Stories

Skilled visa applicant – daughter with Down syndrome

We applied for a 186 visa which is a permanent residence visa and has a pathway with a health waiver. I am an engineering surveyor and my wife has a middle management role in the disability sector and works as a Practice Leader. Our daughter is happily going to school and will be eight years old this year. Our daughter was diagnosed with Down syndrome at birth.

We are currently waiting for a response from the department having submitted our application for a health waiver for a skilled visa over 18 months ago.

The whole process is emotionally draining and Is constantly at the back of our minds and this has affected us in the following ways:

• Our ability to plan for the future - The outcome of the visa application is not guaranteed even though we feel that our case is strong, therefore making decisions such as buying a house or making long term investments is not possible. We are not getting any younger and we feel we are running out of time

• Our ability to plan a family is impacted. We intended to have more children, however we decided to hold off on that pending the outcome of the visa. Again we are not getting any younger and this is something we may not be able to do if we are still in limbo for longer.

• We have always wanted to travel within Australia and around the world but this is difficult because it involves dipping into our savings, we’ve had to make the choice to limit such things in order to save money. We are constantly trying to save our finances to ensure we have something to fall back on in theevent of an adverse decision

• It is vital to maintain family connections. Our daughter has never met her grandmother and other family who still live overseas and our ability to facilitate visits either way is compromised.

• My current visa allows me to only work in the profession that I applied my visa with. This means I am unable to pursue a different career path. 

These are just a few of the Issues we are facing. We are currently living a decent life but this can change very quickly (negatively or positively) once a decision is made and we can’t bear to imagine the impact a negative decision would have on our lives especially for our daughter.

We feel we are discriminated against because we should all be treated equally and having our child being seen as burden in the very community that we are actively contributing in is very unfortunate.

It’s been very difficult and tedious, all we can do is try to patiently see the process out and hope and pray for a positive outcome

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Partner visa – spouse and Australian citizen son off shore

I lived in Australia since 2001 and became an Australian in 2007. All those years I thought my life is over. But then a miracle happened and I met my wife on Facebook. I went to Africa to see her in 2013, we married and we had a baby in 2014 .

That is when I have decided to bring both of them to Australia. I applied for spouse visa for my wife and my son. But under the health check requirement, my wife failed and the visa was refused for both of them. Then I got my son a citizenship of Australia by descent. But still my wife was refused the visa.

That application took about two years. Then I had to apply AAT which took another long wait. At that moment I hated my life  and  the fact that I couldn’t see my wife and son for nearly five years . I was stressed and depressed, mentally physically and emotionally. On top of that I had to support two house holds - one where my wife and son were living and the other one is the big place I leased hoping they will come .

The Australian government left me emotionally and financially broke. A family should be only separated by death, not because of health requirements for visa.

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Australian family  applying for an on-shore  parent visa for elderly mother

For us it has been overwhelmingly stressful as with Mum there was two sides to it. There was the bureaucracy of the immigration department as well as dealing with Mum's health issues.

Mum had to go for medical after medical [for migration purposes] and various tests which started to add up in cost.

What we found really stressful and annoying was Mum being given permission to apply for her visa "on shore" with a waiting period of fifteen years. I think there are many grey areas in the on-shore process that need to be addressed. Mum gave up everything in the UK and moved to Australia and then got sick during the waiting process. To be told your visa is denied and you have to leave Australia and re-establish
yourself is inhumane especially when all close family are in Australia.

It's of huge comfort to Mum knowing that she can stay in Australia and enjoy her twilight years with her family and that we are nearby to care for her.

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Skilled visa applicant – family member with disability

I was invited to apply for a temporary nominated skilled visa in 2014 due to Australian skill shortages. My husband was included on my visa as my spouse. My brother-in -law was also included on my visa application as a dependent due to him having a mild learning disability and he had lived with us for several years following the death of his parents.

In the process of our visa we all completed our physical medicals which we passed, however my brother in law was also requested to undertake the mini mental examination which concluded that he had a mild cognitive impairment, but that he did not require any social supportwith his daily living.

Our application was continuing, and we were prepared to leave to start our new life in Australia having paid our fees, medicals, and handed our notices in to our employers, and sold our belongings.

We were then informed by the Australian government that my brother-in-law would not be granted a visa because of his requirement  for social support services. We had already shown that this was not the case for my brother-in-law who had never required any such support. Further, he was not eligible for Australian social support services as he would have been a temporary resident.

The government requested that we have a health waiver signed by my employer in Australia that would make them liable for any future payments, should they arise.  Understandably my employer at this time was unable to commit to this. We were then informed that our visa would not be granted.

In the nearly five years since he has been in Australia, my brother-in-law has not required access to any social support and is surrounded by his family (four of whom have filled Australia’s skilled shortages) who all reside in Australia. He also works voluntarily for a children’s charity.  He has made many friends and enjoys the
Australian lifestyle.

Going through this process has been very challenging for all of the family, both financially and emotionally.  It causes us great anxiety that my brother-in-law’s future is still undecided and the stress of uncertainty plagues the family daily.  We find it very difficult to plan for the future.

