So we finally submitted our application yesterday! YAY us!!
We had read a lot about the Partner Visa on this forum, the Immi website and various other blogs before we started our application but none of those posts dealt with the Online application process which is very new. So I thought I'd give some tips.
[NOTE: we submitted a Defacto Partner Visa application from outside Australia - i.e. visa Subclass 309/100 - so some of these details and forms I mention might be different to yours]
The way the online submission works is:
- Create an Immi Account
- Fill in your forms online
- Pay online via credit card
- you get an acknowledgement email immediately after payment.
- The email above opens a new section in your ImmiAccount that enables you to start submitting your Evidence documents online.
- attach your Evidence docs.
All online 'Proof' documents have to be colour-scans, J-pegs format and less than 500kb otherwise the system doesn't accept them. Setting your DPI to 96 when saving is a help to reduce document size. Some places in the Immi website say that you have submit certified copies and some say you just have to scan in the original documents, so it was a bit contradictory. We scanned our certified copies and attached them.
Here are my tips:
1. Apply for your Criminal Checks (ie Police Clearance/Penal Certificate - whatever your country calls it) NOW. They take ages. And, if you are applying outside Australia you may need one for BOTH partners as you each need them for any country that you have lived in for more than 12 months in the last 10 years.
The medical examinations are not such a big issue as the new online process only requires you to provide proof that you have booked a check, you don't have to actually do the check-up before submitting an application - and it guides through exactly how and where to make a booking.
2. Print out paper versions of your forms by downloading them from the Immi website and use them as a guide to start collecting the information you need. Once you have everything you can simply 'data-capture' your information onto your online application. The reason for this is that the online forms are not indexed - ie to get to Page 8, you need to click "Next" at the bottom of pages 1 to 7 in order to get there. Many of the forms are more than twenty pages. This requires each page to load, then go onto the next one. With the website instability and slowness, trying to log in and get back to the place you were at previously is VERY time-consuming, so try and do it all in one go.
3. Bookmark the login page for your ImmiAccount. The link to create an ImmiAccount is in the Immi website but it's not easy to find. The best way to find it was to Google ImmiAccount, it always comes up first. We probably did this a hundred times before we eventually bookmarked it. You need to keep coming back to your forms to your account to submit more info so you need to find the login page - rather bookmark it now.
4. WRITE DOW your password! Or store it in your computer by clicking "remember this password" as soon as you create the account. You will need it regularly and their Forgot My Password function is NOT simple or quick to respond.
5. Click their SAVE button after every page or section. We found the website was quite slow and highly unstable with pages often freezing or closing by themselves and then the information we had added wasn't stored. These glitches will probably get sorted out eventually but until then … SAVE !! It took us TWELVE HOURS to fill in Form 40SP due to website issues so you need to have patience.
6. There is NO online support. The Immi website has an FAQ section but NO support if you are getting error messages or anything else odd. We spent hours searching the Immi website for a support desk so let me save you the time. If one of your pages gets an error message when submitting a page - and we encountered several - try re-typing information, deleting or closing the page and trying again etc.
7. Your partner cannot submit form 47SP until you have submitted your entire form 40SP. There was a section in one of their guides that made us think that we could each complete our own forms at the same time. So we had both created Immi Accounts and were each completing our forms. However my set of forms kept kicking out a frustrating "data cannot be verified, please check information" error message whenever I tried to submit it. Eventually once my partner had submitted her forms, mine were able to submit. We realised that the applications are electronically linked and the system would not accept the other set of forms until the Applicant had submitted theirs.
8. Something which we hadn't seen mentioned on ANY other blogpost is that the online form asks for ALL your relatives date of birth, marital status AND wedding dates!! (it specifies siblings, step-siblings, siblings-in law, parents, step-parents and children but not in-laws, grandparents, aunts, uncles ) If they are deceased, you need to fill in their date of passing. We thought we had small families until we started adding step-siblings and siblings-in-law! Although we knew most of our families birthdays, it took us several days to contact everyone and get them to send us their wedding dates, then when were filling in our applications, we landed up trying to find their various texts, emails and voicemails replies. Nightmare! So start now and keep a record of their dates on your paper forms as they come in.
9. Another question, which we hadn't seen anyone else write about, asks for both partners to give details of their past relationships. This includes birthdays of your ex's, as well as as the dates you got together and broke up! If you think you has several "uhmm…?" moments when you tried to remember your and your current partners dates, just wait til you have to remember 'that bastard that kissed my best friend in 2002's birthday!! Make sure you WRITE these dates down as you have to fill them in on both partners forms. The online process doesn't allow you to be vague here, it requires DAY, Month and YEAR for every ex. We landed up having to estimate a lot of these dates, particularly as we aren't friends with some of our exes on Facebook and couldn't really remember their birthdays, let alone the dates we broke up. Then two days later when fill in in the hoers partners forms, we realised we had forgotten what we had estimated and will have inconsistancies between the two forms. Although Im sure a sympathetic CO would understand this at interview, it makes be very uncomfortable to have discrepancies.
10. Be organised, have patience and persevere!
Good Luck! (And keep holding thumbs for us!)
