This is another crucial piece of the jig-saw. The permanent CPV 143 or CAPV 864 cannot be granted until an acceptable Assurance of Support has been put into place first. Up to three individuals can club together to provide an AoS, but an individual can only Assure a maximum of 2 adults at any one time, plus the Assurer is means-tested by Centrelink.
Since you are a wife & mum, the usual scenario would be that you and your OH together would provide a joint AoS for your Parents, because you are their child but he is probably the main breadwinner in your own household.
You have to be very careful about the fact that if Hubby gets involved with Assuring your Parents then he would be unable to Assure his own Parents for any sort of Parent visa until the 10 year AoS period for your Parents’ visa has come to an end.
This being so, are there any plans for Hubby’s Parents to migrate? Even if they cannot migrate now, what would happen if one of Hubby’s siblings should die prematurely? Would that alter what his Parents might want to do?
Also, you are talking about the CAP 864 visa, which is the immediately-permanent version of the onshore CAP visa. Fine, but an AoS would be needed for that and Centrelink will require proof of the Assurers’ incomes for two consecutive years, and the income for the first of the relevant years must be proven by production of a Tax Assessment Notice for each person involved in giving the AoS. Please see the following links:
Again, this is affected by what effect the new quota will have on processing times, and that in turn will affect whether or not you opt for the temporary CPV or CAPV to start with. If you propose to try an early application plus the processing time is likely to be quick, you may be forced to choose the temporary CP 173 visa or the temporary Contributory Aged Parent 884 visa to start with.
So again I would say let us leave this in abeyance for a day or two whilst we clarify the other questions. However, please DO make sure that you and OH are earning enough between you so that there will be no possible headaches with the AoS income thresholds when the time comes. They do increase the thresholds without notice, and the new, higher thresholds then apply with immediate effect, so “just about enough” today is NOT enough to be safe at some time in the future. That said, the thresholds were reduced when the scheme was re-jigged at the beginning of January 2008, hopefully making things easier for families on comparatively low incomes.
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:
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:
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.
Because of the Appeals Question, onshore Agents nearly always recommend that when Parents are as old as yours one should try to get them into Australia first so as to be able to make an onshore application for an Aged Parent or Contributory Aged Parent visa instead.
The way this idea works is that when the tourist visas which have gotten the Parents into Oz in the first place expire, the Parents switch to Bridging Visa. These enable them to stay in Oz until the outcome of the AP/CAP application is eventually known. If there is a visa refusal on medical or any other grounds, the family can appeal to the Migration Review Tribunal. If the MRT upholds the refusal then depending on the reason for the refusal it may be possible to appeal to the Court next. Whether or not the Court gets involved, if the MRT refuses the visa then the family can make a direct appeal to the Minister for Immigration.
The Minister alone has the power to waive all or any of the criteria for a given visa if he – in his sole discretion – considers it to be in the public interest to do so. Australia is not keen on acquiring an international reputation as a bunch of inhumane bastards who would deport honest people in their 80s and 90s, so although the outcomes of Ministerial Appeals are not reported, it seems pretty unlikely that a frail and ancient Parent would be thrown out of Oz in the end. The Parent remains in Oz, on the Bridging Visa, until the outcome of the appeal to the Minister is eventually known, so effectively it is likely that a Parent who is too ill to pass the meds will probably end up remaining on a Bridging Visa for the rest of his or her life.
Which – if one is considering the legal issues alone – is an argument that I find compelling. Plainly the best place for an ancient Parent is with his or her only child in Australia if the child is not willing to consider leaving Australia in order to care for his/her Parents elsewhere.
However, I don’t like the Medicare angle with Bridging Visas and British Parent visa applicants. Please see Form 1024i below:
According to that form, Medicare is not available to an applicant for a Parent visa who is in Oz on a Bridging Visa (and we can bet that this applies to applicants for Contributory Aged Parent visas as well.) In this scenario, it is not clear whether the RHCA between the UK and Oz will reverse Form 1024i or whether it won’t. The day the Parent is being admitted to Intensive Care is not the time to try to find out, either, so I think that for safety’s sake one would need to buy absolutely top-of-the-range medical private medical insurance for the Parents concerned, irrespective of the cost of the Policy, which would be high. $600 a month minimum for such an elderly couple would not surprise me at all. I also wouldn’t want to see this situation dragging on for too long, which brings us back to the quota / processing times / length of time for Appeals.
