Visa Costs

Hi All, My wife and I are looking to move to Australia and have tons of questions. First and foremost. will Australian companies hire (and sponsor) you if you do not yet have a working Visa. My w...

Visa Costs

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Canadians in Australia and New Zealand

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batman2282
New Member

Joined: 25 Aug 2008
Posts: 2
Location: Vancouver

Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2008 2:31 pm

Hi All,

My wife and I are looking to move to Australia and have tons of questions. First and foremost. will Australian companies hire (and sponsor) you if you do not yet have a working Visa. My wife and I are both in IT (I am an IT Architect and she is a Senior BA).

Second questions, for work visa's where you are not sponsored, the cost looks to be $2015.00. but is that per person or can my wife be included in my application?

I will leave it at those two questions for now. i have a ton, but I'll wait to hear back from you guys.

Thanks in advance!
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Cheers!

comet555
CanuckAbroad VIP

Joined: 28 Jun 2007
Posts: 201
Location: Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2008 7:28 pm

Hi,

You're both in IT so you might find someone who will sponsor you without a visa. But to be brutally honest it can be very difficult to find anyone to sponsor you. Then when you are sponsored you're effectively tied to that employer. If you quit or are fired then you have 30 days to find a new sponsor. There are lots of other reasons I would avoid being sponsored if you can. If you're only looking to move to Oz for the short term then it wouldn't really matter.

My husband tried job hunting while we were still in Canada waiting for our visa. We had absolutely no luck. All the jobs were through recruiters and basically no one would look at him because he was overseas and did not have a visa. He's a mining engineer and they have a shortage of them so we thought it would be much easier. In the end we had to have the visa in hand and arrive before he could get a job. Who knows though, it might be easier in IT to get sponsored.

If you both qualify for a 175 permanent visa then that's the way to go. In my opinion anyway. On a permanent visa you get the free healthcare (Medicare) and free schooling for any kids. Plus, you will eventually get citizenship after 4 years if you want it.

As far as costs go you and your wife can go on the same application. For example, we applied on my husbands skills. We had a 135 points so me and the kids just tagged along. He was the only one who needed the skills assessment. If we had been short on point I could have got a skills assessment and added more points to our application, luckily we didn't need it. So in your case I would check the points for both of you and see who will have an easier application or skills assessment. If both of you have 120 points then just pick one of you as the main applicant and the other as the spouse.

So for costs you've got the following:
$2000 for the actual visa application (with both of you on it)
$250 for the skills assessment (just a guess, my husbands was engineers australia, yours will be different)
$500 for medicals (I think that's fairly close to what we paid)
$50 for mailing (you'll want to send it in a secure fashion so you can track it to it's destination)
$30 for police checks

We also had about $200 for certified copies. But it looks like everything can be attached online now so that shouldn't be necessary. Something to keep in mind though in case you need it.

In total ours was about $3000 when we did it in 2006. We also had two kids included in our application so we spent a couple hundred on medicals for them. Ours took one month for the skills assessment and about 6 months for the visa. The processing times are always changing though so I have no idea how long it would take now.

To start out you'll need a positive skills assessment. Once you have that you are free to apply for the visa.

The best sources for information (besides me!) are the immigration website and a forum called British Expats.

http://www.immi.gov.au/immigration.htm
The 175 visa is under migrants.

http://britishexpats.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=32
There's also general boards on there about living in australia & random chit chat. The forum is a great place for info on immigrating to Australia. With help from there and the immigration website I did the whole visa process myself. Easy enough to do if your case is simple and you don't mind paperwork. The board is the best place I've found for info, and there are people from all over (not just the UK). There's a Canadian named Dorothy who is very helpful, they moved over in 2005 or 2006 I think.

Good luck with the planning. If you have any more questions just ask.

