ETA visa prison sentence less than 12 months
 

I'm struggling to find information for my issue online and wondered if anyone has had a similar experience.

Last year I travelled to Australia with my husband who has a conviction but served less than 12 months in prison. I completed his eta before booking our tickets to make sure he would be allowed entry. The only question it asked was whether he had been sentenced to 12 months or more, I answered no which is the truth, and the eta was granted. We went on holiday a few months later and were asked to complete the landing cards which asked do you have a criminal conviction, to this question we answered yes.

The issue I have is that we were almost denied entry to the country because they said we had lied on the eta about his criminal conviction.

Could someone please explain whether we did something wrong on the eta. I've looked again at it and nowhere does it ask about convictions of less than 12 months sentence. Did I miss something?

Could this affect an application for a pr visa? We loved it there and are now hoping to move there.

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks

Re: ETA visa prison sentence less than 12 months
 

Welcome to the forum sure someone will be along to help shortly.
You are correct I don't think you did anything wrong.It definitely says at the start of the online application no more than 12 months in total combined sentences.
Are you a British a Passport holder because you mentioned eta visa which is not for British passport holders and costs $20? Not really relevant to your post but you normally apply for eVisitor 651 which is free.
My wife had a conviction about 25 years ago just a fine. She ticked the landing card and got pulled aside for a talk and a check when we went for a reccie.Cant recall feeling like they were going to stop us entering.They were just doing their job even though my wife was embarrassed. Have to admit when we entered on PR we didn't mention it and nobody bothered us.

Re: ETA visa prison sentence less than 12 months
 

Thank you for your reply, I hope you're right. I suppose I just don't want them to think we lied on the tourist visa and hold that against us. It doesn't really make sense for them to have two different questions on the visa and the landing card.

Re: ETA visa prison sentence less than 12 months
 

Your husband was completely correct in the way he proceeded. It's important to note that he will always need to tick yes on his landing card in future if he's thinking about applying to migrate to Australia, even if it's inconvenient to be hauled over coals by an immigration officer each time.