George Lombard Posted October 9, 2010 Share Posted October 9, 2010 Unfortunately the Minister did not use his opportunity on Friday to announce the SMPs at the MIA National Conference, but some information about developments is now available. The starting point is the table of planning levels at Migration Program Statistics - Statistics - Publications, Research & Statistics . There will be 61,700 general skilled migration visa grants in 2010/11. Of these, 23,000 are allocated to state sponsored migration and 35,200 to skilled independent applicants. A further 3,500 people are anticipated under the family sponsored stream. Talking to states and DIAC people at the conference it seems that the 23,000 planning level on state sponsorship is effectively a cap, ie if they can't reach you in the current program year then it will need to be the next one, or the one after that. This will be made more complex by planning levels for particular occupations in particular state migration plans. Anecdotally, some states are already highly oversubscribed even though the number of state sponsored visas available has increased dramatically. This may mean that a longer wait is involved for most of those seeking state sponsorship. There are of course already longer waits for everyone else and this form of management may at least allow some sort of orderly progression for all those who fit within DIAC priority groups 1, 2 and 3. Priority groups are explained at http://www.immi.gov.au/skilled/general-skilled-migration/pdf/priority-processing-14-july-2010.pdf . For priority group 4, although there is an allocation under the GSM program for family sponsored cases, it's hard to see that the specified allocation will make much of an impact as there are as many as 40,000 applicants in this group. On the timing of the GSMs it seems that 1 November is a popular choice but there are still those who expect it earlier. DIAC of course can't say anything on this. More to come I hope. Cheers, George Lombard Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
George Lombard Posted October 10, 2010 Author Share Posted October 10, 2010 I think the clear indication is that they'll now start allocating SMPs casesin bulk and with priority - when there are SMP cases - until that capacity is exhausted and then go back to Schedule 3 (ie Priority group 3 cases). Some overlap between Schedule 3 and the SMPs so some state sponsored cases would already have been granted this program year and will come off the totals but overall there will be another complete change of direction. Cheers, George Lombard Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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