Over 1,500 Deaths Due to Australian Parent Visa Processing Delays

1,536 Deaths Over 21 Months

According to documents submitted by the Australian Department of Home Affairs to a Senate hearing last month, 1,536 parent visa applicants died without receiving their visas during the 21-month period from July 1, 2024 to March 31, 2026.

As of the end of the 2024-25 financial year, over 157,000 people are waiting for parent visas. The annual allocation for this financial year was reduced from 8,500 to 7,060 cases.

Costs and Processing Times

Non-contributory parent visas cost less than $9,000 but currently have an estimated processing wait time of 33 years.

Contributory parent visas cost close to $50,000 per case but have a processing time of approximately 15 years.

Applicants' Situations

Ji Tu, a surgical trainee in Sydney, has been waiting over three years since his parents in China applied for contributory parent visas. At the current processing rate, they are expected to be processed in 2038. By then, his eldest child will be 15 years old.

Tu's parents, currently 57 and 67, are in Australia on temporary visas but must leave the country for 6 months every 18 months.

Engineer Ruby Liu has been waiting 7 years for her 69-year-old mother's contributory visa application. Her father died in a traffic accident in 2019, five months after the couple applied for visas from China.

Liu's mother lived in Australia on a temporary visa but returned to China in February this year when her visa expired.

Policy Change Concerns

The Labor government postponed the announcement of immigration policy reforms this week, but is expected to introduce new regulations to reduce net overseas migration.

According to ABC reporting, the reforms will include a ban on spouses, children, and parents of Australian citizens from entering as tourists and then applying for visas domestically.

Navjot Singh Kailay, who has worked as a migration agent in Melbourne for nearly 10 years, said that some of his clients' parents have died while waiting for permanent residency.

Former Deputy Secretary of Immigration Abul Rizvi assessed Australia's parent visa policy as "the harshest among comparable countries on the planet."

A 2023 expert review report of Australia's immigration system noted that wait times of 30 to 50 years "effectively reduce the probability of successful migration to zero" given applicants' ages, and pointed out that "offering visa application opportunities that will not be realized is cruel and unnecessary."