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Australian Visas

New Zealand citizens can live in Australia without explicitly applying for or being granted permanent residence. Upon entering Australia with your New Zealand passport, a Special Category Visa (SCV) is electronically assigned, and nothing else needs to be done to live and work in Australia indefinitely. Some exceptions do apply, but are not common.

The Australian Immigration web site features this fact sheet about New Zealanders in Australia, which discusses the special visas granted to New Zealanders to allow us to live and work there.

Another excellent source of information about special visas granted to New Zealanders travelling to Australia is this page of the Australian High Commission, NZ website.

When Is It Necessary To Apply For A Permanent Residence Visa?

If your situation is not typical, you might need to apply for permanent residency. Our situation of simply wanting to live and work in Melbourne did not require this, but you will need to if you:

• Intend to apply for unemployment or sickness benefits. These benefits cannot be received until two years after successfully applying for permanent residence in Australia.
• Intend to become an Australian citizen.
• Intend to sponsor family members in their applications for permanent residency.

Becoming An Australian Citizen

Although New Zealand citizens can live and work in Australia indefinitely, you must still apply to become an Australian citizen. As we are yet to apply for Australian citizenship, we can't offer any personal insight into the process, except to say that you will almost certainly have to apply for a permanent residence visa first. You can become an Australian citizen without losing your status as a New Zealand citizen.

The best place to start for more information specific to New Zealand citizens who want to become Australian citizens is this page of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

Still have questions about visa requirements in Australia? Check out our FAQ page where you can ask questions that can be answered by us and other readers.

Moving Your Money To Australia

The goal here is simple: to get as many Australian dollars for your New Zealand dollars as possible. This is how we did it, and it worked out well for us:

• Please, please do not take large sums of cash or travellers' cheques! You are literally wasting money by doing so. The best way to convert anything other than the smallest sums of money is to send it via telegraphic transfer (TT).
• Open an Australian bank account before leaving New Zealand so that you can minimise the amount of cash you need to take with you.
• Don't use a bank to convert your money! Use a specialist foreign exchange company to get a better exchange rate and to avoid high bank fees.

Of course, you can wait until you get to Australia before opening an account. This will be easier if you prefer a bank that doesn't allow you to open an account online from New Zealand. You can still use the advice below about converting your New Zealand dollars to Australian dollars as it isn't dependent on opening an account before you leave New Zealand.

Opening An Australian Bank Account Before You Leave

The key criteria here are the ease with which you can open a new account without actually being in Australia, and minimising the fees associated with getting your newly converted Australian dollars into your account. You can always switch banks once you become familiar with the great and not-so-great aspects of the one you choose first!

When it comes to opening a new account without actually being in Australia, there seems to be quite a big difference between the banks. Some will let you do it pretty much all online, others want you to fill out paper forms and mail them, and yet others don't want to know you until you are actually in Australia. Being internet junkies, we preferred the banks who let you do it all online. Paper forms are so 2001!

Commonwealth Bank

In our experience, the easiest bank to open account with from New Zealand is the Commonwealth Bank because they provide a convenient online application process for people moving to Australia.

The Commonwealth Bank owns the ASB bank here in New Zealand. We banked with ASB in NZ, so this helped make up our minds to choose the Commonwealth Bank.

Opening an account with the Commonwealth Bank involved these steps:

1. We visited the moving to Australia section of the Commonwealth Bank website. There you can complete the online form to indicate that you want to open an account with them.
2. Someone from the bank called us the next day around 6pm and we discussed our requirements and arrival date etc to make sure we were opening the right account for our needs.
3. Our account was opened within 48 hours. Once your account is opened, you can use it to deposit funds but you cannot withdraw any funds until you have presented ID at a branch after your arrival in Australia. For our purposes of using the bank account as somewhere to send our Australian dollars, this was all we needed.

If you are opening a joint account, be aware that both of you will need to go into a branch and present ID when you arrive before you can make payments from it etc.

