Daniel and Ciera

We’ve been asked by others going through the USA – Australia move to give details about applying for the Australian Partner Visa. This post is basically an overview of all the main parts of the application process. You will be able to find more information in the Partner Migration Booklet 1. Eventually we’ll write a post on our experiences, but for now, this post is just about the process itself.

While we were in the USA, we applied for the Offshore Partner Temporary Visa (Subclass 309). The visa is valid for two years, and if the relationship is still standing after these two years, a Partner Permanent Visa (Subclass 100) is granted. The one application covers both visas. While the visa application process isn’t very difficult, it does involve a lot of work and time. In our case, we applied in a de-facto relationship, although it’s a very similar application process if you’re applying as a married couple.

Note that the application process refers to a “sponsor”. This visa is not like other Australian visas where you need to get someone else (like a potential employer) to sponsor you. With this visa, your sponsor is your partner who is an Australian citizen. If you are the person applying from overseas, read “sponsor” as “my partner”, and “applicant” as “me”.

Relationship Evidence

One of the major components of this visa is evidence that your relationship is genuine. You won’t need to provide everything that we’ve listed in these categories but it’s safe to include as much as you can. The more proof you provide, the less likely it is they’ll find a reason to deny your visa application. There are four broad categories for the evidence needed:

Financial Aspects

The financial aspects category involves evidence that you and your partner share financial commitments and responsibilities. This includes ownership of major assets (like a car or house) and/or liabilities (loan or insurance), helping pay for each other’s travel, sharing of finances, a joint bank account statement, and sharing of bills and expenses.

Note that this evidence needs to show financial support both ways – It can’t just be one person supporting their partner.

Social Context

Social context involves how your friends and family see your relationship with your partner. This includes evidence that you’re accepted as a couple socially, such as party invitations, group photos, and having friends in common. This also includes joint participation in social activities like sports, and joint travel.

As you’ve most likely travelled around the world a few times to see each other, you should include printouts of travel itineraries, clearly labelling them and ensuring a date is visible on the page.

Nature of Household

Nature of the household is evidence that you and your partner share responsibilities within your household. This includes things like living arrangements, housework, joint ownership of your house, joint responsibility for bills, and correspondence addressed to both you and your partner at the same address.

As with all the other sections of the visa application, the circumstances are different for everyone. If you did not own your house (for example, like in our situation we were living with our parents), that is okay. Just include everything that you feel is relevant. This can be simple things like letters from friends, as long as the letters have both your names on them.

Nature of Commitment

Nature of commitment involves proving that you and your partner have mutual commitment to each other. The most common form of evidence for this category is proof of correspondence during any periods of separation. This can be in the form of phone or chat logs.

It’s important to note that you shouldn’t print out ALL your chat logs and submit these, as for a lot of people, that would be massive! In our case, we chat every day and so we have some very big chat logs. Instead, only include a representative segment. That is, include the most important things. This can include things like:

• Logs from when you first met, and when the relationship began
• Logs from planning trips to see each other
• Phone call logs from when you were apart
• Logs showing how much you miss each other when you’re apart

If you have other things that prove your commitment (such as mentioning each other in the terms of your wills, or intention to buy a house together), these should also be included in this category.

History of Relationship

In addition to these four categories of evidence, you and your partner need to provide a statement about the history of your relationship. You both need to write your own. The content will obviously be similar, but you should each write it in your own words. Essentially, this is like a love story (as cheesy as it sounds), detailing how/when/where you met, how your relationship developed, when you decided to get married or begin a de-facto relationship, and so on. Most importantly for long-distance relationships, it needs to mention when you’ve been apart, and how you maintained your relationship during these periods of separation.

