Scottish Green family facing deportation from Australia win battle to stay

February 2012 – Mark Green is wanted for his specialist solar installation skills to take his family from Ayrshire, 40km southwest of Glasgow in Scotland, to a new life in Adelaide, South Australia, 16,000km away.

May 2014 – Mark has to change jobs, just a year away from qualifying for residency after the company shuts down.

August 2014 – History repeats itself and Mark has to find another new employer. The family is paying for all of their medical care since they don’t qualify for Medicare on their visa and also $8,000 a year for their daughter Rebecca’s education at the local public state school.

August 2015 – Mark has to find another new company. His son Jamie had to fly back to Scotland because he couldn’t work in Australia under the terms of the work visa and residency is at least three years away again.

April 2021 – The Green family discovers that the residency application that Mark’s boss promised them was false, without their knowledge. As a result, their visa conditions were breached, meaning they had to leave the country to reapply. They start working to try to overturn the decision and get the visa reverted to the type that would allow them to stay in Australia while they apply. As the application drags on, they realize they will be kicked out of the country and start selling their prized possessions.

June 2022 – They make their first public appeal to the government for clemency, as friends and colleagues plead for an intervention in the same way that the new Labor government saved the Biloela family and allowed them to stay in the country. The family has already spent $150,000 on visa applications and immigration attorneys.

July 2022 – Daily Mail Australia reveals their desperate situation and the story goes global, making headlines in the UK and on British TV.

August 10, 2022 – The family is due to be deported and has a 22:20 flight booked from Adelaide back to the UK, but they have no idea where they will live or work. After local MP Frank Pangallo puts them in touch with a new immigration lawyer, they are convinced to stay and fight at 3:30 p.m. At 7 p.m., just when they should have checked in for their flight, they get a call South Australian Prime Minister Peter Malinauskas telling them they have been granted a reprieve. He persuaded Labor’s immigration minister, Andrew Giles, to give them an extra month to submit their paperwork to stay in the country.

August 22, 2022 – The family has 24 hours to complete some 240 pages of visa paperwork that requires all the travel details of the last three decades, but they are hampered by returning their old passports with details of visas and international movements when they were renewed in early this year.

August 29, 2022 – The minister wants the complete finalized file of the family’s visa application to make his decision.