The long wait to bring mum and dad to Australia

When Roli Vatss lodged an aged parent visa for her mother and father in January 2021, she was doing the ordinary thing a daughter does. Dr Vatss had come to Australia from India in 2014 and built a life as a doctor in Wollongong, and she wanted her parents near her as they grew older. Her father, already about 70, was the main applicant. Then the family waited. In October 2023, before any decision came, her father died. The answer finally arrived in May 2026, and it was a refusal. “We were waiting for a visa. Instead, we received a refusal. The decision came as a complete shock,” she told SBS Punjabi. If her appeal fails and her mother has to leave, she said, the family “would seriously consider leaving Australia with her.”

A queue measured in decades

Dr Vatss is one of a very large crowd.

The department does not hide the length of the wait. Its own processing page, last updated on 9 July 2026, tells newly applying families that a contributory parent visa now takes about 15 years, while the parent and aged parent visas take about 33 years. As at 31 May 2026, the department was only releasing contributory applications lodged up to November 2018 for final processing. For the non-contributory parent visa it had reached March 2014, and for the aged parent visa, April 2014.

Behind each of those figures is a grandparent who may never see a grandchild grow up, and a daughter weighing whether to leave the country she chose. Australia asks migrants to build their lives here, to work, pay tax and raise children. The parent visa system, as it stands, quietly asks many of them to do all of that without their own mother and father, and to keep waiting in a queue that, for some, will outlast the people standing in it.