SaintLouisBlues

"You have to wonder what the world's coming to". I bet they said that when Jack The Ripper was at work in London. The world hasn't changed one little bit.

The bear's favorite phrase in the English language "This time it's different".

I thought having a criminal past was a prerequisite for migration to Australia. Why was he being deported?

This entire thread has served to convince me that using an immigration lawyer to handle all the paperwork all the time is the way I'll continue to go.

Actually none of the Western embassies certify that you have a monthly income of anything at all. They certify that you told them that you have 65K a month, which is not the same thing as having it. Hence an Immigration Officer may ask for further evidence which maybe could be evidence of deposits into a Thai bank account from abroad of the stated amount. Embassy officials I have dealt with are openly contemptuous of the whole process.

To clarify your position you already hold a one-year marriage visa which was issued in KL? True or false?

Your circumstances haven't changed ie. still married? True or false?

You want to renew this visa? True or false?

If all of the above is true then surely it's the same as a retirement visa - you don't get a new visa you get a renewal of your existing visa in Thailand, no need to leave and go through the application process every year???

If it poisons only lesbians my Care Factor is zero.

I care about the majority of gay people who don't have children and have no desire to have children. To return to my original thesis, half a loaf in this case is infinitely better than no loaf at all.

Gay civil partnerships are about (at most) 5% of the population - a minority of gays will ever want such a thing, so I would be inclined to say 2% of the entire population. Within such partnerships a tiny minority will want children. As a gay male myself I feel completely liberated from the notion that children should play any part in my life. So you're focussing on - and let's be wildly generous here - 10% of the minority of 5% of the population who will be gay people in civil partnerships who want children (10% of 2% is my guess!!!). Frankly I don't give a damn about them at all.

By way of backing up my statistics, in the recent Australian census there was a total of 36,000 households that identified they were living in a gay relationship. That's 72,000 gay people out of an adult gay population of roughly 720,000 people (I take the standard one-in-twenty statistic of those who identify as being gay and I'm taking the adult population of Australian as being roughly two-thirds of the total population). There is zero evidence that the entire 36,000 have entered into civil partnerships (let alone the nonsense that is "gay marriage") or that they have children!

Politics is the art of achieving practical objectives not retaining ideological purity, Jingthing

Surely half a loaf is better than no loaf at all (as the character played by Peter Finch in the film about bi-sexuality Sunday Bloody Sunday remarks at the end of the film)? Let's worry about "negotiating away the bits we don't like" once we've actually got something. Babies and bath water is another phrase that comes to mind.

The best books on retiring to Thailand on Kindle that I have found are by someone called Bill Dean and are called How to retire to SE Asia and How to survive retirement in SE Asia, both $5 as I recall

I use Apple TV mirroring my iPad all the time in Australia so I will be bringing them to Thailand soon. From what I can see I need to get some version of SmartDNS onto my router so I can watch UK and Australian programmes. I'll be experimenting with some of those services using their trial versions before I leave Australia so I can work out what works there so it should work here. I've got all the TV apps I need on my iPad - BBC iPlayer, 4OD, all the news services I want, plus ABC iPlayer. My condo has cable Internet - any suggestions on the most effective package?

The visa that you get on entry to Thailand using the APEC card is the equivalent to a 90-day B visa, right? Can it then be used to apply for a retirement visa?