New MODL being released on Mon 8 Feb 2010

[Guest pippa1]

Hi Rachbarlow

 

I must agree with Ramot, please do not stereotype all students. I am a graduate yet also have experience. I worked in education in UK before moving to oz to study. I was just the wrong side of 35 to apply at the time although I did actually get my first skills assessment back in 2005! I was not aware of whole process and trusted an agent who I believed would guide me through it.....bad move!

 

I have uprooted my whole family, have kids in school, have all my immediate family living here as permanent residents, yet find myself in this position. What do I do if they increase the passmark and I no longer qualify at time of decision??

 

Please have a little heart for us students....we are not all good for nothings you know:)

[lizzy27]

Are the new changes going to affect ENS visas? Were putting ours in shortly with my husbands employer. Nearly done our 2 years..

[Guest luyaoqin]

Hi, everyone. I am a student majoring in Accounting and have got 4 sevens in Ielts. Waiting for grafuation in April. Can anyone tell me if the new policy affects me please? I know it is silly to ask, but things make me worried!!!

[Guest press]

Hi

wont there be any good change for the 176 family sponsored non CSL non MODL? DIAC is ruining my life My fiancee has applied for the above visa offshore in 2008 jan. Assuming his PR will be granted at least in 2010 i also applied for a graduate scholarship in AUz which I got and will have to leave in March. its breaking my heart to leave him and go with all this uncertaintiy of when he will be able to join me there Can someone please tell me if i could have a slightest hope for Monday? Too many sleepless nights since I got the offer Appreciate any replies..

[matjones]

Hi

wont there be any good change for the 176 family sponsored non CSL non MODL? DIAC is ruining my life My fiancee has applied for the above visa offshore in 2008 jan. Assuming his PR will be granted at least in 2010 i also applied for a graduate scholarship in AUz which I got and will have to leave in March. its breaking my heart to leave him and go with all this uncertaintiy of when he will be able to join me there Can someone please tell me if i could have a slightest hope for Monday? Too many sleepless nights since I got the offer Appreciate any replies..

 

Unfortunately all we can do is wait....

[matjones]

I do vaguely remember some serious newspaper articles about the idea at the time. The Aussie Government insisted that theirs was a brilliant idea. Everybody else shook their heads and said it was a bluddy daft idea which would cause more problems than it would solve in the long term. I don't think any other country adopted the same notion and the UK definitely didn't adopt it.

 

Well the UK are apparently having similar abuse of visa problems, and are reworking the system:

 

Britain to cut number of student visas | The Australian

[lizzy27]

Plz anyone opinions on the ENS visas?? Will the new changes affect this visa??

[Christopher McGrath]

Everyone needs to note, this is all based on a newspaper artical, we agents know no more than that. No one can answer your questions. The main questions is, or one of them anyway, will whatever changes that will be made affect applications already lodged. No one knows outside DIAC and the Minister. Yes its very hard not knowing, but you will know soon. Having said that, until leglislation is changed we wont really know. Sometimes leglislative changes do not reflect what the Monister actually said, and thats been the way over many years.

 

So dont be gloomy, its not bad news yet, it may not be bad news, we have to wait and see.

 

While visiting another forum, I came across a post that claimed the following memo was sent to all staff of the Australian Demographic and Social Reserach Institute at the ANU, inviting them to attend the Minister's speech on Monday

 

"Dear ADSRI Staff and Students,

 

Skilled Migration Reforms – Speech by the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship

 

I am writing on behalf of Senator Chris Evans, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship and the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute (ADSRI) to invite you to attend a speech in which the Minister will announce significant policy reforms to the skilled migration program. T

 

This event is being hosted by the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute (ADSRI) of the Australian National University.

 

Representatives from industry peak bodies, unions, the education sector and key interest groups, as well as stakeholders of the ADSRI, have been invited to attend.

 

The forum will provide you with an opportunity to be briefed on key policy reforms and priorities within the Skilled Migration Program.

 

We look forward to receiving confirmation of your attendance, or that of your nominated representative at the meeting. The details of the meeting are as follows. Time: 8.30am for a 9.00am start. The event will be for approximately 2 hours. Date: 8 February 2010 Venue: The Hall University House, Australian National University, 1 Balmain Crescent, Acton, ACT.

 

It would be appreciated if you could please advise of your attendance, or that of your representative, by email at the earliest opportunity. For further information please contact xxxxxxxxxxxxx."

