Tribunal: Member W Banfield
The Department of Home Affairs (the Department) cancelled the applicant’s student visa. The applicant applied to the AAT for a review of the decision. The AAT affirmed the decision to cancel the applicant’s Subclass 500 (Student) visa.
The applicant, a citizen of Taiwan, had been in Australia since 2014 on either working holiday or student visas.
Under Australian migration law,[1] the Department has discretion to cancel a visa if a visa holder gives incorrect information[2]. Incorrect answers provided in connection with a previous visa held by a person may also be grounds for cancellation of a person’s current visa[3]. In one of his working holiday visa applications, the applicant claimed he had earlier worked on a regional farm for three months. However, the Department received information from the owner of the farm advising that the employment claim was false.
The applicant claimed that the employer’s lack of knowledge of his work was because he had dealt with a third-party agent. The AAT did not find this credible and the applicant was unable to provide any independent evidence of his employment, either by way of electronic records or paperwork, claiming it had been lost after moving.
The AAT had to decide whether there were grounds for cancelling the visa and, if so, whether the visa should be cancelled.
The Tribunal noted that the previous visa would not have been granted if the applicant had correctly answered ‘no’ to the question about whether he completed regional work.
The Tribunal found that the applicant had provided incorrect answers in their visa application and further, having weighed the evidence and considered all the relevant circumstances, concluded that the visa should be cancelled. [4]
Read the full decision.