Rishta in Australia

How to read an Australian profile properly

Ask for the subclass number, and write it down

Australians talk about visas by number, and a family in Pakistan should learn to do the same, because the number tells you more about a household than anything else on the biodata. Asking what is your visa gets you a vague answer. Asking which subclass gets you a fact that can be checked.

The common ones run roughly like this. A 500 is a student visa: temporary, tied to study, with limited work rights and no ability to sponsor a spouse for permanent residence. A 485 is the temporary graduate visa that follows a degree; it is short, it is normally granted once in a lifetime, and the clock on it is the most stressful period in most young migrants’ lives here. A 482 is an employer-sponsored work visa — temporary, and tied to that employer, so losing the job starts a very short countdown. A 186 is the employer-sponsored permanent one. A 189 is independent skilled permanent residence, the best outcome, with no strings. A 190 is permanent residence nominated by a state, which comes with a moral and sometimes contractual expectation of living in that state. A 491 is the regional one, and it is the one families misread most often: it is temporary, it requires living and working in a designated regional area for three years before permanent residence can be applied for, and for this purpose everywhere except Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane is regional — including Perth, Adelaide, Canberra, Hobart, Newcastle, Wollongong and the Gold Coast. A bride marrying a 491 holder is agreeing to live where that visa says, not where she chooses.

Then the fact nobody mentions in a rishta conversation and everyone should. The skilled points test is savagely age-weighted. Points for age peak between twenty-five and thirty-two, fall at thirty-three, fall again at forty, and disappear entirely at forty-five. A man of thirty-six on a temporary visa with no employer willing to sponsor him may simply have no skilled pathway left, however good his job is. That is not a reason to refuse a proposal, but it is a reason to ask what the actual plan is, because the honest answer in some cases is that there isn’t one.

So, before anything is agreed: which subclass, granted when, expiring when, and shown on a live video call rather than described. Is it temporary or permanent. If permanent, how long has it been held and when does citizenship become possible — generally four years of lawful residence including one as a permanent resident. If temporary, what is the next step and what happens if it fails. And if it is a 491, where exactly must the couple live, and for how long.

The partner visa is two visas, and it is the most expensive in the world

If the match is between someone settled here and someone in Pakistan, this is the paperwork that will govern the first years of the marriage, and it is unlike the British, American or Canadian equivalents in several ways worth knowing before anybody agrees to anything.

It is granted in two stages. The first is provisional — the 820 if the applicant is already in Australia, the 309 if they are applying from Pakistan. Roughly two years after the original application, and only if the relationship is still on foot, the permanent stage follows: the 801 or the 100. A family that celebrates the grant of the first visa and then forgets about the second has not finished.

It is also the single most expensive common visa in the world. The government charge alone runs to several thousand Australian dollars for the main applicant, more with children, and it rises most years; add migration-agent fees, police certificates, medicals and translations and many families spend the cost of a modest wedding on the application. One application fee covers both stages, which is the only mercy in it. Check the current figure on the Department of Home Affairs site before anyone budgets, and agree in writing who is paying.

Three further points that catch families out. There is no minimum income requirement for an Australian partner visa — unlike Britain, and unlike what a great many relatives will confidently tell you. What the sponsor provides instead is evidence that the relationship is genuine and continuing, and in a limited set of cases an assurance of support. Second, a sponsor can sponsor a partner only twice in a lifetime, and generally not within five years of a previous sponsorship, so a second marriage needs this checked first. Third, the sponsor undergoes police checks, and certain convictions, particularly violent ones, must be disclosed to the applicant.

And one protection that every bride and every bride’s family should know exists. If an applicant already in Australia on the provisional partner visa suffers family violence from the sponsor and the relationship ends because of it, the law allows the permanent visa to be granted anyway. Nobody should enter a marriage planning for that. But a woman who knows the protection exists is far less likely to stay silent in a bad situation because she believes her status depends on the man.

Your parents will probably never be able to live here, and you should plan for that

This is the hardest thing on the page and the one families discover far too late. Australia is the most difficult of the four main destination countries in which to bring a parent permanently, and the gap between it and Canada or Britain is enormous.