 

We have checked out the writer of this invitation and he is authentic.

 

Until tomorow,

[matjones]

We look forward to receiving confirmation of your attendance, or that of your nominated representative at the meeting. The details of the meeting are as follows. Time: 8.30am for a 9.00am start. The event will be for approximately 2 hours. Date: 8 February 2010 Venue: The Hall University House, Australian National University, 1 Balmain Crescent, Acton, ACT.

 

So we shouldn't expect an update on the diac website until after this event I assume.

[Christopher McGrath]

So we shouldn't expect an update on the diac website until after this event I assume.

 

 

Thats right (probably, maybe, lets hope so). This DIAC and its leaders are running all over the place making policy on the run, it seems. There is nothing on the DIAC or the Minster's site as yet.

 

Watch this space.

[Christopher McGrath]

So we shouldn't expect an update on the diac website until after this event I assume.

 

Yes, definatelly, or maybe, perhaps.

 

Watch this and other spaces.

[WAITINGGAME]

Arhhhhhhh tomorrow is the day...any idea what time we might find out in the UK?

[Guest Susan Wareham McGrath]

Hmmm...

 

So the very eminent and respected PhD who issued the invitation Chris is referring to in his post above, took it upon himself (obviously in consultation with Evan's advisers) to exclusively invite "all staff, students and stakeholders (whatever that means) of the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute at the ANU", along with "representatives from industry peak bodies, unions, the education sector and key interest groups" to be in the audience for Evan's speech tomorrow, at which we are promised (according to Andrew Metcalfe) that "significant policy reforms" will be announced.

 

To put this in perspective, as Gill has identified in an earlier post, Andrew Metcalfe would regard changing the parting in his hair to the other side of his head as a significant policy reform.

 

And Evans' speech might well end up being nothing more than a vague dissertation about future policy agendas.

 

But the strategic leaking to the Melbourne Age newspaper about tomorrow's speech leads one to believe there will be more to it than that.

 

If the Age has it right and serious policy changes will be announced during Evan's speech, I find it absolutely bizarre, elitist - and totally undemocratic - that an announcement that affects tens of thousands of people will be made to a hand picked audience, behind closed doors, rather than via a formal press conference.

 

Back in September 09, I raised the question " Mad Hatter's Tea Party, or Strategic Policy Change - What WAS Immigration Thinking on 23 September? " in response to the 23 September policy change.

 

Today, I take another quote from Charles Dodgson's Alice in Wonderland in saying that despite its small army of spin doctors, media and communication professionals, DIAC's public advice strategies are becoming "curiouser and curiouser".

 

Regards

Susan

[Guest Jamie Smith]

DIAC are nothing more than a typical monopoly, bureaucratic, slow moving, misdirected and totally neglectful of the customer and their own budgetary limitations.

 

As agents handle anywhere up to 70% of some visa categories, it would be efficient of DIAC to have an agent briefing kit ready to go at the launch party, and email it to agents to assess and then pass to their clients with comment.

 

That would avoid DIAC hotline staff and case officers being inundated with calls and emails that they have no idea as yet how to deal with.

 

DIAC put their own staff under pressure needlessly.

 

Furhtermore, the lack of consultation encourages applicants and agents to take recourse be it through the courts or in the media until things settle down, further tying up DIAC resources.

 

This is gross mismanagement of taxpayer dollars.

[Guest Susan Wareham McGrath]

Well said, Jamie.

 

Best regards

S

[Guest pippa1]

Mmmm....just sitting here watching The Biggest Loser, have a feeling that will be me tomorrow...wish it was just kilo's I had to worry about!

 

Think i've lost the plot now:biglaugh:

[Guest scubabud]

Sue Harcus is the SMO in Europe these days, based in London. A friend from PiO rang me a few days ago. He had been to a recent Expo in London and had met Sue there, running the WAGO stand. She told him that WA will need 140,000 additional workers within the next 5 to 10 years.

 

Hi Gill

I also spoke to Sue on the WA stand and she also told me that WA are still in desperate need of all trades and that the ministry would have to do some changes in order to tailor the MODL to meet the needs of each state rather than across the board. Why don't these people listen to the individual states and the process may run a lot smoother!

[Guest Natty T]

Mmmm....just sitting here watching The Biggest Loser, have a feeling that will be me tomorrow...wish it was just kilo's I had to worry about!

 

Think i've lost the plot now:biglaugh:

 

Excellant Post Pippa, know exactley how you feel, i feel we'll be pensioners by the time we get our visa.

