Australia - British Expat Forum

Hi everyone, this is my first post on the forum however i have been using it for the past couple of months to help with an application i recently submitted.

Applied about a month ago (at London) for a 309 defacto visa for my GF. I've already got a PR visa through skilled migration a few years.

Having receiving a case officer a couple of days after sending the application off, we then spent a week or so providing some additional relationship info. Anyway, to cut a long story short, the CO said that he would approve the visa and as we had front loaded the meds we were just waiting for the police check to come back. The PC came back and we send it off/received by CO end of April.

This is where I have a few questions:

1) what happens once the CO has all the information, do they process the application themselves or does it go into a sausage factory where someone else along with a thousand other applications are granted ?

2) Are visas granted on a monthly basis at the same time, i.e. April visa grants, May visa grants etc, or is it just down to when the CO processes it?

3) Once the visa has been granted and i receive the email, can i turn up at the london embassy to drop the passport off, or will they only accept post applications ?

4) Does my GF actually need the label or can we travel to Oz (obviously once the visa has been granted) without it and get a label over there?

5) Is it true that my GF could travel to Oz on ETA and just leave Oz prior to the visa being granted? obviously we would need to inform CO that we were going to Oz and that he would need to hold off the grant until we went to Bali, NZ or somewhere outside of Oz ?


On another note, my skilled migration visa is going to expire in a few months (planning on migrating to Oz ASAP) and as i'm not an Oz citizen i presume i will need to get a RRV if i want to leave for any reason. As i have not been living in Oz prior to an RRV request, i'm probably not going to be eligable for 5 year one. I am looking at work that may require some internation travel to Asia and therefore i would have issues in returning back to Oz. Does anyone know if they take into consideration jobs or say owning property etc or would i just need to keep applying for 3 month RRVs until i have been there fore 2 years.

Sorry for all the questions : ) hope people can help !

J

CO Processes the application themselves, its granted once they approve it (not once a month). If you hit a cap then they stop processing and dont start until 1 july.

She needs the Label, and they should accept postal passports.

She can travel but its a pain in the behind. the CO will want to close the file and if they cant contact you its a nightmare. worse is if you plan your Bali trip and then the CO is sick/holidays and you cant contact them.

On the RRV side as long as you have been to Australia in the last 5 years and have a family tie, business tie (job), economic tie (house) then they should grant you another 5 year visa.


cheers

Mark

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the reply. With respect to CO processing the application, are you saying that the will only process so many per month and once they hit that limit they then wait until the following month.

My GF had her interview with the CO in late April and it was at that interview that he said he would approve the application. It just seems to be taking quite a while compared with some of the comments i've read from people.

John

Caps for Visa Classes are Capped annually. Once the cap is reached they do not do any more processing for the year until 1 July (Australian financial year).

cheers

Mark

Thanks for that. I'm assuming that if a 309 cap would have been reached say end of march, someone on here would have probably found out about it???

J