You may have just received a letter which is called a “Notice of Intention to Consider Cancellation” of your visa. Alternatively, you might be one step further in the process, and you might have received a “Notice of Cancellation” together with a “Decision Record” which outlines the reasons for cancellation.
Australian visas are all subject to conditions which visa holders must comply with. If you breach any of those conditions, the visa may be cancelled. In most cases, if there are grounds for cancellation, the Immigration Department can decide if they will cancel your visa, or if they let you keep your visa despite breaching a visa condition.
In most cases, the first step is that you receive a letter called “Notice of Intention to Consider Cancellation”. Here is what this letter is about:
We have posted a number of videos on our YouTube channel about visa cancellations. Here is an example in which Oszkar Denes, Immigration Lawyer, explains some strategies which you might consider adopting in order to stop the cancellation process.
If Immigration has decided to cancel your visa, this does not necessarily mean that you don’t have any options. What is available in your case depends on the grounds of cancellation, and also on your objectives.
Once your visa has been cancelled, you no longer hold a visa. This is important because in Australia, everyone who does not have Australian citizenship must hold a valid visa. If they don’t, they can be held in Immigration Detention.
So the first issue to consider is to get you a visa to prevent Immigration from detaining you. There are a number of possibilities at this point:
There are additional consequences of a visa cancellation. Two of the most important are: you are unlikely to be able to apply for a new visa in Australia (there are some exceptions). Further, Public Interest Criteria (PIC) 4013 will likely apply to you when you apply for a visa in the future. If PIC 4013 applies to you, this would prevent you from applying for certain visas for 3 years.
The first thing you need to remember is that there are strict time limits to lodge your appeal. The applicable time limit depends on why your visa was cancelled. Please read the cancellation decision very carefully because the time limit is set out there.
Secondly, the appeals process varies as well: