Re: Which Bank?
 

I'm looking for somewhere to stash my cash and Bank West is coming up on all the 'best rate' searches I've been doing (currently 8.1%); however I think you have to be a PR/citizen to qualify and I'm on a 457. Will be checking with them later.

Re: Which Bank?
 

Yes it all went very smoothly.
The account pays interest but one problem is that you can only organise online payments to bank accounts or companies in your home country (UK in my case), international online payments are limited to other Citibank accounts. To make other types of payments you have to use telephone banking. They do give you a card though, which you can use to get cash out of ATMs in the currency of the account, which is pretty useful. So using this you can get AUD cash from ATMs in Australia for no fee, having put money into the account using something like HiFx or UKForex (OzForex). This is a very good way to organise cash when travelling to Australia.

Re: Which Bank?
 

We've had a bit of a mess around.
I tried to open as Oz online account which they ssured I could from the UK. They never received my documents in Sydney (double checked the address), so now we're off to London on Thurs to set up a UK account in $. We can use this over there, set up an Oz one when we get there and transfer the money.

Seems quite straight forward, maybe someone in the call centre getting their wires crossed.
Used HIFX for transfer.