The Green Party has pledged to push ahead with parental visa reform, greatly accelerating and reducing the speed and difficulty of reuniting Australian immigrants with their parents.
According to the SBS, the Green Party said it would limit the waiting time for parents' permanent visa applications to 12 months and process pending parent permanent visa applications within three years, adding up to 97000 applications in that category.
(Richard Di Natale), the leader of the Green Party, told journalist he was shocked that government had left people separated from their loved ones for years, if not decades. "I am from a closely connected Italian immigrant family and I believe nothing is more important than family reunification," he said.
It is understood that the current "contribution category" parents visa fee is 47000 Australian dollars per person, waiting time about 45 months; The "non-contributing" parent visa costs A $6000 per person, but it takes a long time to wait and many immigrant parents have not been able to sign for the rest of their lives. At the current processing rate, all backlog applications will take 30 years to complete.
The Green Party said it would overhaul both visa regimes and revisit the "Family member Test (balance of family test)" rule, which requires parents visa applicants to have half of their children citizen or permanent residents in Australia.
In addition, the Green Party plans to allow humanitarian refugee to apply for family reunion visas by boat, promising to spend A $250 million in the first half and A $12.68 billion over a 10-year period.
Senator Faruzi (Mehreen Faruqi), a Pakistani-born green party, said Australia had previously welcomed immigrants to Australia, but now it is almost impossible for immigrants to bring their parents and families to Australia.
"We want to create a family-friendly visa system, not a system that separates families from one another to another," she said. In my opinion, it is cold-blooded and ruthless to allow immigrants to wait for decades before they can be reunited with their families. "
Before the Greens announced their parental visa policies, Labour and Unionparty had introduced their own policies. In May 2017, the Unionparty announced new parental visa rules, which not only set a limit of 15000 visas per year, but also stipulated that immigrant families could only guarantee one parent of one of the spouses. The rule will come into effect on July 1 this year.
The Labour Party has raised an open-ended quota for parents' visas and allows the immigrant family to serve as a guide for both spouses. The Labour Party also promised to cut the cost of the 3-year and 5-year visas from $5000 and $10,000 to $1250 and $2500, respectively.