Good luck everyone, lets hope its good news all round or its back on the wine again.

[Guest proud2beaussie]

It will be very interesting to see if the minister gets a grilling about the changes at the senate estimates hearing in Canberra on Tuesday or whether he lets/makes Mr Metcalfe take the heat.?

[cartertucker]

Hi Gill

I also spoke to Sue on the WA stand and she also told me that WA are still in desperate need of all trades and that the ministry would have to do some changes in order to tailor the MODL to meet the needs of each state rather than across the board. Why don't these people listen to the individual states and the process may run a lot smoother!

 

Good post

 

Lets hope & pray that tommorow will show that our very long & anxiously awaited for state sponserships actually mean something.:notworthy:

 

Wishing us all the very best of luck.....:yes:

[Guest Gollywobbler]

It will be very interesting to see if the minister gets a grilling about the changes at the senate estimates hearing in Canberra on Tuesday or whether he lets/makes Mr Metcalfe take the heat.?

 

Hi Nigel

 

I've only really studied the two Hansards and the written answers to Questions on Notice from the two Senate Estimate Committee Meetings in May and October 2009. So I don't know how Evans performs in the House when he doesn't have DIAC's senior people on hand to look after him.

 

From the two meetings that I have followed (which together only amount to a tiny quantity overall) Mr Metcalfe is clever and crafty. He can spot a political question from a mile away, whereupon he smiles sweetly and says firmly that he can't deal with political questions himself.

 

Minister Evans is clever as well. He spots political questions and fields them himself. However he does seem to be long on refusing to answer questions. He is very ready to tell the Senate Committee that he will not release any information which is for the Cabinet's ears only and he has had some pretty good battles with them about that, since quite a bit is Cabinet Business Only according to Minister Evans.

 

The Aussie political structure seems to me to be a hybrid between the UK and the American models. I recognise bits of it from the UK but there are other bits which I think must be American because I don't recognise them at all? Then again, I've never studied the British Political Machine closely and anyway Parliamentary Democracy ceased to exist in the UK soon after Tony Blair learned that using spin doctors instead is quicker and more effective from a leader who was a wannabe Amercan style President instead of a British Prime Minister, and who is a republican at heart.

 

What I don't like and don't trust about Minister Evans is David Wilden's insistence, as follows:

 

In London, all 6 of the visitors complained that many of the 2009 changes have had a retroactive effect because they have affected people who have already made their visa applications and there are no saving provisions (eg a child will turn 18 before the visa is finalised because of the delays imposed during 2009.)

 

Mr Wilden was on the ball and sharp. He said that the Minister has not made any changes to the actual Migration Act. Nothing but a retrospective change to the Act would be a retroactive change in the Law, according to DIAC. Their Chief Lawyer has obviously advised everybody that splitting this semantic hair in this way will work.

 

The lawyer in me can understand where Ms Bicket is coming from and techincally she is probably right. The person in me dislikes taking anything so close to the wire, though.

 

I dislike it because if all you do is to fiddle with the edges, and the rules which are under the Minister's power alone, first you can shout "Not retrospective because not a change in the Law" all over the shop. The other thing you can do is to avoid going to Parliament, explaining the whole story properly to them, and putting up with the inevitable disagreement from the Opposiition. They would say things like, "Yes, well, this is all do-able in the future no doubt but you cannot use it in order to tweak the existing backlog. The backlog must be cleared by some other means and your future changes must be introduced properly, with proper advance warning and proper consultation with Parliament so that the only people who will be affected will be those who apply a year or two from now. We can't let you rush into major changes quickly when you don't know how to handle refunds of application fees and you have no idea how to compensate International Students who have already paid for all or part of theiir courses. Those courses are taking place in Australia. We will not have you wrecking Australia's good name for honest dealing everywhere you go, chum."

 

By leaving Parliament out of the whole thing, the Minister is negating the very checks and balances which Parliament exists to provide. I don't like that.

 

Cheers

 

Gill

[Guest Jamie Smith]

DIAC have been hounded by agents and applicants, and politicians, for many years. They think DIAC are the only ones who know what goes on. Maybe 40 years ago they were right.

 

Because of their own lack of management oversight competencies as exhibited in many Ombudsman's reports, DIAC management lack the courage to delegate more authority to States and the higher quality agents.

 

Aggravating this, some States also lack a "fair and reasonable" approach to their interstate competition and that complicates things.

