Friday, August 30, 2013

Rolling my eyes over SG visa renewal

Meanwhile, renewed my Oz PR yesterday and bloody hell another A$300 down the drain. Apparently labor party or some smart alex, in their attempt to cut down immigrants, they changed the law and now even Australian's spouse need to fulfil the 2 year stay in Oz now before I can get my annual 5 year renewal. So now I have to renew on a yearly basis. What an "innovative" way to fund more money for the Oz govt. Now prob somewhere down the road, we need to consider spending 2 years in Oz so that I can rid myself of this annual PR renewal process.

Sg immigration isnt faring any better.
I know with all the outcry against huge influx of PR etc, the govt has rightly so implemented a tighter control on approving PRs. That obviously has an impact on my man as well. What normally takes a month application became a 4 month plus and still waiting period. My SG good friend's Ozzie husband, married for 12 years, living in Singapore, is into his 6 month wait and still waiting....

You see, because we are working and residing in HK, it becomes a pure "he is my spouse" hence we need the PR thing. Same goes for my Oz PR. Considering we dont own any HDB or depriving anyone of housing or jobs or medical care or investing in anything in Sg to push up prices for my fellow citizens, I dont see what the issue is. In fact, in my humble opinion, we had the stupidest questions posed to him. (though my man doesnt realise how lowly I thought of the question posed. He was more like "Did they think we are in fraud marriage or what?? Like as if I need Sg PR to travel anywhere???)

You see, we moved out of Singapore before we got married, and after marriage, we still didnt go back to SG and moved from Hk to Oz to HK instead. That's like more than half a decade ago and his PR was already renewed once during this period.

Suddenly this time round, an "overzealous" (I really dont want to insult him in public domain) civil service staff refused to approve his application because his query was "Why isnt your SG ID sharing the same address?"

If he had asked me that in person, I would have got up, smacked his head and tell him he is a fucking moron.

However instead, I replied calmly in an Email to our civil service staff

"Dear Sir,

If you noticed, my husband was working in Singapore before I met him. He already had his SG PR ID, hence the address on his PR ID. SO if I had not met him then, he obviously will not be sharing the same address.

Then BEFORE we got married, we moved overseas for work reasons. Obviously MINE was retained as my family's address, while he has no valid sg address to update his ID with since we are dating, NOT married. You dont put your gf's address on your ID when you are dating right? Only family members right?

After we got married, we continued to LIVE OVERSEAS and hence still do not have a joint SG address. Of course, I had personally visited our DEAR NEIGHBORHOOD POLIC POST IN BEDOK and asked to update our NRIC with our overseas address, ONLY to be advised by our efficient SPF that our Singapore ID cannot have overseas address.  So we can just retain what we have. So dear sir, can u kindly explain to me again where did we go wrong?

Meanwhile, if necessary, I am happy to send you a whole A4 box full of joint bank accounts, and bill payments stating our same address starting from 2004 to present 2013, with every month to date if you are interested to verify that we have been living together, if and only if, that is where your concern is."

Obviously, what we received was 2 weeks of pure silence with NO acknowledgements.
Then out of the blue, we received a letter form immigration with 2 ID stickers with our current HK address. Oh so, NOW we are able to paste overseas address on our ID. Did the law changed or did our friendly SPF officer told me the wrong thing?

Oh well.
At least its something we can now put it behind us, for another 5 years to come.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

is your husband a caucasian from down under ?

Nomad said...

Nope. Chinese ethnic.