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September 28, 2009 – Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship announced changes in its priority processing for skilled visas. The changes concerns is a reshuffle of priority visa processing, meaning that those who were previously quite high up in the priority order, now find themselves near the bottom of the queue. And the apparently sad news is not only affecting the new visa applicants but changes would also affect applications that were already being processed.

As a result many people were shattered to learn that, as well as being bumped down the priority processing list, they may have to wait until 2012 to get their visas finalised!

The popular expat forum Poms in Oz has been inundated with disappointed and irate applicants like PaulTerriMojo who states: “We’re applying for a SS 176 visa which was acknowledged with DIAC on the 8th of September. We were preparing to get police checks and medsdone in the next month or so, now these changes come in! My occupation is not in the CSL, so we’re bumped down 3 places in the queue. We were looking to have a reccie next year. I don’t think that’s going to happen now.”

However individual case officers and migration agents are telling their clients they will only have to wait a few months.

Cartertucker said from the agent that the way processing times are going at Adelaide, we could still get our visa in 3-4 months. Whereas Sam&G said: “What confuses me are the postings of others whose agents suggest it will only take months before people like us start getting their visas processed rather than the 2012 date which Evans states. Why? Why are they saying this? They don’t have insider info otherwise the agents on here would be saying the same thing. To my mind, it must be in order to keep their clients calm and sweet – this news is bad news for everyone agents included. As much as I would love their speculations to be true, I seriously doubt it.”

Overall people are stunned by the news and the speed with which the changes were made, with no prior warning: “We have been affected by the recent changes made. We are a family of four who applied for a 176 WA state sponsored MODL visa. We lodged our application in April and received our state sponsorship in July and was given a Case Officer at the beginning of September, we were instructed to get our police checks and medicals done which we did at a cost of around £975 inc police checks. We had our medicals two days ago on the 22nd September only for the changes to be made the day after! Surely people with case officers should be honoured ? We also have our house on the Market and have started rehoming our pets!! Fingers crossed Maybe common sense will prevail and things won’t be so bad but we will have to wait and see.”– Lazybass.

Source:
embraceaustralia