Canadians moving to Aussie, granted Permanent Residency

Hello Everyone,

My husband and I are moving to Australia, we have just been granted our Permanent Residency.....how long do you have before you have to go to Australia to have your passport stamped with the Permanent Residency stamp? As it stands they are only giving us 2 months, is this normal? It sure doesn't give us alot of time and we have already booked our ticket...which is 3 months away!!!!!! Anyone out there that could give us a little bit of information, or if there is someone to call that will actually talk to us in person.

Thanks,

Coreen

I see this was posted over a month ago so you might have already left by now.

You need to validate your visa by visiting Australia in whatever timeframe they give you. It will tell you how long you have if you look at the stamp on your visa.

The time frame is determined by when you had your medicals and police checks done. Once your visa is granted you are given 1 year to validate your visas, this year is calculated from whenever you had your police checks or medicals done (whichever is earliest).

So from what you've said it sounds as though you've done your medicals and police checks way too early, I would guess you did at least one of those things around May or June last year (probably when you submitted the application). Generally speaking they are very inflexible about this date so you NEED to validate in the time frame given or your visa will expire.

You can try and contact them and plead your case, usually they give you a minimum of 3 months even if you did do your other stuff too early so I'm surprised you only have 2 months. Unless it was 3 months from the time it was granted and it took until now to get the visa label and post.

Anyway you can try and reach them on the phone through this number:
http://www.immi.gov.au/contacts/visa-en ... ionals.htm

You didn't say what visa, so I'm assuming a 175 permanent visa.

As a side note, where are you headed? We're in Brisbane.