I actually think – myself – that the offshore visa coupled with one or two long stay tourist visas is much simpler, safer and vastly more elegant than getting involved with the uncertainties of Bridging Visas in a situation where the Parent might sail through the visa meds anyway. If there is no reason to doubt that the Parent will pass the meds, and the processing of the offshore CPV is likely to be reasonably speedy, then I can’t see the point of taking a risk with adequate medical cover for the sake of an appeals process which may not have to be used in the end anyway.
The onshore visa is used every time if there is genuine reason to suppose that the Parent will not pass the meds. In that situation there is really no viable alternative, and when the Parent is from a country that does not have a reciprocal health care agreement with Oz, any Parent of 70 or over would need private medical insurance in order to be able to get a 12 month stay on a tourist visa anyway, so I think the situation is actually less complicated for families which are not British and therefore do not make comparisons with the Welfare State in the UK.
British Parents are shocked by having to pay $31.30 per drug every time they need a routine repeat prescription for medicines for their various ailments because they can get the scripts filled for free in the UK. But if Medicare is not available then the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme is not available either, which could result in a bill of over $100 just for one repeat script for one particular drug.
If one is considering an onshore CAPV application for Parents who are currently outside Oz, one has to consider how to get them into Oz in the first place, and this is where I think you could come upon an obstacle that might well prevent any thoughts of an onshore visa for your Parents anyway.
If your Parents apply for a standard subclass 676 tourist visa that would permit them to spend 6 months or more in Australia (they could request a stay of up to 12 unbroken months) the drill is as follows:
First they would need to get their own GP to complete the tourist visa medical certificate for each of them, which is here:
The burble says that they would need medical insurance, implying private medical insurance, but your can ignore that because the Reciprocal Health Care Agreement counts as medical insurance for the purpose of this visa. Since they are British, there should be no query about this and in the event of a query, just send them the link to the RHCA and remind them that it is not age-restricted.
The catch is that if your Parents apply for a stay of 6 months or longer in Oz, in view of their age there is a substantial chance that DIAC will give them the duration of stay that they request, but DIAC will almost certainly impose Condition 8503 on the visas as well. Please see here:
If Condition 8503 is imposed, the effect of it would be to prevent your Parents from being able to make a valid application for any other visas for as long as they are on Australian soil. Since they cannot apply for Contributory Aged Parent visas unless they are in Australia when the application is made, that would be the end of the plans for the onshore Contributory Aged Parent visa.
Condition 8503 would force them to make an application for an offshore Contributory Parent visa before they leave the UK in effect.
The only way to be absolutely certain of defeating Condition 8503 would be if your Parents are able to obtain 90-day ETA visas instead. Please see here:
Condition 8503 cannot be imposed on this visa. However if it is granted and they enter Australia on it, you would then have a maximum of 90 days in which to get the Contributory Aged Parent visa application ready and delivered to DIAC’s general office in Oerthm which is here:
Be in no doubt that your Parents would have to stick to the script until they are safely clear of Perth Airport. If you use this visa, you cannot have them gabbling about an intention to apply for CAP visas once they get to Oz. A 90-day ETA can ONLY be granted if the applicant states an intention to make a short visit to Australia only. They have to state this in the application and then again on the plane, where the passenger disembarkation card asks what the purpose of the trip to Oz is and how long the person plans to stay in Oz for. It would be prudent if they travelled light too. Nobody needs the kitchen sink with them for a 90 day visit, and too much luggage would make even the doziest DIAC aort official smell a rat, to which s/he might or might not turn a blind eye.
In practice, DIAC know this particular game of cat & mouse better than anyone else does, and the ordinary (poorly-paid) local officials are human. They do tend to know all about elderly Parents and blind eyes, but nobody can guarantee that your Parents world not be the unlucky ones who manage to cop Godzilla in a Vile Mood at Passport Control on the day……
If they were my Parents the way that I, personally, would approach this is as follows:
First wait for the breakdown in the new visa quota. Let is get the best ‘fix’ we can on how long processing an offshore CPV application would be likely to take. There is no point in even trying to calculate this until Alan Collett comes back with confirmation of the breakdown of the number of CPVs from 1st July 2008 onwards.
