Migration Help
25th January 2010, 01:24 AM
ANDRA JACKSON
January 25, 2010
Edward Joseph must return to Sri Lanka after living in Australia and caring for his widowed mother Irene for 14 years.
AT 92, a frail Irene Joseph is suddenly facing life on her own, without her devoted son who has cared for her for the past 14 years.
Mrs Joseph, a permanent Australian resident, has the choice of going into a nursing home or returning to war-ravaged Sri Lanka after the Immigration Department set a deadline of three weeks for her son and carer, Edward, 68, to leave Australia or be deported.
The department is pressing ahead with forcing Mr Joseph back to Sri Lanka after its intervention unit refused to pass on an appeal to the minister, Senator Chris Evans, for a reprieve.
Sri Lankan-born Mr Joseph has held a bridging visa while applying for asylum, but was rejected after exhausting all avenues of appeal.
His mother migrated to Australia in 1979 with her late husband and they became permanent residents.
Migration agent Murray Gerkens, a former head of the Refugee Review Tribunal, said an oversight by department officials had led to the current predicament.
This allegedly occurred when Mrs Joseph, who had another son previously living in Queensland who is now overseas, was wrongly put on an aged-relative bridging visa in 1981 after returning from a stay in Sri Lanka.
''For all this time, she could have walked straight into Immigration and been made permanent because she was a previous permanent resident. It wasn't as though she kept it secret. You can't say it is a mistake, but they should have known. It is part of their records,'' he said.
After an article in The Age last month, her permanent visa was restored. It would have entitled her to apply to have her son granted a carer's visa to reside in Australia and to look after her at the time he fled Sri Lanka's conflict in 1995. This was the basis of a new application to Senator Evans that Mr Gerkens filed 10 days ago to grant Mr Joseph a carer's visa retrospectively. ''The minister can intervene if he thinks it is in Australia's public interest not to send a 92-year-old lady in the twilight of her life back to Sri Lanka, which is a land in turmoil,'' he said.
Psychologist Mary Harvey, who has treated Mr Joseph, said his forced departure was ''causing a great deal of anxiety and distress and despair and some of that is at the thought of being separated from his mother''.
Mr Joseph also has concerns for his safety if returned to Sri Lanka where The Age's story last month was published in the local press.
His mother ''is very distressed, crying a lot. She doesn't want to go back to Sri Lanka but she doesn't want to live here without Edward,'' Ms Harvey said.
If she were to be put in a nursing home, ''I think her condition would deteriorate. We had some evidence of that last year when she had to go into rehabilitation when she had a fall.''
A department spokesman said Mr Joseph's latest appeal was not passed on to the minister because the intervention unit considered ''it did not contain any new information that indicated a significant change in his circumstances that raised substantive issues not previously considered''.
He said Mr Joseph had been given ''adequate time'' to get his affairs in order and was expected to leave promptly.
SOURCE (http://www.theage.com.au/national/man-forced-to-leave-after-14-years-caring-for-mother-20100124-msl1.html)
MH
January 25, 2010
Edward Joseph must return to Sri Lanka after living in Australia and caring for his widowed mother Irene for 14 years.
AT 92, a frail Irene Joseph is suddenly facing life on her own, without her devoted son who has cared for her for the past 14 years.
Mrs Joseph, a permanent Australian resident, has the choice of going into a nursing home or returning to war-ravaged Sri Lanka after the Immigration Department set a deadline of three weeks for her son and carer, Edward, 68, to leave Australia or be deported.
The department is pressing ahead with forcing Mr Joseph back to Sri Lanka after its intervention unit refused to pass on an appeal to the minister, Senator Chris Evans, for a reprieve.
Sri Lankan-born Mr Joseph has held a bridging visa while applying for asylum, but was rejected after exhausting all avenues of appeal.
His mother migrated to Australia in 1979 with her late husband and they became permanent residents.
Migration agent Murray Gerkens, a former head of the Refugee Review Tribunal, said an oversight by department officials had led to the current predicament.
This allegedly occurred when Mrs Joseph, who had another son previously living in Queensland who is now overseas, was wrongly put on an aged-relative bridging visa in 1981 after returning from a stay in Sri Lanka.
''For all this time, she could have walked straight into Immigration and been made permanent because she was a previous permanent resident. It wasn't as though she kept it secret. You can't say it is a mistake, but they should have known. It is part of their records,'' he said.
After an article in The Age last month, her permanent visa was restored. It would have entitled her to apply to have her son granted a carer's visa to reside in Australia and to look after her at the time he fled Sri Lanka's conflict in 1995. This was the basis of a new application to Senator Evans that Mr Gerkens filed 10 days ago to grant Mr Joseph a carer's visa retrospectively. ''The minister can intervene if he thinks it is in Australia's public interest not to send a 92-year-old lady in the twilight of her life back to Sri Lanka, which is a land in turmoil,'' he said.
Psychologist Mary Harvey, who has treated Mr Joseph, said his forced departure was ''causing a great deal of anxiety and distress and despair and some of that is at the thought of being separated from his mother''.
Mr Joseph also has concerns for his safety if returned to Sri Lanka where The Age's story last month was published in the local press.
His mother ''is very distressed, crying a lot. She doesn't want to go back to Sri Lanka but she doesn't want to live here without Edward,'' Ms Harvey said.
If she were to be put in a nursing home, ''I think her condition would deteriorate. We had some evidence of that last year when she had to go into rehabilitation when she had a fall.''
A department spokesman said Mr Joseph's latest appeal was not passed on to the minister because the intervention unit considered ''it did not contain any new information that indicated a significant change in his circumstances that raised substantive issues not previously considered''.
He said Mr Joseph had been given ''adequate time'' to get his affairs in order and was expected to leave promptly.
SOURCE (http://www.theage.com.au/national/man-forced-to-leave-after-14-years-caring-for-mother-20100124-msl1.html)
MH