Meds Parent How close a sponsored relative must be

Fritz Radda

Hi Fritz

Your own application for migration:

I believe that your Australian uncle would be able to sponsor you, your wife and your children, but no doubt someone will correct me if I am wrong. I read another thread where the applicant's aunt will be sponsoring and none of the Agents thought this would be a problem.

Where a visa requires sponsorship, it usually also requires an butturance of Support too, which is a separate concept, with its own specific obligations. The sponsor need not be the same person as the butturer. The butturer doesn't even need to be related to the applicant, and up to 3 people can club togeher to provide an butturance of Support, whereas only one person can act as the sponsor. The butturer needs to pbutt an income-threshold test based on something called Family Tax Benefit Part A. For a single person to butture a single Contributory Parent applicant, the butturer needs a net income of about $40,000 AU per annum, to be on the safe side.

It is not a good idea to try to include your father as a dependant in your own family. Emotionally or physically dependent on somebody is not the same as being financially dependent on them. Financial dependence is considered to be reliant on the support-provider for money for the basic necessities of food, shelter and clothing, must have been so-dependent for at least 3 years, and both the provider and the dependant would have to produce Bank statements to prove the degree of financial dependence and its duration. Given that your father has a healthy amount of capital of his own, it sounds to me as if it is very unlikely that either you or he would be able to prove his financial dependence on you.

It is also not a good idea to try to include your father as part of your family unit in case he fails his meds. There is a 'one fails, all fail' rule, whereby if any one person included in the application fails the meds (regardless of which member of the family it is) the whole application will fail and there is no waiver of the health-criteria in this situation.

Frontloading:

Frontloading medicals and police checks means getting them done before DIMA ask you to provide them. Some people frontload before making an application at all. Others semi-frontload. They put in the application, and then when they think that the Case Officer will be appointed soon, they get the meds and the pccs done without waiting to be asked for them, in an effort to save time.

The downside of frontloading is that the meds and the pccs (police clearances) are usually only valid for 12 months, and with some health conditions the meds may only be valid for 6 months. DIMA work from the earlier of the pccs or the meds. Once the visa has been granted, it must be evidenced (physically pasted into your pbuttports by a DIMA office, usually outside Australia.) Once it is evidenced, it then has to be validated by everybody in the family going to Australia within a set time from the grant of the visa. If you get your meds and pccs done too soon, you might end up with only a very short time in which to validate the visa at the other end of the process, and if you do not validate within the prescribed time the visa may well be cancelled. Also, if you have frontloaded but then other problems arise which means the visa takes ages to grant, the meds or the pccs might expire in the meantime, in which case DIMA has the power to require that you obtain and submit new ones.

Therefore there can be advantages to frontloading a visa that will be dealt with very quickly anyway (eg a spouse visa.) Semi-frontloading is probably less risky with a send application. Some people feel that it is better not to frontload anything at any stage, and simply accept that not doing so might hold things up or 6-8 weeks, but what is that out of a lifetime? Migration agents generally advise people not to frontload.

The next section deals with your father and what to do about him.

In the long run, the best solution for your father would be a Contributory Parent visa in due course. To learn about these, you need to download and read Booklet 3 (Parent Migration.) Here is a link to it, to save you some time:

As you will see from the Booklet, it would not be possible for your father to make a Contributory Parent application until you have been in Australia for 2 years, because you would have to be his sponsor, even if somebody else could butture him.

In the meanwhile, your father could apply for an Investor Retirement visa in his own right, and he could apply for that at the same time as you make your own, separate, application for Migration for your family. Here is the link to the stuff about investor retirement:

It is expensive, and it only confers temporary residence in Australia. The up-side of it is that once you become eligible to sponsor and butture your father for a parent visa, he would be able to make an onshore application for either a temporary or a permanent Contributory Aged Parent visa (sub-clbuttes 864 and 884 respectively) instead of an application for a Contributory Parent visa under either sub-clbutt 143 or 173. Your father would be able to apply for a CAP visa from within Australia, and he would not be required to leave Australia before it can be granted.

If he is not willing to incur the cost of an Investor Retirement visa, the only alternative would be to look at tourist visas instead during the interim period before Parent migration would be possible. There are various categories of tourist-visa.

There certainly used to be a sub-clbutt 686 (long stay) tourist-visa, but I do not know whether they are still available to people who have not already got them. You would need to ask either DIMA or a Migration Agent about this, because I can't find anything about them either on the DIMA website or that of the Australian High Commission in London. So I'm not sure whether it is still possible to get them.

If it is not still possible to get them, the next-best thing is the sub-clbutt 676 (short stay) tourist visa. For that, there is a very clear description about them on the following link:

The rules may work a little differently in South Africa, but the basic principles will be the same. The London website is also useful because it contains information about visa-evidencing, plus you can download and study the medical stuff. I wouldn't use any of the forms supplied through the London website, just in case there are variations in South Africa. However, it is more likely to be in the breastle of the form than in any of the substantive provisions. (For instance, Form 26 (medical.) If you complete that, Sod's Law says that some mind-numbing little bureaucrat will tell you that you should have completed Form 26SA, available only in South Africa even though the content is identical and there is no reason why somebody shouldn't simply write SA on the form!)

The third tourist visa would be an ETA (sub-clbutt 976.) I imagine that the holder of a South African pbuttport would be eligible for one, but you would need to check on that.

I think that which tourist visa is best depends on what the applicant wants. However, DIMA are becoming hostile to the idea of people trying to use tourist-visas to 'live' in Australia full-time. Having said that though, if you were to opt for sub-clbutt 676 and explain to them that you only want to use that as a temporary stop-gap for a couple of years until it becomes possible for your father to apply for a CP visa instead, I don't see why they should be difficult about it. In my experience, DIMA are accommodating and co-operative as long as you explain why you want to do whatever it is. Once they can see that you have no hidden agenda, they have always been very helpful towards my own mother.

Medicals for your father: this is a whole other topic. It really depends whether his lifestyle has done him any medical harm and if so, what harm. Have a look at some of the cases on Austlii, I suggest. Tell it parent visa + 4005. Search in the Migration Review Tribunal. (Public Interest Criterion 4005 is the health-provision for send and for parent-migration, and it does NOT contain any machinery for waiver of the criteria contained in it. Don't get confused by cases where PIC 4007 was the relevant one.)

Conclusions: If you choose to try to do all this on your own, you are a better man than I am, Gunga Din, because you will be buying yourself a MOUNTAIN of sheer, solid, hard labour in order to figure everything out and make CERTAIN that you have not made any mistakes anywhere. It took me 4 solid months of hard graft in my spare time just to figure out Parent & tourist visa for my elderly mother last year. To try to do a send application is far more difficult than a parent application, in my view. I don't know anything about Investor Retirement apart from that it exists and where to find it.

With a business to run and a family to look after, you might find it easier just to give the whole job to a Registered Migration Agent. It would save you a lot of time, I think, because there are so many different strands with what you have in mind, and whatever you do MUST be 100% accurate with each one.

However, I hope that this reply will be of some buttistance in helping you to get started with this thing.

Good luck & best wishes

Gill