DIBP announced that changes for the Visa Application Charges (VAC) will take effect in 1 July 2015 and these changes will be will fund investment for improvements to support stronger border and national security initiatives. You can find more details about the changes in VAC here.
They also announced that The Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) and the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (ACBPS) are joining to become one organisation and to make this possible, there will be system outages leading up to 1 July 2015.
These system outages could prevent you from lodging an online application. We will publish advance notice of the outage wherever these are known. You will need to complete your application outside these periods.
We prefer that you lodge your application online through Immiaccount.
There are two planned outages during which you will not be able to complete your online application:
Also, BPAY will not be available as an online payment option from 8am Saturday 27 June to 7am Wednesday 1 July 2015 AEST (GMT +10).
It is your responsibility to complete your online application around these times.
We expect a high volume of online applications during this period. These high volumes could cause delays. You should take this into account when planning to submit your application.
If you are not able to complete an online application, you must send your paper application by post to the processing centre responsible for that application. You will need to give yourself enough time for this to be received by the Department before 1 July.