Hi Pauline,
My mum in law has 4 sons 2 of which already had there visas & were living in Perth. We applied (being the 3rd son) and her forth son has decided to stay in England. So she had pbutted the BOF test, cos she had 2 out of 4 sons living there. The son who sponsered her had been there for nearly 3 years. If it is a contributory parent visa you are thinking of you need to be sponsered & you or a family member must have lived there for 2 yrs b4 sponsering. My MIL is on her own, but if your mum & dad are wanting to move to Australia on a contributory parent visa it is twice the expense, it cost us in total å£19,000 to get my MIL her visa.
On my mum in laws application form it says how many children do you have & where do they live, we put 2 in Australia & 2 in England, but we made it clear that they knew we had applied for a visa ourselvs.
We got our visa grant in March 2005 & she decided to apply for her visa in January 2005 so our residancy was in the uk at the time of application so it didnt matter, b'cos it's taken into account when the application is lodged. Even when we had our visa it didn't mattrer b'cos your are not clbutted as an Australian citizan until you are living there. But I think it helped them knowing that we had applied. Hope this helps a little, feel free to ask more questions if you need to.
Sarah.
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