Better news as you say.

I organised the recent meeting with DIAC in London, on behalf of the members of the Poms in Oz forum, and I attended it myself, too.

I agree with what John Adams has said, that State nominations will help to minimise delays.

However DIAC’s message of 1st December to the MIA is very cautiously worded, which should not be forgotten. The MIA were told as follows:

“The Department is processing applications according to Ministerial Direction No. 42 – Order of consideration – certain Skilled Migration visas. The Department anticipates that a small number of State sponsored non-CSL applications will be finalised this program year. Finalisations will focus on applications where health and character checks have been requested by the case officer.”

As yet, although we are beginning to see sc 176 visas being granted, I haven’t seen an instance of a sc 475 grant as yet and nobody seems to have reported grants of sc 886 or 487 visas either.

I don’t think the pattern is clear yet and so far there has been no public announcement on the DIAC website.

DIAC have said that they will find out how many of the 108,100 skilled visas have been granted as at 30th November 2009. They promised to give us this figure. Once we have that, better guesses will become possible, I hope.

Best wishes

Gill