Lily Lumintang was working at her office in Melbourne last Thursday, reading an ABC story published that morning about her family’s appeal for permanent residency, when her phone rang.

It was her lawyer Andrew Woo, calling with long awaited good news. The Assistant Minister for Immigration, Matt Thistlethwaite, had instructed the Department of Home Affairs to grant her family of four a residency visa.

For Lumintang, the decision brings to an end years of anxiety about the future, and more than a decade of separation from her disabled eldest son, 14-year-old Jonathan, who has cerebral palsy and is currently in Indonesia.

“[I feel] very relieved, as if a massive rock on my shoulder has been removed,” Lumintang said.

“[Now] we know that we can start turning our future plans into reality for our family, for our sons.”

Editor’s note: The ABC story about the family’s plight was reported our Citizen reporter, Kristian Oka Prasetyadi, a journalism student at the University of Melbourne.

Born in mid-2010 in Melbourne, when he was 18 months old Jonathan was taken back home to Surabaya in East Java – 45 minutes flight west of Bali – to live with his grandparents. In 2019, his parents applied for a permanent residency visa as they sought to reunite their family in Australia, but this was rejected in 2021 in due to Jonathan’s disability. Their application for citizenship for Jonathan was also denied.

The Administrative Appeals Tribunal – now Administrative Review Tribunal – maintained that decision, estimating that Jonathan’s health and educational needs would cost $2.51 million over 10 years. This figure greatly exceeds the migration health requirement that applicants don’t have a condition that could require significant care. The threshold at the time was $51,000 over a decade.

Home Affairs states on its website that the significant cost threshold is the “underpinning policy to ‘contain public expenditure on health care and community services’”. In effect, this means that people with disabilities like Jonathan are barred from moving to Australia.

Having exhausted all available avenues and almost $4,000 for the legal processes, parents Lily Lumintang and Martin Cahyo and their three-year-old Raphael had been facing possible deportation until the assistant minister, Thistlethwaite, intervened by “exercising the public interest power” in Jonathan’s case, replacing the tribunal’s verdict “with a more favourable decision”, as stated in their visa grant letters.

“Our prayer was answered through the work of the minister and other parties who were involved,” Lumintang said.

“It really is a miracle.”

This means no more video calls to cure her longing, nor the feeling of helplessness due to her physical absence in Jonathan’s upbringing. “We won’t be separated anymore,” said Lily, who works as a contract administrator at a local company. “We can use our time to focus on him.”

Woo, Lumintang’s lawyer, was quoted by the ABC as saying that the ministerial intervention brought him “a huge sense of relief […] knowing that Lily’s family can finally move forward as a family.”

A Home Affairs spokesperson said it does not comment on individual cases for privacy reasons, adding that the minister’s choice to intervene depends on what he personally determines as “in the public interest”.

In December 2024, I visited Jonathan at the home in Surabaya where he is being cared for. He was watching car racing on the television, waving his hand in excitement. He has little mobility due to weak leg muscles and struggles to speak.

Jonathan is looked after full time by a carer, Ayung Tarunawati, paid for by Lumintang and Cahyo. She shares a bedroom with Jonathan and his 83-year-old paternal grandmother, Estephine Kalalo, at their house in Central Surabaya’s dense neighbourhood of Keputeran.

“If I’m not around all the time with Jonathan, there would be chaos,” said Ayung.

Jonathan’s father, Cahyo, left this neighbourhood in 2008 to work on farms near Melbourne. Lumintang was an old friend, and the pair began a relationship when she arrived to study accounting.

After their son was born with cerebral palsy, Cahyo took Jonathan back to Surabaya in early 2012 so they could get support from his extended family network, and remained with him there until 2017.

Returning to work in Melbourne, the plan was that Jonathan would follow. However, Australian migration laws said otherwise, and they had been separated ever since.

In the meantime, despite his parents’ long-distance efforts to ensure maintain his quality of care, his mobility deteriorated. His parents hope his condition will improve with their care, and with his exposure to a society with more inclusive infrastructure, policies and attitudes to disability.

Too many children like Jonathan continue to be locked out of Australia by migration rules, according to Jan Gothard, a Perth-based immigration lawyer who co-founded the campaign group Welcoming Disability.

The Migration Act is exempt from the Disability Discrimination Act. Gothard argues that this means the Department of Home Affairs “can discriminate against people with disability, and that’s perfectly legal”. This is despite Australia being a signatory to the national and international commitment of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability.

“It’s a denial of human rights and It’s not in step with the way that the community in Australia thinks these days,” said Gothard.

A Home Affairs spokesperson stated that the migration law and regulations have been reformed. First, in mid-2024, the significant cost threshold increased from $51,000 to $86,000 over 10 years after “a substantive review of the Migration Health Requirement”, with a commitment to review it once every two years.

Second, an amendment to the Migration Regulations 1994 allows child visa applicants to be granted an automatic health waiver if they are born and have lived at least half their lives in Australia. “Living with a disability or health condition does not automatically prevent visa being granted,” the spokesperson said.

But Gothard said the new figure wasn’t good enough. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, in 2021-2022 the government’s average expenditure on a person’s health services was $9,365 a year, or $93,650 a decade. That figure is higher than the $86,000 cap over 10 years imposed against disabled migrants.

“How can a cost be significant when it’s less than the average cost? I don’t get that,” Gothard asked.

She argues the cost threshold “should be radically increased” up to a level similar to that of New Zealand, where the cap is $NZ81,000 over five years. In 2022, Canada boosted its ceiling to three times the average Canadian per capita cost of health and social services.

Gothard also urged the federal government to give an automatic health waiver for all children born in Australia, for which Welcoming Disability has long been campaigning.

Dr Piers Gooding, an associate professor at La Trobe University’s Law School, said the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities had advised Australia to rid the Migration Act of the exemption from the Disability Discrimination Act to ensure no one faces discrimination in the process of migrating or obtaining an asylum.

However, the federal government continues settling migration requests on a case-by-case basis through ministerial intervention. According to a document provided by Home Affairs, 268 families requested a ministerial intervention in 2021, followed by 563 in 2023. How many were disability-related is not disclosed.

Having survived the lengthy and costly test to obtain residency, Lily Lumintang has called on the federal government to amend its migration law and regulations thoroughly.

Disabled people have potential to offer to the country’s economy and society to which they migrate, she argues, adding that unlike an English proficiency test, disability is something that a person cannot control.

“I wish to see no more discrimination, especially in financial terms, against children with disability,” she said.