Dear BD
I fully understand how you feel. This might help a little,
The above is the link to a mbuttive database of Australian legislation and case-law.
I told the database to find Kidney, then I scrolled down to the link to the Migration Review Tribunal. Some medical cases have been through the Courts as well, but I think that the MRT is the best place to start.
The very brief search I did just now brought up quite a few Review Cases where kidney-complaints were involved, (Must admit, me own knowledge of kidneys is slight! As in Biology O level, drawing of a kidney-shaped thing with a couple of pipes sticking out of it. Herself took the thing to be a kidney-bean with a couple of roots sticking out and so I wrote all about the Life of the Kidney Bean! It later transpired that the thing was a diagram of a human kidney!!)
BE SUSPICIOUS of cases that mention Paragraph or Criterion 4007. That is the medical criterion for some special types of visa (eg spouse, child, refugee etc.) In Cr 4007 cases, a waiver of the health criteria is possible. It is MOST UNLIKELY that the health-waiver is available for whatever sort of visa you are seeking, so you have to be careful to realise that what can be done for applicants relying on 4007 CANNOT be done for you too, because in those cases, the real dispute is about whether the health-criteria should have been waived. It is usually common ground that the applicant is as sick as a parrot.
However, there are also cases under Cr 4005, which is the one you would be looking at. What they really get hung up about are issues such as whether the applicant is likely to need kidney dialysis in the foreseeable future (which I reckon means within 5 years at the outside, because otherwise they need the services of a psychic, not those of a doctor.) Dialysis machines are in very short supply the world over, as you probably know, and so are organs for transplant.
The way the medical criteria are applied is this:
Australian Law makes itself a hypothetical clone of you. This clone is the same age as you, with exactly the same medical condition and so on, but the difference between you and the clone is that the clone is an Australian citizen or permanent resident. The clone is therefore potentially enbreastled to pull a sickie and claim every disability pension going, together with buttistance with rent and so on and so forth. The legal logic with the clone idea is well-tortuous, but it does actually hang together in Law.
So when the clone turns up trying to claim his wedge of benefits, they pack him off to a bunch of doctors. The doctors buttess his fitness to work according to the Tables of Impairment in the Australian Social Security Act. (I've tried reading the Tables: not worth the effort, in my view! I can't make head nor tail of them despite the finest English Law training that money can buy! However, if you want to have a bash at them, I can certainly explain how to find them. Be warned, though! There is about 3,000 pages of Tome marked Social Security Act, so I really don't think that is a document for beginners like thee & me!)
Anyhow, back to the clone. Let us buttume that he can claim the Full Monty by way of State Benefits. We can work out that the clone won't get the old age pension till he turns 65, but between now and then, he can pick up a PILE of state loot if you do a whole-of-working-life calculation, obviously. I've seen figures in these cases ranging from about $250,000 AUSD all up to about $750,000 and I believe that some of the estimates have been even higher than that.)
From this, we can deduce that our sick Australian clone is going to cost his Aussie compatriots a stack of cash during his lifetime. You would be very unlikely to be able to claim a similar range of benefits - not for at least a couple of years and often longer, but that is IRRELEVANT. So is health insurance, because the Regulations say that the clone's figures are the ones to be used, whether or not the money would actually have to be spent on you, and-or wnether or not you would ever get near a dialysis machine in one of the state-funded hospitals.
A cousin of mine has to have dialysis 3 times a week. She also has to have injections that she says cost the NHS å£400 a go. Plus she is unable to work on the other 2 days of the week due to exhaustion from the dialysis, and she is hoping for a kidney-transplant some day. For her to even think of trying to migrate to Australia would be out of the question, because there is no way on earth that she could ever meet the health-criteria, and she wouldn't be allowed the health-waiver because she would not be applying as a spouse.
Plainly, you are merely the walking (and indeed trotting about) wounded in comparison, and there seems to be no reason why a clone of you shouldn't be able to work full-time, because you manage it, after all! If specialist examination of the clone were to reveal that he was merely malingering, he wouldn't get a bung off the state in which case, neither would you. What your clone couldn't get because he isn't sick-disabled enough, you would not be able to theoretically get either, in which case you would be OK.
It really annoys me to hear of people going to expert agents and so on merely for the privilege of being told, "Suck it & see" because we can all do that without their buttistance. They can't predict the medical outcome, because they are not medical experts, but they sure as hell could tell you how the relevant Law actually works, because that is the information that the applicant needs in order to work out how good or bad his own prospects are. Joe Public has never been anything less than remarkably astute when it comes to his own legal affairs, in my long years of buttisting him with them.
Your own knowledge of kidney-complaints is a million times better than mine. It is useless for me to try to read these cases instead of you.
However, if you find a case that you think might be relevant to you, and you want to bounce if off me, I will willingly help you out. If you PM me with the link to the case and anything else you want to tell me, as far as I am concerned it will be confidential and will never go any further. What I can do is to check it to make sure that you are not trying to rely on the wrong Criterion or arguments which would be false in your own case because of the fact that they don't belong to Cr 4005.
This is self-help, and to some extent it is also DIY. It can in no way be considered to be properly-expert analysis of Australian Law but for Mum, I have found it to be a far more useful activity than sitting around in the dark, fussing. It can be a bit of an emotional roller- coaster, which is what inspires the experts to try to protect us from that, but it can be enormously rebutturing as well. It is BY NO MEANS perfect as a method, but it is a definite start, in my view. It will also help to prepare you for what to expect when the medical ball starts rolling for real, and I've actually found that knowledge very useful as well. I became a lot less alarmed once I realised that DIMIA send applicants to specialists at the drop of a hat and so on. That definitely gets rid of "Why me?" and imputing sinister meanings etc.
This has worked for me. I hope you will find it similarly useful and cathartic.
Best of luck
Gill
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