Meanwhile, let us do some serious thinking about how close you really are to being able to say that you are “settled” in Oz, because that question will arise no matter which of the vsas your Parents apply for. From your answers on this point we can get an idea of how long it is likely to be until a viable Parent application can be made.
Then you have to think about the logistics, because their flight to Oz is probably going to be a one-way trip for your Parents. Are they going to sell their house in the UK before they leave, and take a chance on the idea that neither of them will fall ill before their visas can be granted? Are they going to let it instead and then somebody (perhaps you) comes to the UK at a later date in order to organise selling it? What are you going to do about accommodation for them once they get to Oz? Have you investigated any of the Retirement Villages reasonably close to you? For a couple of your Parents’ ages, finding them a home in a Retirement Village might be the best bet. Remember the Bedcocks – the Tribunal was impressed by the fact that they moved straight into their own home in Oz.
Your Parents are contemplating a huge move. They will need time to say their goodbyes in the UK etc. This is bound to have an effect on when they will feel ready to begin the transit into their new lives in Oz, I suggest.
How healthy are they now? Mum is obviously as fit as a fiddle, but what about Dad? At this sort of age, the MOC is dead interested in whether they still have all their mental marbles as well as in their physical health. I don’t know your Parents so I can’t guess whether they are likely to remain in robust health for another couple of years.
What is their attitude to life? Are they prepared to go along with a bit of deception in order to facilitate the onshore visa route? Or would they feel happier if you do everything “by the book” – in which case an offshore CPV application is indicated?
Interesting to note the increase in the number of the old style Parent visas.
Best regards.
__________________
Managing Director, Go Matilda, http://www.gomatilda.com
Registered Migration Agent Number 0102534 and Chartered Accountant (England & Wales, and Australia)
Offices in the UK and in Australia
Alan Collett is an absolute superstar. As I mentioned yesterday, he has done a huge amount behind the scenes - for no reward - to improve things for Parents and Contributory Parents and his hard work has paid off.
The Minister has increased the quota of Contributory Parent visas to 6,500 in total, which is an extra 3.000 visa a year.
This will bring the processing times down to arund 12-15 months, I reckon, and if an application is handled efficiently 12 months should be do-able.
Which is just fantastic news. I can't tell you how delighted and excited I am.
It makes a massive difference to your own planning as well, I reckon, because my instinct is that the best scenario for your Parents is probably an offshore CPV application coupled with a 12 month tourist visa. No worrying about whether or not this will go to plan or that will go to plan.
Alan Collett is an absolute superstar. As I mentioned yesterday, he has done a huge amount behind the scenes - for no reward - to improve things for Parents and Contributory Parents and his hard work has paid off.
The Minister has increased the quota of Contributory Parent visas to 6,500 in total, which is an extra 3.000 visa a year.
This will bring the processing times down to arund 12-15 months, I reckon, and if an application is handled efficiently 12 months should be do-able.
Which is just fantastic news. I can't tell you how delighted and excited I am.
It makes a massive difference to your own planning as well, I rckon, because my instinct is that the best scenario for your Parents is probably an offshore CPV application coupled with a 12 month tourist visa. No worrying about whether or not this will go to plan or that will go to plan.
Let us speak later, I suggest.
Best wishes
Gill
Yes Gill... i completely agree... prior to this news i was siding on the off shore CPV and now i am even more sure.
It goes hand in hand with our time line in that we can prove on settlement as well.
Let me have a chat with my folks etc and i'll get back to you... and thank you for your time and effort xx
Mum was 85 when her visa meds were done. She is disabled after breaking her back a few years ago. Because of that she needs a zimmer frame to walk indoors at home. She needs a wheelchair for anything more.
The MOC asked for a geriatrician's report. He wanted the geriatrician to comment on the following:
Does Mum have all her mental marbles?
How independent is she in "activities of daily living"?
What is her general state of health?
Does she need residential care either now or in the foreseeable fiture?
Is the able to make the long flight to Oz on her own?
Well - she was in Oz when she saw the geriatrician! We had frontloaded her visa meds in the UK and the Panel Doctor was not expecting to be asked to send her to a geriatrician, so Mum went to Perth. That took care of that question. As for the rest, she was and remains fine. The geriatrician confirmed this and that was the end of it. Mum was given an unconditional OK on her meds.
As long as Parents are basically healthy they certainly don't worry about routine ailments associated with great age, and the real fear (it seems to me) is whether or not they might need residential care.
