State Sponsorship - will it help?

[Junie]

We applied for a skilled sub class 175 visa in Sept 2008. Hubby was taken off the CSL list in March 2009. We have decided to stay in Western Australia. If we were to apply for State Sponsorship now will it help speed up our application as we'll have to wait till 2013 otherwise?

 

Do we still need a lot of money in the bank? I've looked and all I can find is that the application requires you to have 'sufficient funds to cover the settlement'...what does this mean?

 

:nah:

[lizzy27]

I would also like to know the answer.. I would Like to sponsor my sister once we get PR, but my folks & 3 other siblings also live in the USA, so I'm wondering if it's possible??? She doesn't wanna study..

[Guest highlander]

SS is still a good move but not easy to get one,It is due to large numbers of PPl been removed from CSL.

 

According to some other posts [pomsinoz.com] It seems alike that DIMIA staff are trying to process all SS non -CSL by June 2010. Good Luck

[Guest Gollywobbler]

Hi All

 

According to some other posts [pomsinoz.com] It seems like that DIMIA staff are trying to process all SS non -CSL by June 2010. Good Luck

People on Poms in Oz are absolutely dreaming if they believe the sentence above. Mr Wilden - DIAC's Regional Director for Europe - has made it absolutely clear that DIAC do not expect to process all of the SS non-CSL visas (Cat 5 in other words) by 30th June 2010, which is the end of the current Migration Program Year.

 

In London with the DIAC staff in November 2009, I and the other PiO members were told that there is a "tick nox" system at the ASPC. Apparently as bits & pieces are completed with a GSM visa application, the various boxes on the form are filled in with ticks. The junior staff who man the phone lines at the ASPC have access to this electronic tick box system. Thus if an applicant rings up or sends an e-mail PLE, the support staff can see from the form whether or not the application is decision ready and simply needs a CO to sign it off or whether more work still needs to be done.

 

DIAC have been insisting, via London, via phone calls to the ASPC and via PLEs that although DIAC have started processing the Cat 5s, they do not expect to be able to complete all of them during this Program Year. At the moment they are giving priority to the Cat 5 applications which are decision ready only.

 

If the CO has done everything to get a file to the point of being decision ready, why doesn't the CO simply finalise the application then and there? Why are decision-ready applications left lying around, I asked myself?

 

The answer turned out to be that the COs are quite senior DIAC officers. I don't know the exact correlation between the Aussie ranks and terms and the English civil service terms but I think the COs at DIAC are probably of similar seniority to SEOs (Senior Executive Officers) in the UK.

 

In the UK civil service agency that I worked for, an SEO is 5 ranks from the bottom with two or three very senior, managerial Grades above that.

 

Seemingly each CO at the ASPC has a support worker. The supporter deals with most of the routine, repetitious work of getting each application into a decision-ready state. Every applicant is capable of being subjected to independent checks, which can be internal or external checks. Any part of the application can be checked independently - identity, age, employment history, security profile - the whole lot.

 

A vaguely understand that "internal checks" are ones where DIAC check their own various internal databases. External checks seem to be done by DIAC's embassies overseas. The overseas staff are in touch with the local police and other Intelligence services in the relevant country. It seems that the local staff in the other countries are sometimes very slow but the Aussies can only go so far - they get their information as a matter of goodwill, not as of right. Therefore the embassy staff can ask local officials for information but they cannot push them. If the local services taake a year or more to respond to a query, DIAC simply ask the question and leave the locals alone. The matter is out of the Aussie Embassy's hands once they have asked for the help.

 

Internally it will be easier but the visa processing staff don't maintain the Movement Alert List, for instance. They don't maintain the details of all known-to-be-stolen passports either but DIAC have the details of 2.4 million of those. If the UK passport people are told that a UK passport has been stolen, they share the information with DIAC and the information goes on to the DIAC computer.

