Rishta in Melbourne

How to read a Melbourne profile properly

We are building a house: what that actually means here

In Melbourne a very large number of young Pakistani households are buying in a new estate on the edge of the city, and the phrase a family uses — we are building a house — covers several quite different situations. It is worth knowing which one you are being told about, because the difference is years and sometimes a great deal of money.

Most of these purchases are either a house-and-land package or an off-the-plan contract. In a house-and-land package the buyer settles on the land first and signs a separate building contract, so for a period they own a block of dirt with a mortgage on it and no house. Off the plan means buying a dwelling that does not yet exist from a drawing, paying a deposit, and settling at completion, which may be two years away. Both are perfectly normal and both are how an ordinary couple gets into this market. Both also carry risks a family in Pakistan has no reason to know about.

The risks, briefly. Construction can run long past the promised date, and a couple may be paying rent and a land mortgage at the same time for a year or more. Builders in this country have failed in significant numbers in recent years; Victoria has a statutory builder’s insurance scheme that covers an insolvent or vanished builder up to a capped amount, which is real protection but not unlimited, and claiming on it is slow. For an off-the-plan purchase, the finished dwelling can be valued at less than the contract price by the time it settles, which leaves the buyer to find the shortfall in cash. Duty concessions for these purchases exist and change frequently, so nobody should rely on a figure a cousin quoted two years ago.

So ask the questions properly, and ask for documents rather than descriptions. Is the land settled and titled, or is it still being registered. Is there a signed building contract, with whom, and what stage is it at. What is the contract price and what has been paid. Is there a mortgage, on the land, the house or both, and in whose name. When is the realistic completion date, not the brochure one. And where will the couple live until then — because the answer is often a rented unit or a room at his brother’s house for eighteen months, and a bride should know that before the nikah rather than after.

One further point about the estates themselves, said plainly because it matters more than the finances. These are new suburbs. Some have a station and good bus services and some do not; shops, schools and mosques arrive years after the houses do, and the nearest Pakistani grocer may be a twenty-minute drive. A woman arriving from Lahore into a house in an outer estate, unable to drive, with her husband gone twelve hours a day, can be more isolated than she would have been in a village. It is entirely solvable — a driving licence in the first six months, a car she can use, and a deliberate effort to connect her with the women at the local mosque — but only if somebody plans it.

The degree chosen for the occupation list, not for the person

Here is something true of Australia that is true almost nowhere else on this site. For roughly two decades, the surest route to permanent residence ran through a small number of occupations on a skilled list, and accountancy was the most prominent of them. An enormous number of young people from Pakistan, India and Nepal enrolled in accounting degrees in Melbourne not because they wanted to be accountants but because that degree led to a visa. IT has played a similar role more recently. The result is a generation of members whose qualification and whose actual working life do not match, and a biodata that says accountant may mean almost anything.

This is not a criticism of anybody. People do what the system rewards, and a young man who studied a subject he did not love in order to build a life in a safe country has done something sensible rather than shameful. But a family reading that profile should understand what they are looking at, so ask.

Is he actually working in the field, and in what role — a graduate accountant in a firm, an internal accountant in a business, a bookkeeper, or something else entirely. Is he a member of a professional body, meaning CPA Australia or Chartered Accountants, and has he completed the programme or only started it, because that distinction separates a career from a job. Did he sit a skills assessment for migration purposes, which is a different and lower bar than professional membership. And the human question, asked kindly: what does he actually want to do. A great many men in this position moved sideways after getting residence — into business, into IT, into transport, into a shop — and that is a perfectly honourable outcome, but a family expecting a chartered accountant’s income and status should know the real position rather than the one on the certificate.

The same reading applies to IT, where the gap between a job title and a job is wide. Our Calgary page sets out the equivalent question for engineers, and our Adelaide page for health workers. The principle is the same everywhere: read the role, the employer and the body, not the noun.

The mehr, the gold, and what an Australian court does with a nikah nama

Families settle the mehr at the nikah, gold is given, and everybody assumes the nikah nama is a contract that an Australian court would enforce. It is a contract in our tradition and it is binding on the parties before God. Whether an Australian court will give effect to it is a separate question, and the answer is: not automatically.

Australian family law has its own device for agreeing in advance how property will be divided. It is called a binding financial agreement, and to be binding it must meet strict statutory requirements — in particular, each party must receive independent legal advice from their own lawyer, and each lawyer must sign a statement confirming it. A nikah nama, however carefully written, almost never satisfies those requirements, so it is generally not a binding financial agreement. Courts here have on occasion taken a mehr into account as one relevant factor when dividing property, and there are reported cases where it mattered, but outcomes turn heavily on the facts and nobody should assume the figure will simply be ordered paid.

