CAT5 is going to process

Dear friends,
i come to know that from other forum the CAT5 applications are going to process very soon

Thanks for original poster

At the meeting with David Wilden at Australia House today, we were told as follows:

All the applications in hand from people in Categories 1 - 4 as listed in the FAQ of 23rd September 2009 are now under control.

DIAC estimate that there are about 3,500 applications in Category 5 - that is, State sponsored but the main applicant's occupation is not on the CSL. Mr Wilden has been told that DIAC are now in a position to make a start on processing the Cat 5 applications.



Mr Wilden said as follows:

* Roughly 3,500 is the number of actual visa applications, not the number of people involved. (I checked this with him specifically and he was definite about it.)
* They will start to process the Cat 5s according to the dates when the visa applications were lodged and they will deal with the oldest applications first.
* They will make no distinctions between the different visa subclasses - first come, first served means what it implies in a situation where the occupation is not on the CSL but the applicant does have State sponsorship.
* There is no foundation to the rumour that tradies may be excluded from Cat 5 processing - the tradies are to be treated identically to people whose occupations are in ASCO Groups 1-3.

Mr WIlden stressed that he cannot say how long it will take to clear the backlog of about 3,500 Cat 5 applications. As & when they receive further applications from people with greater claim to priority, the applications with greater priority will be dealt with first.

That they can't say how long it will take to clear the 3,500 or so Cat 5 applications is reasonable enough. Mr Wilden promised to find out how many of the 108,100 skilled PR & Provisional visas for 2009/10 have been granted as at 30th November 2009 and he said he will let us know as soon as he knows. Once we have that figure it will probably be possible to start making reasonably sensible guesses.



Thanks to all
Ritu