 

DIAC and the Commonwealth Ombudsman are very tight-lipped about what, exactly, all these internal and external checks are and what they are for. That is understandable because issues of Aussie National Security are involved. There is no way for an outsider to get all the details and the relevant DIAC staff are all sworn to lifelong secrecy etc.

 

So DIAC have provided me and the others with the brief and basic gist only. It is recorded in the Notes of the meeting that was held in London, which are around on the PiO threads - we've had various documents made into pdf files so that they can be attached to the posts in the threads.

 

The upshot, though, is that the on-line status page does not tell the whole story. The tick box list does but that is never published except to DIAC's own staff.

 

DIAC say openly on their website that they treat the applicants from some countries as being High Risk. This is is NOT to say that individual applicants from the countries concerned are considered to be dishonest - far from it. Some countries are High Risk because diseases are known to be rife in that country - eg some forms of TB which are air-borne and very infectious, I gather. (I'm not a medical expert but this is the rough gist.) Or the country concerned may have very poor Intelligence systems (by Aussie standards) and so on.

 

They do do more screening with applicants from HR countries. These are often countries where passport frauds are rife, for instance, so DIAC would check the applicant's identity and passport more carefully than they would with a British WASP called Joe Bloggs when there is no stolen passport in his name, for example.

 

The upshot of the whole thing is that the ASPC are trawling their files. When an application in Cat 5 is decision ready, it is being passed to a CO for urgent finalisation. Meanwhile there may be an application where 80% of the work is complete. The support staff will have been told to find out what is happening with the remaining 20% and if external people need to be asked to do things then requests will be sent to Australia's embassies offshore. Other applications have been received and have been checked for basic validity but no other checks have been done yet and there probably won't be time to do them during the current Program Year.

 

DIAC refuse to discuss what will happen in the 2010/2011 Program Year which starts on 1st July 2010. As yet, they don't know what the quota of skilled visas will be for 2010/2011. Setting the quota is a political decision, made by the Aussie Minister for Immi, approved by the Aussie Cabinet and possibly approved by the Aussie parliament as well. I think it is too soon for DIAC to make many plans for the 2010/2011 Program Year as yet. They still need to get through the remaining 5 months of the current Year first and some of the lessons learned this Year will need to be carried forward and so on.

 

Another thing that Mr Wilden told me on the phone is that DIAC run various models, using different scenarios, to see what the computer comes up with. He said that DIAC could run 100 of these models but there will always be a degree of discrepancy between the models and what actually happens in practice. I believe him. Any sort of model runs this risk - they are merely better than wild guesses.

 

Cheers

 

Gill:jiggy:

[Guest Gollywobbler]

We applied for a skilled sub class 175 visa in Sept 2008. Hubby was taken off the CSL list in March 2009. We have decided to stay in Western Australia. If we were to apply for State Sponsorship now will it help speed up our application as we'll have to wait till 2013 otherwise?

 

Do we still need a lot of money in the bank? I've looked and all I can find is that the application requires you to have 'sufficient funds to cover the settlement'...what does this mean?

 

:nah:

 

Hi Junie

 

It is definitely worth applying for State sponsorship.

 

At the moment your application is likely to be in Cat 6 because it is likely that your OH has an occupation which is on the current MODL. However the MODL is being reviewed at the moment. If OH's occupation is removed from the MODL, your visa application might slip to Cat 7. If you get State sponsorship then you will move up to Cat 5 and you will stay there - the Minister will not do away with State sponsorship.

 

Please see the FAQ of 23rd September.

 

http://www.immi.gov.au/skilled/general-skilled-migration/pdf/faq-priority-processing.pdf

 

Do we still need a lot of money in the bank? I've looked and all I can find is that the application requires you to have 'sufficient funds to cover the settlement'...what does this mean?

 

At the moment, WA do not require cash in the bank until you reach Oz. They don't publish how much they are looking for, exactly. Early in 2008 they were looking for about $25,000 in total for a family of 4. Most of the other States publish definite figures and details so you can extrapolate from the other States:

 

State & Territory Migration Sites - australia.gov.au

 

Cheers

 

Gill