We had read a lot about the Partner Visa on this forum, the Immi website and various other blogs before we started our application but none of those posts dealt with the Online application process which is very new. So I thought I'd give some tips.
[NOTE: we submitted a Defacto Partner Visa application from outside Australia - i.e. visa Subclass 309/100 - so some of these details and forms I mention might be different to yours]
The way the online submission works is:
- Create an Immi Account
- Fill in your forms online
- Pay online via credit card
- you get an acknowledgement email immediately after payment.
- The email above opens a new section in your ImmiAccount that enables you to start submitting your Evidence documents online.
- attach your Evidence docs.
All online 'Proof' documents have to be colour-scans, J-pegs format and less than 500kb otherwise the system doesn't accept them. Setting your DPI to 96 when saving is a help to reduce document size. Some places in the Immi website say that you have submit certified copies and some say you just have to scan in the original documents, so it was a bit contradictory. We scanned our certified copies and attached them.
Here are my tips:
1. Apply for your Criminal Checks (ie Police Clearance/Penal Certificate - whatever your country calls it) NOW. They take ages. And, if you are applying outside Australia you may need one for BOTH partners as you each need them for any country that you have lived in for more than 12 months in the last 10 years.
The medical examinations are not such a big issue as the new online process only requires you to provide proof that you have booked a check, you don't have to actually do the check-up before submitting an application - and it guides through exactly how and where to make a booking.
2. Print out paper versions of your forms by downloading them from the Immi website and use them as a guide to start collecting the information you need. Once you have everything you can simply 'data-capture' your information onto your online application. The reason for this is that the online forms are not indexed - ie to get to Page 8, you need to click "Next" at the bottom of pages 1 to 7 in order to get there. Many of the forms are more than twenty pages. This requires each page to load, then go onto the next one. With the website instability and slowness, trying to log in and get back to the place you were at previously is VERY time-consuming, so try and do it all in one go.
3. Bookmark the login page for your ImmiAccount. The link to create an ImmiAccount is in the Immi website but it's not easy to find. The best way to find it was to Google ImmiAccount, it always comes up first. We probably did this a hundred times before we eventually bookmarked it. You need to keep coming back to your forms to your account to submit more info so you need to find the login page - rather bookmark it now.
4. WRITE DOW your password! Or store it in your computer by clicking "remember this password" as soon as you create the account. You will need it regularly and their Forgot My Password function is NOT simple or quick to respond.
5. Click their SAVE button after every page or section. We found the website was quite slow and highly unstable with pages often freezing or closing by themselves and then the information we had added wasn't stored. These glitches will probably get sorted out eventually but until then … SAVE !! It took us TWELVE HOURS to fill in Form 40SP due to website issues so you need to have patience.
6. There is NO online support. The Immi website has an FAQ section but NO support if you are getting error messages or anything else odd. We spent hours searching the Immi website for a support desk so let me save you the time. If one of your pages gets an error message when submitting a page - and we encountered several - try re-typing information, deleting or closing the page and trying again etc.
7. Your partner cannot submit form 47SP until you have submitted your entire form 40SP. There was a section in one of their guides that made us think that we could each complete our own forms at the same time. So we had both created Immi Accounts and were each completing our forms. However my set of forms kept kicking out a frustrating "data cannot be verified, please check information" error message whenever I tried to submit it. Eventually once my partner had submitted her forms, mine were able to submit. We realised that the applications are electronically linked and the system would not accept the other set of forms until the Applicant had submitted theirs.
8. Something which we hadn't seen mentioned on ANY other blogpost is that the online form asks for ALL your relatives date of birth, marital status AND wedding dates!! (it specifies siblings, step-siblings, siblings-in law, parents, step-parents and children but not in-laws, grandparents, aunts, uncles ) If they are deceased, you need to fill in their date of passing. We thought we had small families until we started adding step-siblings and siblings-in-law! Although we knew most of our families birthdays, it took us several days to contact everyone and get them to send us their wedding dates, then when were filling in our applications, we landed up trying to find their various texts, emails and voicemails replies. Nightmare! So start now and keep a record of their dates on your paper forms as they come in.
9. Another question, which we hadn't seen anyone else write about, asks for both partners to give details of their past relationships. This includes birthdays of your ex's, as well as as the dates you got together and broke up! If you think you has several "uhmm…?" moments when you tried to remember your and your current partners dates, just wait til you have to remember 'that bastard that kissed my best friend in 2002's birthday!! Make sure you WRITE these dates down as you have to fill them in on both partners forms. The online process doesn't allow you to be vague here, it requires DAY, Month and YEAR for every ex. We landed up having to estimate a lot of these dates, particularly as we aren't friends with some of our exes on Facebook and couldn't really remember their birthdays, let alone the dates we broke up. Then two days later when fill in in the hoers partners forms, we realised we had forgotten what we had estimated and will have inconsistancies between the two forms. Although Im sure a sympathetic CO would understand this at interview, it makes be very uncomfortable to have discrepancies.
10. Be organised, have patience and persevere!
Good Luck! (And keep holding thumbs for us!)