Tag Archives: oceania

Family whacked with $85k bill after a decade waiting for visa

2022-07-22 FreeNews

When Sydney woman Joyce Lim Chin applied for her mum and dad's aged parent visas a decade ago, she never imagined she would be left with an $85,000 hospital bill and so much heartache.

"All of the family is here in Australia, including my sisters," Lim Chin said.

"We just wanted my parents to be able to stay here too, so if something happened we could take care of them."

Safoorah Ramasawmy died earlier this month and her parent visa was yet to be processed.

In 2012, Lim Chin and her family paid $6000 for her parents' visa applications and hoped to hear back soon, having no idea how long the process would take.

Two years later, in 2014, her parents passed their medical checks and were told they had been put in the visa queue.

The elderly couple, who are from Mauritius, spent the next eight years living in Australia on temporary visas while they sat in the queue.

Earlier this month, Lim Chin's mum, Safoorah, died, aged 92.

Her visa was never processed.

Lim Chin's 85-year-old father, Sachooda, is still waiting for his visa to be granted.

Waiting for decades

More than 120,000 people are currently waiting for parent visas to be processed, according to figures released to 9news.com.au by the Department of Home Affairs.

The department estimates the processing time for parent and aged parent visas is now about 30 years.

The waiting time is second only to the remaining relative visa, which has an approximate processing period of 50 years.

There are many visas with lengthening wait times, but the remaining relative visa takes the longest to process at approximately 50 years.

Australia offers another visa option for parents with a shorter waiting time – the contributory parent visa – but it comes with a $50,000 fee per applicant.

Processing times for the contributory parent visa have also ballooned in recent times, and now stand at more than five and a half years.

Lim Chin said the contributory visa was not an option for her parents as it was too expensive.

"Even though there are three of us (siblings), we all have financial commitments, we couldn't afford it," she said.

Lim Chin said her parents had been living independently until a few months ago, when her mother's dementia worsened and she began receiving palliative care.

Around the same time, her father fell and broke his hip, requiring surgery and a month-long hospital stay.

As temporary visa holders, Lim Chin's parents have never been entitled to Medicare.

Lim Chin's family are now left with hospital bills totalling more than $85,000 for the medical care her parents have received over the past few months.

"We have just received dad's hospital bill – it was $71,000 for the hospital bed alone, then the surgery will be on top of that," Lim Chin said.

"Mum's bill is more than $15,000.

"It's been a very sad and stressful time for us."

Safoorah and Sachooda Ramasawmy applied for aged parent visas in 2012.

Lim Chin, who is an accountant, moved to Australia on a skilled visa 27 years ago and is now an Australian citizen, as are her two sisters.

Lim Chin said she understood her elderly parents had not made a direct economic contribution to Australia, as she and her siblings had.

"We have paid for everything for our parents and we have been happy to do so, they don't get a pension.

"However, I feel like with the medical situation my parents found themselves in over the last three months, at least some assistance should have been given.

"There was no compassion shown."

Lim Chin said it was also deceptive of the Department of Home Affairs to offer a visa which came with a decades-long wait.

"It is ridiculous, they should just tell people not to apply, not take people's money," she said.

The lack of transparency of where exactly her parents sat in the queue was also frustrating, she added.

The Department of Home Affairs says on its website it has now processed aged parent visa applications which entered the queue before October 2010.

However, it is not clear when the next intake will be.

Department figures provided to 9news.com.au show there are now more than 73,100 outstanding applications for contributory parent visas and contributory aged parent visas.

At the same time, there are 48,000 applications for non-contributory parent and non-contributory aged parent visas waiting to be processed.

Under Australia's 2021-2022 Migration Program, 4500 parent visas – both contributory and non-contributory – were allocated.

Escalating wait times for family and partner visas were the subject of a Senate inquiry last year.

The inquiry's final report, released in April this year, recommended that the Department of Home Affairs develop a "long-term strategy to update its system for the processing of visas" as a "matter of urgency".

Immigration Minister Andrew Giles said the new Labor government was looking at how it could address the lengthy visa processing times but warned "it can't happen overnight".

