THE NEW PARENT VISA: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Bringing parents from India to live in Australia has always been problematic. The current options take too much time and are too expensive. In this article, we look at the new temporary parent visa and summarise the main rules as they apply to applicants from Australia who wish to bring their parents over from India.

There is yet another parent visa in town; this one actually promises to work in an affordable way for most migrant families that call Australia home.

If you’ve moved here from India any amount of time ago and started a family here, you must know how difficult it is to get your parents to live with you for an extended period of time. The current solution is to use a temporary visiting visa that expires in three to six months, or to apply for a $5935 visa with a 30-year queue, or to apply for a $47,000 visa with a 2-year queue.

Needless to say, none of the options are particularly ideal. However, there is a new temporary parent visa that the immigration authorities will bring into picture from July 2017 that promises to solve this problem. Here are a few advantages of this visa:

• It is a longer term visa, valid for a maximum of five years. The visa will also be valid for renewal after the five-year period is up. Unlike the current system, this visa will sit outside the Australian permanent migration stream, so potential queue lengths are going to be short.
• It will be a more affordable visa. While no price levels have been announced yet, the government has promised that it will be more affordable than current options.
• The catch? Parents who come to live in Australia under this new visa system will not have healthcare of welfare provided to them. Since these two are the biggest drains to the government’s coffers with incoming retirees, not giving these two benefits will make it cheaper for the government. It will, of course, add to your family’s budget if you wish to bring your parents over.
• You need to take private health insurance in your parents’ names before they arrive in the country. In fact, you may need to furnish evidence of private health cover as part of the visa application process.
• The other pre-requisite is that you have to be a biological child to sponsor your parents, and you may also need to pay a bond as part of the application to assure the government that your arriving parents will not be a financial burden on Australia.
• A reasonable proficiency in English may be expected of your parents (so they may have to run through IELTS), and work rights for people who enter through this visa have not yet been decided. That means there is a good chance that your parents will not be able to work once they come here. So if you’re counting on them working to pay off some of the extra expense, don’t count on it just yet.

We will bring you more as and when information becomes available. Stay tuned!