What does the Department and a strip club have in common?

26 Nov What does the Department and a strip club have in common?

Gone are the days you can strip tease your Case Officer, you need to go the full monty!

Yep, you read that right. As shocking as it sounds, it’s the most brilliant analogy there is.

Gone are the days where you can submit an application to the Immigration Department and hope they ask for more questions.

With mounting political pressures, tougher deadlines, and general increase of applications into the never-ending pipeline, Case Officers are rarely asking for clarification or more evidence to be provided on applications. If it is incomplete or unclear, the applicant is at fault and most certain runs the risk of refusal without further opportunity to discuss with the Case Officer. Periodic newsletters from the Department to migration agents reiterates this in every recent edition.

In the past, migration agents and lawyers may have deliberately cut corners in the drafting process by leaving out information that was previously considered ‘subsidiary’ to the success of a case, or perhaps was done on mutual agreement with the client to cut professional fee’s. Or perhaps an applicant chose not to use an agent or lawyer to assist in the process and many have lodged an underdone application without their knowledge. Either way, applications that could previous have been ‘passable’ or had the opportunity for further questioning are becoming less and less. Whether this is so that the Department can reduce processing times by simply approving and refusing without further delay is not my place to confirm, but I can confirm that it is a trend more and more common.

This leads me back to my original point – don’t give the case officer a peak and play hard to get hoping they come back for more, you’ve got to bare all and give them everything you’ve got.

Instant refusals without question certainly doesn’t occur with all types of migration lodgements though, with some aspects such as some types of business visas getting approved with in-depth discussion with the decision maker. However these visa streams have much lower numbers than that of the student, employer sponsor, and family visa areas.

So what do you think? Should the Department spend time and care with every application, deliberating and consulting with the applicant or agent to ensure it gets over the line? Or should the Department continue this trend in an effort to drastically reduce the current ridiculous processing times with it’s simple “unclear or incomplete = refusal” approach? No matter what your opinion, it’s a current trend everyone needs to be mindful of.

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