My brother and I are the only kids of our parents. I came to Australia in 2010. My brother was already here and I was working in the USA. As a family, we made a decision that I could permanently move to Australia based on a skilled visa and took it as an opportunity to bring family together. Since then me and my brother have lived together. Back in 2016, on 6 Oct 2016, we made a decision to apply for a parent contributory 143 visa. It made sense to apply then as we thought we could afford it as a family. The waiting period for this visa was 18-24 months at that time.
Considering that time we started planning the move. As a part of that plan, my brother and I built the houses next to each other so that we can support our parents’ needs together. We were almost certain to get it in 2018-2019. As if you see its way before the pandemic, but since then the waiting period kept on increasing. From 12-18 months it went up to 3 to 3.5 years, then to 60 months and currently it shows 65 months on the website. One thing it kept on growing and secondly calculating my waiting period, it’s already been 67 months and I haven’t heard back any movement in the process.
Impacts: I could not list them all here but here are a few which came straight to mind.
1. I can’t tell you how much as a family we were impacted during the pandemic. No one could travel during that time and I understand the reason for that and many of us have gone through that, but at least give some respect to what families have been through? Every day you hear news about someone losing a loved one due to a pandemic and the person can’t travel to pay respect to the last ceremonies.
2. With these changing times, there is no way we can plan the move. Moving to a country and organising that much money takes months of planning and we had to put that on hold many times.
3. We had a visitor visa for our parents, they are currently with us but after they left Australia, they don’t have any visa to come back. With this limbo what should we do whether to wait to get PR or get another visitor visa?
4. Communication and status check has been so poor that, many times when I called home affairs and tried to check on status, they said no one has visibility of the status of individual files.
Moreover, like other visa classes you can even pull them in an immi account to check the status and see if there is something missing.