Pendragon Straight Talk: Episode Twenty-Eight

 
TRANSCRIPT
 
JOHN GLOVER: Hello and welcome to another Pendragon Straight Talk. This week I’ve been asked what should internationals looking to come to Australia think about before they attempt to come here and work, especially if they need a visa.
 
So, the first thing, which is the most important thing is to get a migration agent or someone to assess your skills to make sure what visa you can or cannot get, especially with the changes to the new 457 visa programme where they have moved that into two lists.
 
The thing to do is to ask them while they are checking for your assessment for the new 457 visa or the TSS visa, is as what can you do with that visa, can you get permanent residency from that visa, because what you’re going to find is that those occupations that fall on the second list, which is the short term list, where you get a visa for two years only, you will most likely find it very hard to get permanent residency from that visa.
 
So, I would ask the question, can I get a visa and if I do get that visa what is my potential for getting permanent residency afterwards, so, you’ve got a long-term view and a life plan of what you want to do.
 
Once you’ve sorted that out and you know that you can get a visa and you want to come, whichever way the visa is, then obviously the obvious thing to do is to check the job boards because you obviously need to have a job, it’s very dangerous coming to this country without a job. A lot of people come here and then they really struggle because they may get permanent residency or another type of visa, if they don’t get the 457, and find that they are struggling to get a job. If you’re coming under a sponsored visa, you have to have a job to be sponsored, so, look on the job boards.
 
Then I would suggest visit Australia. Australia is a great place to come for a holiday anyway, so just look at it as a superb holiday. You are allowed to come here under a certain visa that allows you to come here for a job interviews or at least to talk to some clients or some recruitment companies to see what options you may have for getting a job and at that point then you can then think to yourself well okay we really want to make the move and move to Australia. It’s a great place to live and its great place to bring up children. So, I recommend that.
 
Now, once you’ve got your visa and you’ve got your job offer and your visa is there, well prior to getting your visa, you’ve got think you’ve got to get police checks now days and you’ve got to do an English test. So there is two new rules that have kicked in, so you have to think of the police checks of all the countries travelled to and you’ve got to do an English test no matter where you come from.
 
Once you’ve obviously got your job offer and your visa, then you can move onto actually looking at setting yourself up in Australia, which obviously then is another long list of things you can do. Two of the things you can look at doing prior to coming here which can obviously assist you is setting up a bank account prior to coming here from overseas and/or looking at setting up your tax file number, so that obviously once you get here and you get paid you can get paid correctly and not taxed at the wrong rate.
 
So, I think just in a nutshell I think the most important thing first of all is come to Australia if you’re looking to come here and work and you really want to stay here then please get your occupation and your skills assessed for what visa you might be able to get that will allow you to come and do what you want to do but also might allow you to get your permanent residency at a later date.
 
That’s all for now, I’ll talk to you next week.