 

As a first step, DIAC can delegate just some authorities to some states, if they wished. But they won't.

 

Why? DIAC planners lack the courage to commit to sorting out problems face to face with the market. They never meet the people involved, they just stay in the back rooms and hypothesise.

 

They therefore lack confidence in themselves to work through the issues that would come from making the delegations.

 

Until the policy wonks and decision makers acquire the cojones to get out to the market more and learn not to be put off by it, we will always have near miss academic based migration policies rather than highly effective practical ones that generate long term stability.

 

It's plan from behind the battlefront on information that is out of date and only comes from one side, then send a few willing scouts to handle the flak and dig in for fight.

 

Sun Tzu argues that the best batttles won are ones that have never been fought, meaning DIAC could formulate polices along with the market and develop a united front to introduce the changes so that agents and applicants understand and accept the changes.

 

At present, applicants get bombed and agents get sniped at without rest.

[Guest Jamie Smith]

Nothing but a retrospective change to the Act would be a retroactive move, according to DIAC. Their Chief Lawyer has obviously advised everybody that splitting this semantic hair in this way will work.

 

They have taken a posiiton to create doubt in the minds of possible litigants, and they know they are wrong.

 

Anything changed after an application is made that makes an application invalid, where it was never declared to be a time of decision thing, well I think anyone would win an argument that that IS retrospective change. The effect must be considered along with the structure before deciding if an outcome is retrospective.

 

I'm not a lawyer, but if I was on jury I'd go that way.

[Guest Gollywobbler]

They have taken a posiiton to create doubt in the minds of possible litigants, and they know they are wrong.

 

Anything changed after an application is made that makes an application invalid, where it was never declared to be a time of decision thing, well I think anyone would win an argument that that IS retrospective change. The effect must be considered along with the structure before deciding if an outcome is retrospective.

 

I'm not a lawyer, but if I was on jury I'd go that way.

 

Hi Jamie

 

You have identified one of the problems. The applications in the 140,000 strong backlog have all been accepted as valid applications. If the criteria set out in S65 of the Migration Act are complied with, those applications must be finalised sooner or later. The Law insists on that and DIAC argue that there have been no changes to the law. The law merely doesn't say exactly when those applications must be finalised - so the Minister is using that fact to his own one-sided advantage as a way of controlling the backlog.

 

His new measures (eg TRA and Vetassess) will stop the backlog from getting any worse and eventually things will return to normal once the present backlog is cleared.

 

However the Minister is in such a hurry to plan for the future that applicants and agents are finding holes in the new Vetassess and TRA rules whenever they look at either of them. Proper consultation with the MIA beforehand would have identified most of the practical and other problems and it would have resulted in insistence from the MIA that TRA and Vetassess must go back to the drawing board and formulate their new rules (a) properly and (b) thoroughly. As it is, there are two new sets of rules for skills assessments and even the organisations concerned cannot justify the arbitrary nature of some of their rules.

 

Minister Evans doesn't care if people are plunged into chaotic doubt as a result. Apparently he doesn't care that he alone is giving Australia - a country that will depend on immigration for many years to come - a thoroughly bad name on the world stage.

 

Minister Evans sees a bold, new future in which only applicants who are likely to be highly paid in Australia (plus nurses) will be allowed in. Who is going to build homes for them? Who is going to build schools for their children? The Minister's cronies in the CFMEU but they will want a fortune for building anything because there will be so few tradies that they will become highly paid people as well.

 

For a start, that idea will upset the Aussie economy and will cause rampant inflation. In the UK, Mrs Thatcher took an iron handbag to the trades unions with similar ideas and told them, "Perish the thought because you have just become completely irrelevant, lads."

 

Secondly, the medics can fix the injuries sustained on the gas rigs but they can't and won't go and build or run the gas rigs themselves. Tradies will have to do that but the tradies will then need homes of their own etc.

 

Australia's future isn't broken so why does Minister Evans have such a passion to fix it? :mad:

 

Cheers

 

Gill

[Guest Susan Wareham McGrath]

Minister Evans is clever as well. He spots political questions and fields them himself. However he does seem to be long on refusing to answer questions. He is very ready to tell the Senate Committee that he will not release any information which is for the Cabinet's ears only and he has had some pretty good battles with them about that, since quite a bit is Cabinet Business Only according to Minister Evans.

And under Australian administrative law, material destined for Cabinet is generally exempted from release under both Freedom of Information and Right to Information legislation...

 

Best regards

Susan