All people are equal, but children are more equal than others (immigration exemption in Australia)

Once again, we find children being granted exceptions when it comes to medical policy. Australia has a policy that to be eligible for permanent residency, a person must not be a burden on the health system. Whether or not one agrees with that rule, it is exceedingly unfair that it was bypassed for a child, when an adult who might have given everything up to move, only to subsequently suffer from a debilitating disease, would have been kicked out.

The Irish couple moved to Australia in 2009 and have been fighting to stay in the country since their son was born in 2015 with cystic fibrosis. Their son relies on a drug which costs $300,000 per year to survive, and immigration law states that to pass the medical assessment in order to apply for permanent residency, your treatment costs cannot exceed $40,000 per year.

The couple argued that if they moved back to Ireland they'd lose access to the drug for at least a year. Well, that sucks, but that's on Ireland, isn't it? I'm still wondering what would happen if an Irish woman moved to Australia and subsequently suffered from an expensive disease; I'm guessing they would send her back to Ireland and be unmoved by any concerns that she might die waiting for treatment. Unless, of course, she was a mother of a young child, in which case people would be calling for exemptions.

Once again, one rule for children/famblees and another for everyone else. 120,000 people signed a petition for them to stay, and the local premier asked the federal government to ignore the rules. And it worked, because the immigration minister decided to review the case and intervened, allowing the family to stay.

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How dumb. My sibling's two (minor aged) kids have resulted in well over a million dollars in hospital visits, treatments, emergency rooms, etc.

Consider how many more defects are being born all the time. Nature's way of saying, "don't reproduce."
All those miscarriages? Nature is knocking on the door, she has had enough.

Besides, kids in general are klutzy and accidents waiting to happen. Couple that with not understanding consequences and count the ratio of kids to adults in the emergency room.

When I was a kid a child with birth defects was incredibly rare. And I knew of only one kid who was insanely hyperactive. The population was considerably smaller then. There were barely any kids with allergies and other than leukemia kids didn't get cancer. Skin cancer was something that you may worry about when you hit about 45. Now children get skin cancer. Even the asthmatic kid was rare. There were no kids that had to sit inside at recess because of an allergy to bee stings. And there were no restrictions on what kids brought to lunch due to a widespread peanut allergy (or whatever else).