Members of Indian Community in Australia have rekindled their Long Stay Visa for Parents campaign before the upcoming elections.
Almost a year ago, Adelaide residents Arvind Duggal, Parminder Sohal and Davinder Pal Singh started a petition on requesting the Hon. Peter Dutton, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection to introduce a Long Stay Visa for parents.
The petition collected over 21,000* signatures when it was submitted to the Australian parliament. This petition was later referred to the Minister for Immigration for consideration but in April this year, their request was turned down.
The community, which has a following of over 5700 people on their Facebook Page has urged the community members to take this up with the candidates who are fighting elections from their constituency.
“This issue affects a large number of people who have moved to Australia but their parents who are ageing are still living alone in India. The current visa arrangements allow our parents to live with us for 12 months. This is quite expensive and often our parents have nobody to take care of them while they live alone in India. We have therefore decided to involve more people and are requesting the members of the Indian community to raise it with their local political aspirants,” Arvind Duggal told SBS Hindi.
Sudhir Juneja, a resident of Melbourne supports the Long Stay Visa for Parents. He said, “I had to rush to India as my aging mum who’s unwell is unable to visit and stay due to long travel time - there are many cases like these I hear every day. Apart from this, in Australia we have the primitive qualifying rule of balance of family test for parent migration. This rule is a major issue for many families trying to reunite with parents after migration.”
Community leader Jasvinder Sidhu said that grandparents are core-component of Indian families and suggested that the growing Indian migrant community will be relatively stress-free if their parents live with their children here in Australia. “In an Indian family structure, older parents look after kids and parents pursue their professions without being stressed about their kids. It’s a win-win situation for everyone where the family is intact and working couple is adding their bit to the economy,” Sidhu told SBS Hindi.
*(it has reached 25000 signatures now)