"We're considering all options to allocate resources to dealing with the visa backlog," he said.

"People reallocated to dealing with the visa applications on hand need to be trained and skilled before they can go about this important work."

'A moral obligation'

Mateja Rautner is a former lecturer in migration law at the Australian National University and the director and principal migration agent at Migration Plus.

Rautner said the decades-long wait for non-contributory parent visas meant the declining health of applicants often became a big issue.

"We've seen cases of parents who are 80-90 years old who have gotten cancer, so then they get a refusal," she said.

"Then we have to appeal the decision and go to the minister asking for mercy.

"Most of them get the visa at the end of the day, they wouldn't be put on a plane and deported.

"But the human costs for the applicants and also the cost on the system dealing with these cases is enormous. It's just a waste of resources.

"If we provided this pathway, then we really have a moral obligation to allow people to settle properly here."

Contact reporter Emily McPherson at em********@******om.au.

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Spymaster's 'unusual' remark on Putin's health

2022-07-22 FreeNews

CIA director Bill Burns gave an unusually candid assessment this week, when he told attendees at the Aspen Institute's annual security conference that Russian President Vladimir Putin is "entirely too healthy".

Burns was careful to qualify apparently tongue-in-cheek remarks, saying they didn't constitute "a formal intelligence judgment."

But asked directly if Putin was unhealthy or unstable, he said: "There are lots of rumours about President Putin's health and as far as we can tell, he's entirely too healthy".

Russian President Vladimir Putin was rumoured to formally declare war on Ukraine on May 9.

So what are we to make of speculation about Putin's health? These rumours are nothing new.

His body language, speech and gait have all been relentlessly scrutinised. And every time Putin disappears from public view for a few days — or even makes a slight misstep, such as he did recently after touching down in Tehran — it can set off a round of intense, tabloid-style speculation about his physical wellbeing.

That's the nature of Putinism, a sort of post-modern dictatorship built around one man. The Kremlin has worked hard to create an aura around Putin as the country's sole problem-solver: He hosts an annual call-in show where he literally takes on the role of pothole-fixer-in-chief.

And over the course of two decades, he has consolidated power, building a system that is driven by the whims and fixations of one person (obvious case in point: the invasion of Ukraine).

The Kremlin routinely ridicules any speculation about Putin's health; on Thursday, spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin felt "fine" and in "good health" before describing speculation to the contrary as "nothing but hoaxes."

Dmitry Peskov

But Burns' statement, even if made in jest, perhaps tells us a lot more about Western policymakers than it does about Putin's fitness.

For starters, it reflects a strong element of wishful thinking when it comes to the Kremlin leader. It suggests that the most worrying international crises might simply evaporate if one person — Putin — disappears from the world scene.

And that's a potential misreading of Russia. To be sure, the decision to invade Ukraine came down to one person: The Russian president, who seems to be driven by his own warped reading of history and a dose of imperial ambition.

And Russia's confrontation with the West has been driven for years by the personal grievances of a person who famously lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But it's naive to hope that Putinism might not live on without Putin.

Nearly half a year after the invasion, Putin's heavy battlefield losses have not sparked, say, widespread draft resistance.

The Russian population — with the exception of thousands who have been arrested in anti-war protests — has more or less passively accepted the economic pain of new sanctions imposed on their country.

Putin's ratings, if the findings of state-run pollster WCIOM are to be believed, have actually gone up since the February 24 invasion.

The CIA director's remarks, in context, reflect how challenging it is to understand Putin, someone whose decision-making processes are opaque to the outside world.

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Old rescue dog given new lease on life as companion to the elderly

2022-07-22 FreeNews

He may be named after the Greek god of thunder, but Zeus the rescue dog is really more like Cupid with a bow than his more noisy namesake, at least within the surrounds of Cameron Park Care Community in Newcastle.

Zeus arrived at Cameron Park a few months ago, after several failed attempts at rehoming, and an extended stay with Dog Rescue Newcastle.

"He was an escape artist," says Dog Rescue Newcastle volunteer Bec Lee.