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New Zealanders (Australian citizens) applying for child visa for child with autism

In 2009, my husband, two young children and I moved from New Zealand to Brisbane,  Australia. My sister was already living in Australia so we moved to be closer to her and for a better lifestyle and more opportunities for our family. We settled quickly with jobs, built a house and the kids were thriving - we were living the ‘Australian Dream’.

We knew early on that Australia would be home. My husband gained his citizenship in 2012. It was a very straightforward process as his father is Australian so my husband was able to gain Citizenship by Descent. By this time, I started to look into pathways for myself and our two children to also gain permanent residency so we could all eventually become Australian Citizens. As I had travelled to Australia when I was a child, I was able to meet the criteria to apply for permanent residency under the Return Resident Visa (RRV) pathway. Again, I found this a straightforward process and once I was granted my permanent residency, I was excited to be able to sponsor my children so they could also gain permanent residency (Visa Subclass 802) and have a pathway to citizenship.

As proudly as I stood at my citizenship ceremony in September 2015, it was a really bittersweet day for me as it came only a few weeks after I had received the devastating news that my son Cameron’s permanent residency visa had been declined due to him not meeting heath requirements. Both myself and my two children are vision impaired and legally blind but this did not seem to pose an issue - after all, my visa and my daughter’s visas were granted so I was really taken aback that Cameron’s visa was declined. Upon further contact with Immigration, I was told this was due to Cameron’s autism and intellectual disability. He did not meet the health requirements to become a permanent resident as the estimated cost to support him was deemed to be a ‘burden’ on the Australian Commonwealth.

The figure they estimated Cameron to cost the Australian government was absurd, especially given that as a New Zealand citizen, Cameron was already entitled to use  Medicare, to access special schooling and to access a disability pension at age 16 under the Trans-Tasman agreement.

With the help and support of our friends, family and a wonderful migration agent, we fought a tough battle for Cameron. We applied for a health waiver but this  was declined. Dissatisfied with that, we appealed at the AAT and sat through not one but two gruelling AAT hearings only for Cameron’s visa to still be denied.

On the brink of giving up and facing a return to NZ, we dug deep and decided to take Cameron’s case to Ministerial Intervention. We had no new evidence to give and to be honest, we were not hopeful of a positive outcome but whilst there was even a tiny glimmer of hope, I felt like I owed it to Cameron to take that chance.

I don’t think I will ever forget the day 3rd July 2017, when I received the call from our migration agent to tell me that the Minister of Immigration had in fact exercised his right to overturn the decision of the AAT and had granted Cameron’s permanent resident visa! I was in absolute disbelief, I sobbed tears of joy and was so very grateful. This was a life changing day for us.

The final part of the journey came when Cameron was then granted his Australian Citizenship in November  2018. We finally feel settled and know we can truly call Australia home now.

As I look back to 2014, when I started the visa process for my children, I had no idea what lay before us. It was an incredibly tough few years. I still feel emotional today thinking back on the whole process. By the time Cameron’s visa was granted, we had spent thousands of dollars which of course was a financial strain on us. It was a hugely time consuming process too - letter writing, statutory declaration writing, phone calls, emails all took a huge amount of hours away whilst I was trying to hold down a full time job. But, it was the emotional stress that took its toll the most and looking back now I don’t know how we kept going at times. The process consumed me and at times it was all I could think about.  I felt a huge amount of anger at the Australian government for their treatment of our son. How can they grant three out of four members of a family Australian Citizenship and decline the remaining one on the disability factor? I was angry to learn that Australians in New Zealand have much clearer pathways to permanent residency and NZ Citizenship - where is the ANZAC spirit from the Australian Government?

I am deeply saddened at the Australian government's disgraceful attitudes to health and disability. How hurtful it was to have my son labelled with a dollar amount and to be told he would be a burden to the Commonwealth and therefore not worthy of becoming an Australian Citizen! I am passionate about disability rights and equality and narrow-minded attitudes like this are certainly not helping the acceptance of disability as a whole within our communities. As a person with a disability myself, I have faced discrimination and know how damaging this can be. I also know first hand that it is truly unfair to label health and disability in one box. There is ABILITY in disability and the government are refusing to see this.

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Permanent Residency - Health Waiver

I'd like to remain anonymous - I don't want my condition  to define who I am to people I work with or know in passing. I find when I tell people they change how they interact with me, and it takes a long time to shift their perception of what I can and can't do and who I am - they pity me, but they also subconsciously put a limit on my abilities and what I can achieve. 

In terms of getting my permanent residence (PR) visa, there are a few points I'd make. Firstly, and less substantively, the effort involved in gathering all of the necessary information and documents needed to prove that you should receive a waiver is substantial. I had to spend hours gathering documents and other evidence to support my application, which went way beyond what was required for the core application. Some of this documentation had to be paid for e.g. letters from my specialist, I was able to afford this but it was an extra financial burden we had to bear. I also felt that I needed to engage lawyers to support me through this process, and I'd say that this was absolutely vital to the successful outcome of my application - there were approaches they took to arguing for the waiver that wouldn't have occurred to me, and I'm sure they were crucial in securing the outcome. I want to say that I'm incredibly grateful for all the work the lawyers did, but it was obviously a very costly exercise, and not everyone will have the resources to be able to pay for this.

