AAT Processing Times

If you’ve had the misfortune of having a visa application refused or cancelled by the Department of Home Affairs, and as a consequence, you’ve lodged and application in the Administrative Appeal Tribunal it’s probably of interest to you how long it would take until there is a hearing for your matter.

The wait time to have your matter heard by the Administrative Appeal Tribunal can be an agonising period of time due to the fact that not knowing the outcome of your visa can create emotional and financial stresses. The length of time that you wait for a hearing depends on the range of different factors

The hearing wait time can depend on the subclass of the visa, the availability of decision makers, and the current case load of the Tribunal. The AAT recently published processing times for decisions made over the last 6 months. According to the statistics, it appears that partner visa decisions take around 483 days on average and decisions related to temporary skills shortage work visa take around 400 days. Most decisions for other subclasses take a similar indicative period of time. However, bridging visa and visitor visa decisions are usually made within 40 and 264 days respectively.

The process of the Administrative Appeal Tribunal is to first allocate your case to a decision-maker before the hearing date can be set. Cases are allocated to members of the tribunal in a priority and date order. Although from time to time, the tribunal can take a strategic and targeted approach and identify specific batches of visas for early review. Specifically, cases that involve immigration detention have historically been given a priority. Other high priority matters include specific protection visas and visa cancellation cases. For instance, protection visa appeals that stemmed from the protection visa caseload in 2016 were given priority by the administrative appeals tribunal.

The number of applications for review lodged with the Tribunal has steeply increasing over the past years as a consequence of the increase in visa refusal and visa cancellations. During the first quarter of 2018 and 2019 financial year over 15,800 new applications were lodged with the Tribunal bringing present number of cases on hand the tribunal to over 60,000. This is a substantial and sharp increase in tribunal processing times especially keeping in mind that 3 years ago the number stood at only 22,000. A number of strategies being implemented by the Tribunal to curb the backlog and improve the processing times. This is causing efficiency improvements and specific changes to the way cases managed.

It is the hope of the whole team at Summit Migration that these changes will have a substantial impact in the near future and the caseload of the tribunal will return back to 2058 levels. If you’re considering lodging an application for review with the tribunal, there are specific and stringent time limitations.

Time is of the essence once you have received a refusal or cancellation. Contact the registered migration agents at Summit Migration today for a full assessment of your prospects for review at the Tribunal. Summit Migration provides free 15-minute general information assistance to all callers. Claim your free telephone consultation today. Call us on (07) 31777609

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