ANZ Bank

The ANZ also has a convenient online application process for people moving to Australia. Visit this moving to Australia page of their web site for more information and to apply online. As with the Commonwealth Bank process, you need to present your ID at a branch in Australia before you can withdraw funds from the account.

If you have personally opened an account with the ANZ this way before leaving NZ, please email us to let us know how it went and we will update this guide to make it more useful to those who prefer to bank with the ANZ.

NAB - National Australia Bank

When we looked at opening an account with NAB while we were still in New Zealand, we couldn't find a process like that offered by the Commonwealth Bank or the ANZ (unless you are a student, in which case it does seem possible). If you know of a convenient way to open a transaction account with NAB from New Zealand, please email us and we will update this guide.

Westpac

Apparently Westpac has recently added this new facility for opening an Australian bank account online. We haven't had any experience with this ourselves, but have been advised that it is now available.

Please email us if you opened an account with Westpac before leaving New Zealand and we will share your experiences here.

Converting Your Money To Australian Dollars

Surprisingly few people seem to realise that there is quite a lot of choice when converting money into another currency. Many people just go with their first instinct - to use a bank. Don't do that! Unless you happen to be a very important customer, you will not get a good deal from your bank. Typically they will give you a pretty bad rate, and then charge you a commission on top of that!

The reason you want a bank account before converting your money is to avoid dealing with cash. Conversion rates for cash are often much worse than when dealing with electronic funds. For this reason, you should aim to convert as little physical cash as possible and send the converted funds directly to your new bank account.

Depending on how much money you are converting, you can save yourself hundreds, or even thousands of dollars by using a specialist foreign exchange company. We used Elldridge Lynch (they have since rebranded to Currency Online), a New Zealand based specialist foreign exchange company, because we could get a much better rate, we paid no commission, and we could do everything online. Just by choosing to use Currency Online instead of a bank, we saved a few hundred dollars. There are other specialist providers too, but we chose Currency Online because of the added convenience of being able to do it all online.

Here's the basic process we went through to convert our money, once we had our Aussie bank account opened:

1. Open an account with Currency Online. It doesn't cost a thing, and you don't need to do regular transactions with them. You'll need to send electronic copies of your ID to complete the process. Just scan or take a photo of your passport (or drivers license, etc) and email them as per the instructions they give you.
2. Once your account is open, log in and create yourself as the receiver of the Australian funds (this is referred to as creating a beneficiary). Use your new Aussie bank account details to have the Australian dollars paid directly into your account.
3. Convert your money online or over the phone. You can do this at any time between 7:30AM Monday and midnight Friday (New Zealand time). Pay the New Zealand dollars your are converting into the Currency Online bank account (instructions are given on the confirmation of your currency exchange contract). You can pay the NZ dollars online if you have online banking, or simply credit the Currency Online account using phone banking or at a branch if you don't.
4. Your Australian dollars will appear in your bank account, less any telegraphic transfer (TT) fees the bank has charged you to receive the funds.

If you need any help at any stage throughout the process, call them toll free on 0508 399 399. Joel is particularly helpful.

That's really all there is to it. You might have just saved yourself enough to cover one weeks rent in your new place in Australia, just by not using your bank!

Still have questions about moving your money to Australia? Check out our FAQ page where you can ask questions that can be answered by us and other readers.

Finding A Job

As a New Zealand citizen you can live and work in Australia without specifically applying for any type of work visa. Your Special Category Visa (SCV) that is electronically assigned when you use your passport to enter Australia is all you need to both live and work in Australia.

The most popular job site in Australia seems to be Seek Australia (much as Seek NZ is in New Zealand). Another site called My Career also offers a good range of job opportunities.

