Going Down Under?

© John White

If you have either followed this blog or know me person you will know that, since 2009, Cati and I have had an application to emigrate to Australia pending. What started out as something that would take between 12-18 months has now stretched to two years. This has mainly been down to changes made by Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) to the priorities of certain visas. In any case we’ve slowly moved down the priority list until we hit the bottom which, in the current system, is Category 4.

At the end of last year I was, to say the least, a bit tired of waiting and thanks to some posts on a forum I frequent related to emigration to Australia (Poms in Oz) I realised that one category (2), had not yet been applicable to anyone. Category 2 was for State Sponsored migration and, due to elections, the lists that would apply to these applications had not yet been released nor finalised. So I waited and then slowly but surely each State released their lists and I checked them all to see if Cat’s nominated occupation appeared on any of their lists. In the end only one State had her occupation on, Australian Capital Territory (ACT) or basically Canberra.

So we had a look at Canberra, researched what it was like and so on and decided that it would be quite a nice place to live. It has many parks, lots of cycle paths, is (relatively) close to both the sea and the mountains and, more importantly, would have jobs for the both of us. With that in mind we decided that we would apply to ACT for State Sponsorhip, we did this in March this year, we got a response this month… they said yes! It was a big moment for the both of us; after 2 years of pretty much zero movement our application finally had some traction. Not only that our application would now leap out of the quagmire that is Category 4 in to Category 2 where our average time to completion gets slashed from “sometime” to between 2-12 months.

There’s still a long way to go I guess. We’re expecting to be asked to provide more evidence to DIAC as our application is two years old and we’ve also still got to get a case officer who will, at some point, ask us to get medicals and police checks done. However being granted State Sponsorship has been a big thing for us and slowly but surely the reality that, by this time next year, we could realistically be in Australia is setting in. I’ve been rather excited and a wee bit anxious for things to start really moving along but I’ve/we’ve waited a long time for this so I can stand wait a little longer for things to happen. I guess in may ways though I just want to have everything done and hopefully a visa in our hands so we can start planning the next step and concentrate on getting things sorted rather than still having the uncertainty of not knowing hanging around.

As a Guinness advert once said “here’s to waiting.”