Want an Australian Partner Visa? Start with a Tourist Visa? Bad idea!

Should you get a Tourist Visa first? Then start later on the Partner Visa?

Only if you want to make life difficult for yourselves, and maybe risk a visa refusal

Jeff Harvie and the Down Under Visa team have been doing this for a lot of years! Down Under Visa have brought thousands of couples to Australia from South East Asia over the years. Mostly from the Philippines, but we help increasing numbers of couples where the visa applicant is from China, Thailand, Vietnam or Cambodia.

And what this means is we see a lot of success….and we also see failures when people go it alone after talking to their mate, or their relative, or that minimal-care-no-responsibility Facebook group run by Steve and Maribeth based on their own visa application! One application, and they feel qualified to advise others! It’s not even LEGAL to do that!

So why not get a Tourist Visa first? Then start the Partner Visa application later?

We get a lot of clients coming to us with two scenarios:

1. They want to get an Australian Partner Visa for the love of their life. They want to be together permanently. They want her in Australia as soon as possible, and they do not want her to leave. So yes, Partner Visa is a good idea. But they say “I’ll get her a Tourist Visa (Visitor Visa) then we’ll start the Partner Visa later on when she’s settled in Australia for a while”.
2. Or she’s already in Australia on a Tourist Visa. They may or may not have married at this stage. Sometimes she’s already pregnant! And they want to start and lodge an Onshore Partner Visa before she needs to leave (which is in 6 or 8 weeks!!!)

And I think “Why didn’t you watch this video or read this article, or ask my advice before you did this?” Yes, I DO actually care about couples getting together securely, and hate seeing imminent disasters!

It’s definitely NOT a good idea to get a tourist visa and try to commence, prepare and lodge a partner visa during a 3 month tourist visa stay. And before you ask about 6 and 12 month tourist visas, in reality they don’t exist. They definitely don’t grant them to applicants from the less affluent countries in South East Asia.

Reasons?

1. You will need to get a lot of documents from the Philippines, China, Thailand, Vietnam or Cambodia for the application, and these are extremely difficult to obtain from inside Australia. (And no, there is not a standard list that we can tell you now, as each application is different).
2. And you will have plenty of other work to do to complete the application, as this is a major visa application. Nothing quick or simple about it.
3. So you risk running out of time and having to return to the home country without a lodged application, or lodging a very poor one which is missing essential items.

So you run the visa real risk of messing the entire thing up, instead of just making a start when you knew you wanted to be together. Leaving things to the last minute is not a good idea!

What should you do with an Onshore Partner Visa application?

1. Start early! Don’t put it off!
2. Ignore the well-meaning advice from friends and relatives, and especially the We-Did-Our-Own-Visa Facebook group owners!
3. Get a FREE VISA ASSESSMENT with Down Under Visa. The best five minutes you will ever spend in this scary migration process!
4. And let us lay out a plan for you that will work!

Jeff Harvie is a Registered Migration Agent from Australia, but resident in Philippines since 2010 with his Filipina wife Mila and large extended family. Experienced with the Philippines culture, cross-cultural relationships and bureaucracy as well as Australian visas and Australian Migration Law, he writes with authority and fortunately with enough informality and humour that the average Aussie gets it!