This is quite a lot of writing, and can easily end up being 4 or 5 pages. Some broad categories to include in this document include:

• How you met (online?)
• When and how you met in person
• Any time you’ve spent together
• How long for
• Any time apart
• How long you were apart for
• What you did to keep in contact (chat, Skype, phone, whatever)
• What you did for each other (sent cards, gifts, whatever)
• Details of meeting your partner’s family
• Activities you have done with your partner’s family
• Details of how household duties/chores are shared
• Details of travel you’ve done together (like holidays)
• Details of your social lives together
• How you support each other emotionally, physically and financially
• Where you see your future taking you (getting married? having kids? owning your own house together? etc.)

Some of this will overlap with the relationship proof, but that is okay.

That’s it for the stuff you need to write. Doesn’t that seem easy?

Statutory Declarations

To prove the social aspects of your relationship, statutory declarations are required from people that know both you and your partner. These people need to be over 18 and ideally Australian citizens, although statements from non-Australians are often accepted if you and your partner don’t have any mutual friends in Australia. They need to write about how they know you and your partner, and whether they think your relationship is genuine. Form 888 has all the required information. The people filling these out will need to get them witnessed and signed by an authorized person (such as a police office, Justice of the Peace, or doctor). You need at least two of these, but the more, the better.

Medicals and Police Checks

You will need to get medical checks done by a panel doctor. The panel doctors are doctors approved by Australian Immigration – you can’t get them done at a non-approved doctor. This part can get a little confusing. The Australia Immigration site says to wait until you’re told by your case officer to get the checks done, whereas the USA Australian Embassy site says you can send it in with the rest of your evidence. Our advice is to go with the immigration site. The medical check are only valid for a year. There’s no telling how long it’ll take for a case officer to get to your application so it’s best to wait until you get that first email!

In addition to the medical checks, you also need to get police checks for every country you’ve lived in for 12 or more months. Notably, if you were in Australia on the Working Holiday Visa (as we were), you need to have an Australian Police Check done. The Australian check does not need fingerprints. In our case, Ciera needed to get Australian and USA police checks done. For the USA checks, you need both federal (FBI) and state police checks. The Character Requirements Penal Clearance Certificates document contains information on which police checks to get done, and how to do them.

Where To From Here?

If you live near the embassy in your country, you can hand in the application in person. Otherwise, you need to mail it in. We submitted ours to the embassy in Washington via USPS Express Mail. We’d recommend Express Mail because it’s tracked and the recipient needs to sign for the package, so you know it’s been received. Once received, the initial processing may not begin for a month or two. Eventually, you get assigned a “case officer”, which is the person that is looking into your application.

Things do take a while, so you do need patience. If you’ve included all the required information, your visa should be granted with little hassle, though

Advice

If you’re going to be applying for this visa, some general advice we can give is:

• Read through the whole of the Partner Migration Booklet 1, it has valuable information on the application process.
• Start preparing everything early. Time passes quickly and there is a lot of information you need to gather for the application. We started ours about 6 months before we were going to apply, and still had to do some things at the last minute.
• Get the US FBI police check done about two to four months before you plan on applying, as this can take up to 10 weeks to complete. You can get this done whilst in Australia. Get your fingerprints done at a police station (some Victoria Police do them for free) and send them to the FBI along with the FBI police check form.
• Don’t get the FBI police check done too early! It’s only valid for a year, so if you get it done 6 or 7 months before, it’ll expire before your visa is granted and you’ll need to get a new one
• If you’re not sure about anything, ask! By far the best site we encountered during our research was Australia Forum, which is a forum dedicated to immigration to Australia. It’s definitely better to be safe than sorry. We’re also here to help as much as we can. Feel free to comment with any questions!

There are a number of good references online, including the official Australian Immigration website and Australia Forum. There’s a topic on Australia Forum called “Very Unofficial Defacto Visa Tips” that has a large number of tips about defacto visa applications.

We may have forgotten some things, but hopefully this post has given you an idea of the process required for applying for an Australian partner visa. It really is easier than it may seem. We were pleasantly surprised

Good luck!
— Daniel and Ciera