How tricky is it to renew a kids UK passport and use the new one? Our 175 is in his old one.
HKA
X

Just carry both passports

Where is the quickest renewal office? We are still in Mackay.

For a UK passport? Have to do it through Australia Post - see the sticky thread at the top of this forum

Its easy...we did ours last year and went through our local post office, had Passport back in 10 days!!
Don't worry about Visa sticker, they are all electronic these days and show automatically on the Passport scanner. If in doubt carry your old one or better still your email/letter of Visa acceptance.

All good information!
Thank you.
HKA
X

The Australian visa will not be connected to the new passport unless you tell DIAC. It won't be automatic, you should fill in form 929.

http://www.immi.gov.au/allforms/pdf/929.pdf

This will link the new passport and visa, it is up to you whether you want the physical label or not, many people are happy not to bother.

I've recently returned from a trip to South Africa and I have to say that the DIAC practice of no longer putting PR visa stickers into passport renewals has been a bit of a 'mare.

When my UK passport expired I went to DIAC in Canberra to have the visa placed in my South African passport. The response from the DIAC person who dealt with me was they no longer issue the stickers for free in passport renewals and a new sticker would cost (if I remember correctly) $70 (or thereabouts). However, they said that all I needed to do was to register the new passport against the visa and there would be no problems - which I did.

Fast forward a few months and having spent time in South Africa I now wanted to return to Aus. The Emirates staff swiped my SA passport through their system and it reported I had no visa. No problem, I thought, and produced my expired UK passport containing the current visa. "But this is not a valid visa because it is in an expired passport..." they said, so they needed to telephone the Aus High Comm to obtain authorisation. Ten minutes and a telephone call later and they had the code - problem solved, I thought as they issued me with the boarding passes all the way to Perth. I had booked a very long but much cheaper journey to Sydney via Dubai and Perth (but won't do it again - the horrendously long journey is not worth the saving). Once in Dubai, at check-in immediately prior to boarding the next leg of the journey I has to go through the same visa hoo-ha. This time it was due to the smiling incompetents at Cape Town airport failing to enter the authorisation code on their system.

So to summarise, DIAC's decision to cease placing pink stickers in new passports for free/a reasonable fee has meant that they've created extra hassle for migrants using replacement passports and for DIAC too because they now need to employ extra staff at their call centres to handle a resultant increase in visa queries.

It would still have been a valid visa even if in an expired passport, so that is a matter for the training of the staff in both SA and Dubai. The visa does not expitre with the passport; many people travel with their visa labels in expired passports, and have done even before they started charging for labels.

Having said that, if I was still travelling with a visa i would be paying the $70 for a label just to be sure!

Yes, it's a training thing, I assumed that there wouldn't be a hassle if I produced the passport that the visa is in. Just one flaw in Emirate's otherwise perfect service isn't bad I suppose.

$70 is a rip off that I refuse to be a part of. Besides, I'll be applying for Aus citizenship early next year...

Which is why I have always recommended that people have the visa label affixed to their passport, whether it incurs a fee or not!!

My family and I leave the country too rarely to waste our money on such things. Besides, how can they justify charging $70 (or thereabouts) so that we can save them call centre workload? I'm saving my bucks and sticking to principle on this one. If more did the same they would likely return to their old practice of putting them in for free.

Same thing happened to us with out youngest son, called immigration when we had renewed his passport and they said they don't insert the labels anymore because it is all electronic...makes sense. However, when leaving Perth airport recently we had a very snotty women at passport control who had our young son in tears saying he may not be able to leave the Country, even though we had our original visa letter as proof!!! Quick call to Canberra and the "electronic system" confirmed his visa rights, no problem. A badly managed system with one Department not speaking to another, this must happen so often it needs to be managed much better.

http://www.immi.gov.au/visas/vec-faq.pdf has the details of the electronic system.
As it says, you can still get a visa label from your local DIAC office if necessary - and I have to admit, I would be getting one, makes life easier!

My OH nearly gave the immigration officer a heart attack a couple of weeks back by handing him my sons' unregistered SA passports when they returned to SYD. She said he was not at all impressed