While Australia might have a lot of fraudulent immigration, they harass the normal tourists under the pretense of preventing fraudulent immigration.

This happened some years ago, so perhaps the system has been improved meanwhile, but I strongly doubt it.

At that time, I was living in an European country, but I was working for a subsidiary of an Australian company. There was a reciprocal agreement with Australia that visas must not be required for visiting the other country.

In Europe, the agreement was observed, so any of our Australian colleagues could visit the local subsidiary at any time, no questions asked.

However, there was a moment when the Australian headquarters decided that a team from the European subsidiary must come in a visit to them, for an important meeting where some future strategies had to be decided.

We expected that the travel to Australia would be as easy as the reverse travel for the Australians, but no, while Australia could not demand a visa, which would have been illegal, they had replaced the visa requirement with a requirement for some kind of "electronic" permit, whose name I do not remember, which was nothing else but a visa with another name, because without it you would have been denied entry in Australia.

To obtain the Australian permit one had to provide a really ridiculous amount of personal information about yourself and about a lot of family relatives (not only spouse, parents and siblings, but even grandparents), certainly at least as much as when applying for some security clearance of the highest level. I have traveled through many countries, and even those that require visas do not request such an amount of information. You do not need to provide such information even when going to Israel, where they have reasons to be more careful.

The most annoying was that they were not satisfied with providing a bank account where you held an amount of money greater than would be required for all your travel and stay in Australia. They also required for that bank account a detailed lists with all the transactions done with that bank account for the past three months.

Initially we have provided the list of banking transactions with only the amounts of money that had been transferred, but that was not good enough, they wanted for each transaction the complete information, like the invoice that has been paid and for whom. I could understand if they had required only the source of the money that credited the account, to determine who was paying for the travel to Australia, but a complete list of transactions, including everything that you have bought, was an abusive request.

If we had known in advance the Australian system, we would have created three months earlier a bank account with the only purpose of storing money for the Australian visit, which would have had an empty list of transactions. As it was, because this was a business trip, the account with money for the trip was the company account. Disclosing all the transactions from the company account could potentially disclose some confidential information for competitors and it would also disclose to the employees going in that trip information considered confidential by the company, i.e. the salaries of all employees.

Due to the complications created by the need to provide all the information requested by the Australian authorities, the process for completing the applications for the permit was very long. Even after providing all the required information, on-line to some immigration offices located in Tasmania, the processing of the applications took a few months. Because it was delayed so much, eventually the Australian headquarters has cancelled the visit to Australia and they have organized a meeting in Europe, where they did not fear that the Australians are illegal immigrants.

Our case was certainly not a singular one, because at the same time there was in the news a case when there had been an important meeting of some international organization, which happened to be organized in that year in Australia, and the representatives of some countries could not reach the meeting because they had received Australian visas much too late, even if they had been requested early enough and there was no doubt that they had a valid reason to come to Australia.