advice 4 oz please
 

I need some advice please. I have recently met a girl on the net from oz she has come over to the uk to meet me and stay with me for a few months, she is going home now though because she dosent like it over here. anywayz i am due to go over in Feb I have been told to get a working holiday visa ( thankyou to all the people who advised me to do this on this site) i was just wondering how easy it is to get a working holiday visa to go to australia and the chances of me getting turned down and also whether it would be possible to go over on a normal 3 month visa and apply for a working holiday visa while im over there. also a friend told me the other day that australia has an amnesty every 5 years or something and if you apply for citizenship on the year of the amnesty you get it. is this true and if so when is the next amnesty??? Also one more thing to move to oz and be with my g/f i have been told to go for a defacto visa now what would the chances of me getting one be and what sort of things do they look for if I was to apply for one of these. May i just say that I am in £7000 worth of debt in this country and would it affect me in any way at all if I was to move to Oz on the defacto Visa or whatever. I would be grateful for any help thankyou very much.

Can't understand why if you would qualify for a working holiday visa that you would not head out on that ?

Don't know if you can update a holiday visa to a working holiday visa whilst in Oz. Perhaps you could do that in NZ or Indonesia.

No guarantees on a future amnesty. Don't rely on there being one.

To get your working holiday visa you may have to prove that you have some funds to support yourself. Your being able to demonstrate having funds may or may not have any bearing on your stated indebtedness.

As for the defacto visa ... may not be on if as you say you have only recently met this girl.

You'll need to visit http://www.immi.gov.au to learn more

Re: advice 4 oz please
 

I am Australian and my boyfriend is English (we met while I was over there on working holiday) Just to let you know that we have been together for 18 months and have had nightmare experiences with Immigration over here. They are generally pretty unhelpful (you are really just a number!!) so I would advise going and seeing a registered migration agent if you are really serious, and finding out as much as possible before taking the plunge.
De facto visas are notoriuosly difficult to get (even for legitimate couples) and the process is gruelling and expensive. Just want to manage your expectations - the rules are very strict and be prepared to fork out over $2000 Aussie just to lodge the application. I highly doubt having only just met your girl that you will qualify. The minimum requirement is that you have to prove you have lived together for at least 12 months. This involves proving that you are financially dependent on each other etc, so you must be able to prove that you have joint bank accounts, leases, joint ownership of assets and both names on household utility bills etc over a 12 month period. They may also make you attend an interview together and provide Statutory Declarations from friends and family members verifying your relationship is real and genuine. In short, its a major pain in the ass unless you genuinely are defacto.....
If you do manage to qualify you will be granted a 2 year provisional residency visa - at the end of this to qualify for Permanent Residency you must be able to prove that you are still in the relationship.
Working holiday visa is best option - you can even apply for this over the internet these days. This will give you 12 months in OZ during which you will be able to establish yourselves as defacto and apply from there.
The only thing about the working holiday is that you can only work for one employer for max of 3 months, so thats a bit of a bugger....
The advice we got from immigration was to apply for my boyfriend's working holiday visa from the UK. That way you enter on the correct visa and have no hassles when you get there

Re: advice 4 oz please
 

my two pennies worth:
i was not even engaged to my girlfirend and we only lived together for 10 months but they accepted her as a de facto on my 457 visa. she is not even english or from the EU (she's czech) and was only in the UK on a 12 month student visa at the time (which was how we cheated the system to get her in the UK in the first place). we did not have to be interviewed and all we did was give them copies of joint bank statements, a joint lease, copies of joint wedding invites from a year before and a letter from my parents. for us it really was not an onerous process - we just made sure we put everything in place the day she moved in with me and kept all the documentary evidence we could.

one other point - when i was in australia on a working holiday visa 5 years ago i worked for the same company for 7 months. they merely transferred my employment contract from one group company to another and hey presto, same job, different employer. i suspect the same tricks are played now.

there's always a solution if you search hard enough.

457 visa is a different story. E.g. they are less stringent as you are in Australia on a business visa and dont have the right to remain here indefinitely, or even resident's rights. Your girlfriend and you are sponsored by your company effectively (less risk for the govt - you are at the mercy of them to renew your visa, and can only stay so long as the company continues to sponsor you guys) and rather than applying for 'migration'as such, it seems you applied for her to come over with you as your partner on these terms - not apply for official residency in Australia under the "Partner Migration"scheme which is what I was talking about. This is why the process seemed a lot easier for you. So, as this guy is not being sponsored by a company, this is not the "De facto" visa we were talking about....
On the Working holiday visa front, Im sure loads of people get around the 3 month rule, but the govt have clamped down a lot on this in the past couple of years, and employers are forced to pay substantial penalties if they violate the visa rules, so Im not sure you should be telling people this stuff... maybe things were a lot easier 5 years ago. especially if this guy is considering staying in Oz on a working holiday visa until he qualifies for defacto. You can bet your bottom dollar that the govt will be checking over his tracks since he entered the country to make sure he wasnt doing anything illegal/dodgy before granting him provisional residency so he wouldnt want to do anything that might jeopardise this (just my opinion)
I totally agree with you that there is always a way if you try hard enough. Just trying to manage the guys expectations based on my experience with immigration and the collective experience of my friends and to be aware of the facts (eg it costs over $2000 to apply for defacto with a bonafide australian citizen) and of the worst case scenario (immigration staff cant be really unsympathetic to people's situations)