There are two broad routes and neither is good news. The contributory parent visas can be granted in a handful of years, but the charge runs to tens of thousands of Australian dollars per parent, payable in two instalments, which for two parents is a sum most young couples will never assemble on top of a mortgage. The non-contributory parent visa costs far less and the queue for it is measured in decades; for a parent already in their sixties it is, realistically, not a plan. Both routes also apply a balance-of-family test, which generally requires that at least half the children live in Australia — so a man whose three siblings are in Lahore does not qualify however much money he has.

What families actually use is the sponsored parent temporary visa, which allows a long stay of several years at a time with private health insurance and no work rights, or ordinary visitor visas. These are good things and they work. But they are visits, not settlement, and the parent goes home at the end.

Why this belongs on a matrimonial page: it changes decisions. A couple who assume the parents will join them in five years will plan a house, a job and a city around that assumption and then find it was never possible. A daughter who is the only child of elderly parents in Karachi should know before the nikah, not after, that marrying into Australia may mean permanent distance from them, and both families should talk about what that will look like — the visits, the money, who flies when somebody is ill, and whether the couple might eventually return. Our Brampton page sets out the Canadian version, which is difficult but possible; Australia is a different order of difficulty, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

The nikah, the celebrant, and the month of notice nobody plans for

Australian marriage law is straightforward once you know it, and almost every mistake made here is a timing mistake. A marriage must be solemnised by an authorised celebrant. The good news is that a great many imams are registered as ministers of religion under the Marriage Act, so in Australia — unlike England — a nikah performed by a registered imam can be the legal marriage itself, with no separate civil ceremony needed. Ask the mosque directly whether the person conducting the nikah is registered. If the answer is no, the nikah is a religious marriage only, and the couple must also marry before a civil celebrant or registry.

Then the trap. A Notice of Intended Marriage must be lodged with the celebrant at least one month and one day before the ceremony, and no more than eighteen months before. Families who fly relatives in from Pakistan for a date three weeks away discover this at the worst possible moment. Lodge the notice early, well before anybody books a flight or a hall. Both parties must also provide identity documents, and anybody previously married must produce the divorce order or death certificate.

Three other features of Australian law that affect our families. A couple who live together in a genuine domestic relationship are treated as de facto partners after around two years, with most of the property and support consequences of marriage and the right to apply for a partner visa on that basis; Western Australia runs a partly separate regime for de facto property, so advice there should be local. Divorce is no-fault and requires twelve months of separation before an application can be made, which is often longer than families expect and cannot be shortened. And superannuation — the compulsory retirement savings every employee accumulates, frequently a household’s second largest asset after the house — is treated as property and can be split on separation; it also passes by the binding nomination lodged with the fund rather than by a will, so a newly married couple should check that form within the first month. None of this is legal advice and we are not lawyers; take proper advice in your own state.

Five cities, two of which hold most of the community, and the longest flight home

Treat Sydney and Melbourne as the two real markets and search both from the first day. They are an hour and twenty minutes apart by air with dozens of flights a day, the fare is often less than a day’s wage, and a Sydney–Melbourne match is entirely normal. Brisbane is ninety minutes from Sydney and the third pool. Adelaide is two hours and small. Perth is the outlier: five hours from Sydney, in its own time zone, and genuinely remote even from the rest of Australia — a Perth family searching east should expect the practical business of meeting to be more like an international match than a domestic one.

Outside the five, the regional centres hold more Pakistani families than people assume, precisely because of the 491 visa described above: Canberra, Newcastle, Wollongong, Geelong, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast, and university towns such as Toowoomba, Wagga Wagga and Launceston. If your search is narrow — a particular biradari, a small sect, a hafiz-e-Quran — open the whole country rather than one city. New Zealand is worth opening too; Auckland has a settled Pakistani community, and New Zealand citizens may live and work in Australia indefinitely, which makes a trans-Tasman match far more practical than the distance suggests.

Then the distance home, which shapes a marriage here more than in any other country we cover. There are no direct flights between Australia and Pakistan. Every route runs one stop through the Gulf or South-East Asia, the journey is the better part of a day door to door, and the fare for a family of four in the Pakistani wedding season is a serious sum. The eastern states run five hours ahead of Pakistan, six when daylight saving is on, so a call home happens early in the morning or late at night; Perth, at three hours ahead, is easier. Plan for this honestly. Budget for one trip home every year or two rather than assuming it. Expect that a wedding in Pakistan means three to four weeks of leave, not one. And understand that a parent flying out to help with a new baby is a major undertaking that needs a visa, money and months of notice — which is exactly why the section above matters.