived since then but we assembled a range of documents to substantiate our application and obtained citizenship for the client who then obtained his passport.

For social engineering the UK Labour Party would be impossible to beat, flooding the UK with immigrants who they hoped would settle in England, vote Labour in appreciation and forever keep them in power. Just look where that has led. I don't think the Aussie Labor Party is actually about social engineering in their migration policy. Like the rest of the country they are far too middle class for that and quite reactionary. I hate to sound sympathetic towards the present government here, but can't help myself. They are caught in a bind where they have effectively lost control of the immigration numbers through no fault of their own and are feverishly trying to get that control back without getting too many vested interests offside. Not to mention keeping their union backers happy. The international student business of pumping the masses through low level courses is a 17 billion dollar industry which the government is loath to kill, but the numbers flowing through have got the unions paranoid. The net migration intake is keeping the property market buoyant and going against worldwide trends. No government wants to preside over a deflationary property market when there is a 3 year electoral cycle. Kill migration and in all likelihood property prices will fall. Yet property is spiralling out of reach of the young Aussie worker. A situation which leaves the politicians astride a cleft stick wrapped in barbed wire. Employers want skilled workers and don't really care where they come from but I remember a time several years ago when absolutely no-one was hiring apprentices. That is now coming home to roost. One final example about how useless governments are in forward planning. Many years ago the government here (I can't remember Lib or Labor... too long ago) started to fret about Medicare expenditure going up and decided the best way to control it was to choke off the supply of doctors in private practice and to do that they announced that no Provider Numbers (a pre-requisite for patients to claim medicare benefits) would be issued to new doctors going into private practice unless the did a Fellowship in General Practice first. The College of GPs was rapt as it extended their little empire but the smart cookies doing Med decided that if they had to do a Fellowship to go into general practice then they would do a Fellowship into a specialty instead and make lots more money. As a consequence the average age of your GP is about 50 and the government is chasing overseas graduates madly to make the numbers up leading to the sort of disasters like Patel in Queensland. In some places in Australia over 30% of GPs do not have English as a first language. From a purely political point of view the easiest and quickest area to cut the numbers back is Parent Visas, although I suspect substituted 676s will go up as a result. The decoupling of O/S student courses and PR visas will escalate and I suspect that in a couple of years most of the private colleges providing low level courses will have collapsed. Eventually I think the skilled migration program will be almost solely ENS with a small safety valve to give the government wiggle room. The difficulty the policy wonks in any government have is realising that they are not just dealing with numbers in an econometric analysis and calculation but that they are messing around with peoples lives.

Hi guys, FWIW, I got a Subclass 103 parent visa application through this week for a couple whose queue date was 03 December 2002 although the application was self-lodged about two years before that. That should give you an idea of the time line for a non-CPV application. Cheers, Les