My name is Mariana, I came to Australia on a student visa from Spain in 2010 and now I am a permanent resident of Australia married to an Australian citizen and we have a four years old daughter.
I am employed as a Finance Manager in a commercial and industrial real estate firm and my husband is a solicitor at the Director of Public Prosecutions NSW.
When we applied for the Contributory Parent (subclass 143) visa the estimated processing time quoted by the Department was 24-36 months. We submitted the application on 9 August 2018. Based on current information and processing delays, the application won’t be processed for at least another 5 years. To highlight this further:
According to the FA-201000222-R1-document-released document, which I accessed on the “GM Parents” website, there are 29,815 applications ahead of my mother’s application.
As the cap for new 143 visas granted per year was reduced to 4,500, it is likely my mother’s application could take up to 7 years from today, which would be about 10 years in total. This is a far cry from the 24-36 months.
If the waiting time for the granting of the visa is anything like that of the processing time, there is a very real and terribly distressing possibility that my mother would no longer be around.
Our daughter is missing out on a very special relationship with her grandmother. The waiting times are outrageous. I cannot understand why a modern democracy like Australia takes so long to process these applications. In the meantime, families are kept apart, and families can disintegrate, because of this issue.
We paid an application fee of $3,885.00. Of course, nothing has been done for our money yet. We assume it sits in general revenue gaining interest. However, the financial cost, at this stage, is not the biggest issue.
The real cost is borne through hope and expectation. The real cost is our daughter not being able to build a strong bond and relationship with her grandmother. The real cost is a human one.
Nonetheless, the future financial cost, assuming the visa is granted, is not trivial by any means. It will be about $65-70,000.00. We thought this would guarantee a quicker processing time. Unfortunately, this has not been the case.
Ultimately, the financial cost would be outweighed by the timely processing and granting of the visa. The whole point is to have my mother here with us. If the financial cost was an issue, we would not have made the application. It just puts a bad taste in the mouth when nothing is being done for our money.