This process was also incredibly invasive, for me, my immediate family and my broader family (in particular my parents and parents-in-law). I was forced to ask my wider family for very intimate financial information, and then supply that information to the government. In the case of my parents this was particularly galling as they are not Australian - why should they, as foreign nationals, have to inform the Australian government of their intentions with respect to passing on their wealth.

I was also forced to reveal information about my condition and likely prognosis to a much wider group of colleagues than I would otherwise have chosen to do, and this did (for a while) result in casual discrimination. In many cases this discrimination was completely unintentional, and came from a place of concern about me, for example people rescheduling meetings from the end of the day as they thought I would be tired and unable to fully participate. While I appreciate the thought it's actually damaging to my professional standing, and could easily lead to being passed over for promotion, not being given a big project or team to run etc, as people feel I can't cope because of my medical condition. For people with disabilities to be treated as true equals, they need to make the decisions over what they can/can't do in all aspects of their lives, and until perceptions are changed to enable this there's always going to be an issue with discrimination.

Finally, the very fact that my family and I had to go through this process was in many ways quite demeaning. It placed a lot of stress on my family - I didn't appreciate quite how much until my PR was granted, and the weight was lifted from all of us. For example, while the application was being processed (and for a while afterwards, until I got the records updated), I was stopped at the border every time I left or re-entered the country. I understand the border officers were doing their job, and it was always possible to explain the situation, have them check my underlying 457 and bridging visas and then re-admit me, but this was an incredibly stressful experience - perhaps one time I wouldn't be allowed back in, because someone makes a mistake?

More generally, the heart of the process is proving to the government that you're worth more to the country than the cost of your treatment. So you're reduced to coming up with lots of different arguments for why your contribution to society is worth more than whatever this number is. How can I possibly quantify how much being able to live and work close to my husband's family is worth? Or the fact that we get involved in community organisations?

More generally why should my condition, which attacked me at random, through no fault of my own, mean that I have to go through this? I understand that my treatment is costly, and that Australia can't afford to have an open doors policy that allows anyone from anywhere to move here. But I've already proved that I have a credible, tangible reason for wanting to live here (in my case, my relationship with my husband and our daughter) that qualified me for PR in the first place, and it was difficult to come to terms with the idea that this wasn't enough, that because of my disability I had to do more than others to be allowed the right to stay indefinitely.

I'm planning to apply for citizenship this year, when I become eligible, and I love Australia and my life here - we recently bought a house, our daughter has started school, and we'd like her to grow up here. I do understand why the government has the current rules in place, and that there are fiscal implications for allowing people with expensive treatments to live here and potentially be a net drain (financially) on the country. But at the same time, it's rather incongruous that such a friendly, welcoming society, where everyone is your mate and helps out from day one, takes this approach to deciding who is worth accepting into their society and who isn't. It feels like there must be another way that's less demeaning and invasive to balance these two competing goals.

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A family from the Maldives has a child born here in Australia. The child acquired a brain injury at birth, resulting in significant physical and intellectual disability. The child also has haemophilia.  The child is applying for a temporary visa but, if granted a temporary visa, would be ineligible for any health or community services. All the child’s health and therapy costs are presently covered by the family.  Nevertheless, the child’s visa has been refused on the grounds of ‘cost to the community’ for health and community services. The child’s parents and two siblings were all granted temporary skilled visas, on the basis of his mother’s work in regional Australia in an occupation in demand. The child will die a painful and premature death if required to return to the Maldives where the support needed for haemophilia and therapy is simply not available.  The application for a waiver of the health requirement to enable the child to stay with its family members in Australia, has been refused. The family has been forced to take their case to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), at significant personal and financial cost.

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A woman who is divorced and whose two children are living in the UK with their father, and have been for years, marries an Australian citizen. Her application for a partner visa is refused because one of her children has Down syndrome and the Regulations require that every member of the immediate family of a visa applicant must meet the health requirement, even if they are not applying to migrate. This is known as the ‘one fails, all fail’ rule. The mother does not intend to bring her children with her. The children live with their father in the UK, where they also have extended family. They are settled there and the father, who has sole custody and is their legal guardian would not give permission for them to leave the country other than on holiday with him.

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A Kenyan-born applicant who came to Australia on a student visa, completed his PhD  and became the first blind person to become a registered teacher in South Australia, was refused temporary residence (PR) in 2009 because of his visual impairment and consequent costs to the Australian community. This was despite his ongoing employment and extensive community and outreach work. Ministerial intervention led to the grant of a temporary residence visa but subsequently, when the applicant applied for PR, he was refused again.  It took several more years and considerable hardship and expense before his application for PR was finally granted, following further ministerial intervention.

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