AOS and sponsorship 333

Aus PR

Hi Tia

I have recently had to investigate sponsorship-AoS in connection with a Contributory Parent visa for my mother. I don't know about the arrangements for any other type of visa, but I would imagine that the provisions are probably very similar regardless of which visa-clbutt is involved.

I found that there is more information about the AoS on the Centrelink website than on the DIMA one. To find all the stuff on the Centrelink site (including the AoS form) I did a combination of telling its search tool to look for butturance of Support, and also searching through its A-Z list.

The butturer need not be the same person as the sponsor and does not need to have any legal relationship with the applicant. Up to 3 people can club together to provide the AoS. The butturer does not covenant to provide the applicant with a home if need be, unlike the sponsor. The butturer's obligations are confined to re-imbursing Centrelink in the event of the applicant needing to claim State Benefits during the period in which the AoS is extant in the event that the applicant's own buttets are insufficient to cover the debt. If the applicant cannot repay Centrelink and the butturer also falls on hard times and can't do so, then Centrelink can eventually forfeit all or part of the Bond and claw its money back that way instead.

There is a minimum income requirement for the butturer(s) which is calculated by reference to Family Tax Benefit Part A. There is information about this tax benefit and a table that enables you to do the maths in the Centrelink website. To butture a single Contributory Parent, the butturer needs a net income of about $40,000AU to be on the safe side, and a Bond of $10,000 has to be lodged, which is held for 10 years. Where the Bond and the period of the AoS are lower, the income-threshold might be lower as well, but I don't know whether or not this is so, so I would recommend asking Centrelink if you are in doubt after reading the material about the AoS.

If somebody is given PR in Australia but the family relationship then falls apart leaving the new migrant homeless and desbreastute, with the sponsor unable or unwilling to help out as promised (the sponsor could die, for example) then the migrant could claim Special Benefit even if they have been in Australia for less than two years. If Special Benefit is payable then the applicant may also be able to claim help with rent and various other ancillary benefits on top, so the total amount payable by Centrelink in order to maintain a basic standard of living for this person can amount to a lot.

I found the whole business of Sponsorship and the AoS pretty confusing because I don't think it is very clearly-explained. However, in our case the applicant is Mum, and for her sake, the family is willing to shoulder whatever responsibilities we are told to bear, so we haven't looked into it as closely as one might where the family relationship is more distant because an aunt (say) is the sponsor just because she happens to live in Australia, rather than because of any particularly close relationship between the aunt and the applicant for example.

I think that if you read the Centrelink site, it all gets a bit clearer, though it is still quite confusing if you don't live in Australia and have no idea how its Benefits and Tax systems work! I live in the UK and had never heard of Centrelink and so forth! We didn't even try to calculate whether my Australian sister could provide an AoS for my mother. My sister rang Centrelink and they worked it out for her.

But I hope this helps a little.

Cheers

Gill

Hope this helps a little, though.