General Information on Migrating to Australia

Probably the first thing to know is that Australia was, and continues to be, built on migration. Every year they offer visas for hundreds of thousands of people.

If you want to know more about general facts about Migration, including numbers you can check out our other page on Migration, but last year Australia offered 190,000 permanent visas for people to live in Australia.

Assuming you have decided you want to migrate to Australia the first step is to find a visa. Again you can check out our high level information on types of visa’s, which also offers links to each type.

Our first stop is always to consider Skilled Migration, as this pathway is designed to be done from overseas, and if done correctly will result in you (and your family) being offered Permanent Residence in Australia. There’s several advantages to this pathway, including:

• you can continue to work in your own country while you are doing it
• your permanent visa comes with Medicare, and with Full Work Rights (which is very important when trying to find work in Australia)
• once you are granted a visa you still have one year to come and activate your visa, meaning you have time to wrap things up in your own country
• there’s no requirement for you to work in the occupation you have been nominated in, so if you get granted a visa as an Engineer, you aren’t limited to working in that occupation

Our recommendation is that you contact us and we will assess your options and create a migration strategy for you. If you don’t qualify we will tell you. Why waste your time trying to work out if you qualify when you can have an expert do it for you for free?!

Useful Resources

The Government has produced a couple of handbooks (in pdf format), the first one is a bit high level and not very practical, but the second one “Beginning a Life in Australia” gives some excellent advice for some of the basic first steps when you arrive, such as registering for Medicare, getting a Tax File Number (TFN), etc. It also covers information on things like Society, Law, Housing, Education, Healthcare. I think it’s an excellent starting point to answer a lot of basic questions you may have about Australia.

Life In Australia – high level, not that useful.

Beginning a life in Australia – recommended reading.

Useful Links

The Australian Government website, which also has links to the department of immigration.

Poms in Oz. This website is an excellent place to talk to other people who have been through the process, and they have information on all sorts of topics, such as shipping your stuff here.