Key Points
- More than 137,000 parent visa applications have been lodged with the Home Affairs department.
- With long wait times, there are calls for the system to be overhauled.
- A new report says the migration intake should be increased or the visa should be scrapped.
When Perth resident Sarah scours a Facebook group she’s part of, with scores of others in her situation, she finds countless messages from people in desperation.
The posts from strangers who happen to share her predicament are overwhelming.
“You'll find hundreds if not thousands of people who are just completely confused,” Sarah, who did not want to give her surname, tells SBS News.
Sarah and her parents. Source: Supplied
“They're asking who's got it and when they lodged it. It's just absolute chaos.”
Those posting on these community pages want one simple thing: to bring their parents to Australia.
But with more than 130,000 of them having applied for about 8,500 yearly parent visa spots, many find themselves waiting for years on end without any resolution, and thousands of dollars out of pocket for application fees.
Sarah, who is in her 40s, moved from the United Kingdom after marrying an Australian over a decade ago.
In 2019, she encouraged her aging parents living in the UK to apply for the $47,955 contributory parent visa in a bid to have them close to her in Australia.
What she thought was going to be a two-year processing time then became more like eight years, and with the threat of that blowing out even further, she tried a different option, where they can wait in Australia on temporary bridging visas and apply for a non-contributing visa.
She says while on bridging visas, they can't buy a home and her parents must seek permission to leave the country. Plus, they face the prospect of losing their UK residency status if they spend too long outside the country, leaving them potentially in residency limbo.
But the kicker to the non-contributing visa was the potential 40-year processing wait time.
"They're never gonna get it in their lifetime," Sarah admits.
She says she wants the government to be "honest" about the process, and be upfront about the system.
"You know, be honest about [it] and people can get on with their lives and make plans and decisions.
"Because of the uncertainty of it all, the cloak and dagger approach ... It's not really fit for purpose."
Why are there calls for the parent visa to be scrapped?
Earlier this year, a major Migration Review led by former public service boss Martin Parkinson, suggested scrapping permanent residency for parents altogether, in favour of more short-term visas.
"While likely to be contentious, this approach might provide cheaper, fairer, faster and more certain access to a form of family reunification than is currently available,” the report said.
It’s also something that independent writer and researcher Peter Mares says should be considered if the government would not consider other measures first, including re-defining parents as “immediate family” or increasing Australia’s migrant intake.
Mares has written a new report, commissioned by the Scanlon Foundation, looking into what he has described as a “dysfunctional’ parent visa system that is “causing heartache for tens of thousands of families and a huge administrative burden for the public service”.
“Another approach might be to give into current realities — admit that the permanent parent visa program is completely dysfunctional, scrap it completely and look to satisfy families’ desire to have parents close by through some other mechanism like extended temporary stays,” he said.
Speaking to SBS News, Mares said the political realities mean that redefining parents as an immediate family for the purpose of these visas would mean increasing the migrant intake by 20,000.
“If they're not going to do that, then the current system has to change because the current process of capping and queuing and having an ever-growing waitlist is just awful for everyone.
“It's better for governments to be clear and say ‘No, we're not willing to accept parents and we organise a better temporary visa program instead, rather than give people false hopes.”
The migration review found Australia’s migration system was broadly "not fit for purpose", and recommended "a new and fairer approach" to parent visas.
‘Cruel and unnecessary’
It said a waiting period of 30-50 years, given the likely age of many parents, made the probability of successful migration “virtually non-existent for many applicants”.
"Providing an opportunity for people to apply for a visa that will probably never come seems both cruel and unnecessary."
For Sarah, the uncertainty has taken a toll on her family.
“It's caused a lot of stress on my dad's part," she said.
“He’s had a lot of sleepless nights wondering whether it's the right decision to make.”