Haley
P.S. If you play hockey they do have rinks in most of the major cities.

batman2282
New Member

Joined: 25 Aug 2008
Posts: 2
Location: Vancouver

Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2008 6:28 am

Thanks for the repley comet555. I have to admint, the costs are quite a bit of concern. more for my wife than for me. It is not so much the concern about the dropping $2000 dollars, but rather the fact that there is no guarentee you will qualify for a visa. How often are people who have enough points rejected?
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misterbig
Junior Member

Joined: 22 Jun 2008
Posts: 20
Location: Sydney

Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2008 6:54 am

Not sure how long you're planning to come to Australia. Finding work in IT is very easy in Sydney/Melbourne, including sponsorship. It is very difficult to be taken seriously when applying overseas. Most people I know come on a tourist visa and within a month have found work in IT with sponsorship.

comet555
CanuckAbroad VIP

Joined: 28 Jun 2007
Posts: 201
Location: Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2008 2:03 pm

If you meet all the requirements for the visa then they have to grant it to you. You have to have a positive skills assessment, enough points and pass the medical, police checks, and character requirement (form 80 - basically that you are not a huge criminal), plus you have to pay the visa fee. If you can satisfy all of things they MUST grant you the visa. There's no discretion about it. The medical part just ensures that you're not going to be a drain on the system. Unless you have a condition that would cost them about $20,000 a year then I wouldn't be concerned.

I don't know how often people get rejected. The usual reason seems to be the medical, but general that's because kids have autism or they have serious health problems. If you lie on your applicaiton and they catch you they will refuse it. If you say you have a pile of experience doing something you really don't or use fake references you could get refused. But if you are upfront and honest and meet ALL the requirements then you will get your visa.

You don't have to do the medical and police checks right away. You could wait a while and then do it, which is a better way to do it in my opinion.

There's going to risk no matter what you do, unless of course you can find a job & sponsorship while overseas. In the end my guess is thought that if you want to be sponsored you will be forced to pay for a trip over and look for sponsorship. So you will have to pay for flights, hotels, transportation and have no guarantee of being able to stay. Plus it makes it tough to figure things out on the Canada side as well.

However. if you get your own visa you might have more luck finding a job overseas. Still hard though. But at least if you have to make a trip over to search for a job then you would have a much easier time finding one. If you arrive in the country with your own visa and the right to stay indefinitely you are able to start work immediately and are a lot more attractive to possible employers.

Basically that's what we did. We tried for sponsorship throught the process and had no luck. So we applied for our own visa. Still no one would look at my husband while we were overseas. So. we bit the bullet and sold our house in Fort McMurray and put our stuff in storage. We were going to live Fort McMurray anyway so it wasn't the end of the world. Then we went over for month and had return tickets booked. In the event that he didn't get a job then we could come back and keep looking. As it turns out he did get a job, so we just changed our tickets for our next trip back.

So. there's going to be a certain amount of risk no matter how you approach it. For us the visa was the easiest part because we knew it had to be granted, although I still worried about it! We prefered the risk from the trip over. At least with our own visa we were pretty sure he would get a job.

comet555
CanuckAbroad VIP

Joined: 28 Jun 2007
Posts: 201
Location: Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2008 3:21 pm

One more thing to consider when you're working out costs.

If you do happen to get a sponsored visa (like the 457 temp) there is a good chance that the employer will require you to purchase your own private health insurance. You really need it because you won't be covered by medicare (public health) if you are on a temp visa. If your employer won't provide it for you then you have to pay for it. This is usually about $1500-2000 every year. So that could really add up if your employer won't provide it for you. In our case the company did not provide it.

Even if you come on a permant visa you might need to take it out on your own. For example. if you and your wife make a combined income of $150,000 a year or over then you'll either have to take out private medical insurance, or the government will tax you. If you make over $150,000 a year then you might as well get the private health because the cost is generally the same as what the government will charge you, so at least you get the benefits of it.

So, not trying to confuse things. If you make too much then you'll likely pay for it no matter how you come. But if you're just under that then you might find that you'll have to pay for it on a temp visa but on a permanent visa you'd have free health care.

Something to thing about anyway. Especially if at some point there might only be one of you working for whatever reason.

comet555
CanuckAbroad VIP

Joined: 28 Jun 2007
Posts: 201
Location: Brisbane, QLD, Australia