What follows is practical rather than pessimistic. Record the mehr properly and specifically, as our nikah nama guide sets out — an amount, in a named currency, with a date, not a vague promise. If the mehr is prompt, pay it at the nikah and keep the evidence; an unpaid mehr twenty years later is a dispute waiting to happen in any legal system. Keep records of gold: who gave it, roughly what it cost, and photographs. Gold given to a bride is ordinarily hers, but in a dispute years later the argument is almost always about proof rather than principle. And if there is real property on either side — a house, a business, an inheritance, children from a previous marriage — get a proper binding financial agreement drawn up alongside the nikah nama, with a lawyer each. That is not distrust and it is not an Australian idea imposed on a Muslim marriage; it is the same instinct that made our tradition write the mehr down in the first place.

Two related notes. Australian law does not recognise a nikah performed overseas or locally as a legal marriage unless the formal requirements are met, which our Australia page explains. And superannuation, which most families have never heard of, is treated as property here and can be divided on separation, so it belongs in any serious financial conversation. None of this is legal advice and we are not lawyers; take advice in Victoria before anything is signed.

If a marriage becomes unsafe, a visa is not a trap

We would rather write this and never have it read than leave it out. The great majority of marriages arranged through families are safe and happy. A small number are not, and in overseas communities the woman in that situation is often the most isolated person in the country — new, with no relatives here, dependent on a husband for her visa, and convinced that speaking up means being sent home. That belief is the thing that keeps people in danger, and it is wrong.

Australian migration law contains a family violence provision. If a person already in Australia holds the provisional stage of a partner visa and the relationship ends because of family violence by the sponsor, the permanent visa can still be granted. She does not have to stay married to stay in the country. The provision has evidentiary requirements and it is not automatic, which is exactly why she should get proper help early rather than wait.

Victoria has the most developed family violence response in the country, built after a royal commission into the subject, and it is used by migrant women every day. In an emergency the number is triple zero. The national counselling and referral line, 1800RESPECT, operates at all hours. In Victoria, safe steps is the twenty-four-hour family violence response service for women, and inTouch Multicultural Centre Against Family Violence works specifically with women from migrant and refugee backgrounds and understands the visa questions that frighten people most. The Magistrates’ Court can make a family violence intervention order, and a woman does not need permanent residence, a lawyer or money to apply for one. Community legal centres and Victoria Legal Aid give free advice.

What a bride’s family can do from Pakistan is simple and it works. Make sure she has her own phone, her own email address and her own bank account, and that she knows her passport and documents are hers to hold. Keep a regular call that does not depend on him. Know the address she lives at and the name of one person in her city who is not from his family. Our Surrey page describes how to read a proposal before it is accepted; this is what to put in place afterwards. And to the men reading: a marriage in which a woman is afraid is not a marriage our faith recognises, whatever the paperwork says.

One of the two deep pools in the country, so filter rather than widen

Most pages on this site tell families to open the search wider. Here the advice is the opposite. Between Melbourne and Sydney sits the great majority of the Pakistani population of Australia, and a family in Melbourne can usually find what it is looking for inside its own city — within a biradari, a sect, a city of origin and a mother tongue. Start with the whole metropolitan area rather than one corridor, because Craigieburn in the north and Clyde North in the south-east are two hours apart in traffic and many families never meet.

Beyond the city, Geelong is an hour down the highway and counts as a designated regional area for migration purposes, which puts more Pakistani families there than its size suggests; the same is true of Ballarat, Bendigo, Shepparton and Mildura, all one to four hours out, where doctors, nurses, pharmacists and shopkeepers are settled on regional visas. Melbourne itself is not a regional area, as our Brisbane page explains for the equivalent line in Queensland, so an address in Geelong may be a visa decision rather than a preference.

Interstate, Sydney is an hour and twenty-five minutes by air with flights every half hour and fares that are often less than a day’s wage, and a Melbourne–Sydney match is completely ordinary. Adelaide is an hour and twenty, Brisbane a little over two hours, and Perth around four, across the continent and three hours behind.

For Pakistan, there are no direct flights; the routes run one stop through the Gulf or South-East Asia and the journey is the better part of a day and a half each way. Victoria does observe daylight saving, so the gap to Pakistan moves between five and six hours across the year, and the evening call home shifts with it. Set your own city to Melbourne and the partner preference country to Pakistan, and the pool opens to every district there — but before anything is agreed, establish the Melbourne side’s status by subclass number, because in this community that single fact decides the shape of the next five years.