Parent Visa

[Guest haze]

Has anyone used an agent for help with Parent Visa and if so would they recommend them ?.....we are still desperately trying to find a way to live with our little grandi in oz

 

Many Thanks Haze

[Guest guest36187]

I recommend Go Matilda x

[Guest haze]

Thankyou will go look see if I can find anything out about them

[Guest Gollywobbler]

Hi haze

 

I'm sorry for taking a while to get back to you.

 

I've been through your earlier threads, from which I have learned that:

 

1. You are about 52 and you are sound in wind & limb.

 

2. Your Hubby is about 58. He had an accident at work, for which he receives a small pension which he will continue to get for the rest of his life. regardless of his whereabouts. He is unable to work because of the accident.

 

3. Your daughter lives in NSW with her Aussie OH but she does not live in Sydney or any of the other really built up areas of WA. They have recently had a baby daughter together, who is your only grandchild so far.

 

4. You were in Oz when the baby was born (as was my own mother with her own only two grandchildren - two Aussie boys) but you are now back in the UK after 3 months in Oz. You miss your granddaughter and your daughter and her Partner desperately. (My mother was the same - inconsolable when she missed the boys but couldn't be in Oz with them.)

 

3. You have worked out that you could afford the costs of one CPV but not two, so you are thinking of the long winded but much cheaper non-contributory Parent 103 visa instead.

 

The above are the facts that you have told us so far.

 

****************************************************************

 

Now - please could you answer the following questions for me?

 

1.1. What is your own occupation, please? You are only 52 or so now, and your daughter lives in Regional Oz. Therefore depending on your occupation, an employer-sponsored RSMS visa is not necessarily impossible for you but it does depend on your occupation so this is very important for the moment, please.

 

2.2. Do you and OH have any children at all apart from your daughter in Oz? Children from other relationships on either side are included in the Balance of Family Test, and Parent migration does not get off the ground unless the BoF Test works, so this is the next bit to check, please.

 

3.3. Parent migration also does not get off the ground unless the child in Oz has Aussie Citizenship or Permanent Residency in Oz. The legislation does not recognise you as being a Parent for Parent migration unless a qualifying child in Australia has either Citizenship or PR at the time when the application for a Parent visa is submitted. So what is your daughter's exact status, please? One has to be careful where a Partner visa is involved because the majority of them only give the non-Aussie partner a Temporary Residency visa to start with, which is not good enough to satisfy the legislation for Parent migration so again, this is important, please.

 

4.4. Have you examined what the DIAC wensite says about the Parent 103 visa and have you read Booklet 3, please? If not, please start with those FIRST and read them carefully before you do anything else. They are below:

 

Parent (Migrant) Visa (Subclass 103)

 

Parent Migration Booklet

 

Booklet 3 can be confusing, so here is the easy way through it. One of the Parents must have turned 65 before either Parent is "Aged", so you can ignore all of the visas with "Aged" in the title, which gets rid of 3 of the 6! If you can't afford Contributory Parent visas either, ignore anything marked "Contributory", which gets rid of another 2. This leaves the Parent 103 visa for you!

 

Britons only tend to have small numbers of children so the BoF Test is usually quite easy for Britons to work out. Ages ago, the Perth Visa Centre told me that the majority of Parent and Contributory Parent applicants are not British, the facts can be many and varied and so the Booklet contains a complicated chart about the BoF Test as well.

 

The rest of Booklet 3 is straightforward, though.

 

You have made the assumption that you will necessarily need a migration agent to help you. I disagree. Parent and Contributory Parent visas are so straightforward that most families are perfectly well able to deal with the whole thing by themselves. Which can save a huge amount of money as well as a hell of a lot of red herrings, my friend.

 

Good agents in the UK charge about £1,000 give or take plus VAT for doing a Parent or a Contributory Parent visa application. The application itself is as easy as falling off a log but checking and re-checking all the boring details is what takes the time. My mother has a Contributory Parent 143 visa which my sister and I dealt with for her in 2005 and 2006. The checklist for Mum's visa was dog-eared by the time I had finished with it because I cleared my dining table for about a week in order to assemble Mum's bundle of documents on it. My way of checking everything was to move it all from one pile into a new pile as I went through the checklist. I shifted all the documents at least 5 times in order to make absolutely sure that nothing was missing.

 

But any fool can do it, my friend. None of it is rocket-science. It is merely incredibly boring, purely clerical work. I did this boring clerical work for my mother because she's my mother. I'm way too lazy to get involved with it for anybody else, though. But I did it and I am now 53, so there is no reason why you can't do it as well.

 

I don't know how much the agents in Oz charge for handling Parent and Contributory Parent applications. In general they tend to charge around $2,000, I suspect, which is about £1,000 GBP, simply because of the sheer amount of time that the clerical stuff takes in the beginning. If you are in the UK and the agent is in Oz, though, you can save Aussie GST because an agent in Oz does not have to add GST to his/her fees if the client is not in Oz. I don't know the rate of Aussie GST but your daughter probably knows this. VAT in the UK has gone back to 17.5% though, remember.

 

If you want to use an agent, though, I'd suggest as follows:

 

Go Matilda - Your Gateway to Australia - Contact and Feedback

 

Registered Australian Migration Agents, UK - Ian Harrop and Associates

 

Veronika Hurbis, Sort Out My Visa - LookupPage (Veronika is an Aussie solicitor)

 

Profile | George Lombard Consultancy Pty. Ltd.

 

Dobbie and Devine Immigration Lawyers Pty Ltd (Nigel is also an Aussie solicitor)

 

Bird Australian Migration Agency

 

Anybody from the above list of links can act for you and do the job well. The only one who doesn't make out that it is all highly hair raising and difficult unless one involves an "expert" is Nigel Dobbie, because he knows that such a claim simply isn't true if the Parent does his/her homework properly. Nigel will never be wealthy because his regard for the truth is much higher than his regard for making a shekel for himself. However if you want him to hold your hand for you then Nigel will hold it for you, exactly the same as all the others. Solicitors and migration agents charge exactly the same as each other for dealing with visa applications, you wil find if you phone round in the UK and your daughter does so in Oz.

 

I am worried that somebody who can't afford a CPV would think of spending a LOT of money on a agent for a straightforward Parent 103 application, though.

 

Parent 103 applications take about 12 years to come to fruition. The reason is because only 1,400 visas are available each year and about 16,000 Parents have applied for the Parent 103 visa. They are much, much cheaper than 2 CPVs and in the long run the Parent 103 visa is a much better visa than the CPV 143, but the downside is that they do take a very long time as well. However you can make either long or short visits to Oz whilst you wait, according to how much time you can spare for each visit.

 

Please sing out if you have further queries.

 

Cheers

 

Gill

[Guest haze]

Thank you so much Gill for taking the time to send me all this info have sent you a pm

 

Hazel

[Guest Gollywobbler]

Thank you so much Gill for taking the time to send me all this info have sent you a pm

 

Hazel

 

Hi Hazel

 

No worries. I wouldn't look after the forum if I weren't concerned about the people who want visas for Oz.

 

I have replied to your PM, by the way.

 

Cheers

 

Hill