Once your 'regular' visa expires you go onto a bridging visa which same, you can't really leave the country.
It's expensive as hell too: I think in the end I had a total cost of $7,000, just in application fees. Sounds like immigration is horrible everywhere.
Providing updates to everyone waiting simply wastes time and resources; again, you know roughly how long it's going to take as the estimated times are provided. Hassling the agent on your case is unnecessary.
Regarding leaving and returning Australia - Bridging Visa class Bs are made available if you have good reasons to be leaving and coming back.
I can see this from two sides - my (now ex) wife went through getting temporary then permanent residency in Australia; yes, it was a pain and expensive, but Australia has high standards of living etc, which is why lots of people want to come here. The other side is this - immigration is one of the reasons why there are not enough houses to buy or places to rent, making life difficult for citizens or people who have PR or TR. So if the process of having more immigrants who also require housing is expensive or difficult, I think you'll find a lot of people are not particular sympathetic.
People complain but its generally predictable save for applications for a 3 year visa can lead to a 1 year visa or a 3 year visa or a 5 year visa
There are 2 kinds of countries in Europe:
- Those where movies and TV shows are dubbed: Germany, France etc. Especially the older generations and working class don't speak English too well
- Those where movies are English with subtitles: Many of the smaller countries with their own native language. So everybody is exposed to English all the time and many speak English pretty well.
(Have not watched movies in the Netherlands, but I could guess many are not dubbed?)
In the case of Japan, you also have the insanely difficult writing system, probably the most difficult writing system in current usage. The German language might be difficult, but at least it uses an alphabet with a somewhat consistent spelling.
I loved living in Japan, but even where I lived in Shinagawa, it was very rare finding someone with any English skills at all unless they were young and college educated in the states.
I mean, what do you expect? European languages are all related to each other, so of course it's easier to figure things out by roots. Japanese isn't even remotely related to English, except through borrow-words. That said, I'm usually able to figure a lot of things out by simply reading the katakana, since 95% of the time it's just a borrowed English word. Of course, this depends a lot on what you're looking at: western foods almost always use katakana borrow-words, Asian foods almost never.
I guess you have never visited Finland, Estonia or Hungary...
This is a bit of an understatement. Japanese is a category-V language, taking an estimated 88 weeks of full-time study to learn, while German is a category-II language taking just 30 weeks.
Even better, it's 8000 yen, which with the current exchange rate is about USD $60.
However, I did not have any issues with the bridging visa. It gave me full rights to employment, medicare, and fair taxation (unlike the Work and Holiday Visa I started with, which drastically limited my ability to work, had me paying all medical expenses out-of-pocket, and taxed all my income at the highest tax bracket), and I traveled overseas a few times on it without any issues.
The application fees were expensive, but the bridging visa more than made up for it. I made much more money on the bridging visa than it cost me to apply, so even if my application had been rejected, I would have come out far ahead financially and had a lovely 2-year working holiday in Australia — far better than what the Work and Holiday Visa offers.
The USCIS website also shows your status and gives a rough timeline.