Tax In Australia

The current individual tax rates for the 2007/08 Australian financial year (1 July - 30 June) are:

Taxable Income	Tax
$1 – $6,000	Nil
$6,001 – $30,000	15c for each $1 over $6,000
$30,001 – $75,000	$3,600 plus 30c for each $1 over $30,000
$75,001 – $150,000	$17,100 plus 40c for each $1 over $75,000
$150,001 and over	$47,100 plus 45c for each $1 over $150,000

The Australian equivalent of an IRD number is a Tax File Number (TFN) from the Australia Taxation Office (which is the Australian version of the Inland Revenue Department).

You can apply for a Tax File Number online on the Australian Taxation Office website. As a New Zealand citizen you can apply for a TFN once you are present in Australia.

Applying for a TFN online takes approximately 20 minutes. You will need to provide your passport or travel document number, a postal address in Australia (to which your TFN will be sent), your legal name and other names you use or have used, and contact details for yourself or your preferred contact person. Once you have applied, your TFN will be sent to you in the post and will take about 1 - 2 weeks to arrive.

If you can't or don't want to apply for a TFN online, see this page of the ATO site for alternative application methods.

Still have questions about working in Australia? Check out our FAQ page where you can ask questions that can be answered by us and other readers.

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Finding A Place To Live

Again, we relied heavily on the web to find somewhere to live in Australia - Melbourne, in our case. We wanted a place to rent, and we primarily used Realestate.com.au to create a shortlist of places. Regardless of which city in Australia you are moving to, the good places will be snapped up quickly so it doesn't make much sense to be seriously looking for places until a few days or a week or two before you leave.

We originally planned for one of us to go to Melbourne two weeks before our big move to finalise a place to live. We thought this would help because we would then have an address to send our belongings to when we were packing them up. After being advised by a few international removals companies that our stuff would take up to 6 weeks to actually reach our new place by the time the Australian customs process was taken into account, we decided to scrap the idea of one person making an early trip. Besides, if you choose a place your significant other isn't too happy with, will you be able to live it down? ;)

Renting? Beware the Competition!

Perhaps the biggest surprise for us was how competitive the Melbourne rental market was right at the time we were looking for a place to live. Typical! It does vary though, of course, depending on the time of year. Locals tell us that it is more competitive during the Winter months, easier in Spring and then tougher again at the start of the academic year. Of course, it will also depend on the rent bracket you are looking in. We originally started in the $300 - $350 per week bracket, as that is what we were paying in Christchurch. This quickly changed after we learned that we would have to pay more to get something like we had in New Zealand. So now we're paying $450 per week, but we don't need a car, so it balances out somewhat.

We had hoped to find a place within a week, but that turned out to be completely unrealistic. In part, this was because we were used to Christchurch being such a tiny place and therefore relatively easy to get from one side to the other in no time at all. In Melbourne, we managed to look at 2 or 3 places in a day, at most. This might have been bad planning on our part, but we wanted to take a good look at the different suburbs of Melbourne to be sure we were living where we wanted to be.

In the end, it took us two weeks to find a place and move in. We found our place through an agent listing on Realestate.com.au. Thankfully, we didn't have to pay a letting fee unlike the usual situation when an agent manages a rental property back in Christchurch. Letting fees just don't seem to be common practice here, but your experience might differ. We did have to pay 4 weeks rent as bond and 4 weeks rent in advance though, which meant a whopping deduction from our bank account of AUD$3,900. Ouch.

One thing to keep in mind is that you have to pay for water (at least in Melbourne). This was a new experience for us we didn't have to do so in Christchurch. The cost of power was a surprise though - we're paying about 25% less for it in Melbourne than we were in Christchurch, and only $19 to get connected with no bond (although some companies do require a bond).

We don't know if this seasonal difference is true in places other than Melbourne, but it might be of some use to you for whichever city/town you are moving to (and let us know if you have a different experience to ours).

Australian Tenancy Laws

This is where we were firmly reminded that Australia is quite a lot bigger than New Zealand and has those things called states with different laws etc. So when looking for legislation that applies to the city or town you're moving to, you will of course need to refer to the governing laws of the relevant state (or territory).

Still have questions about finding a place to live in Australia? Check out our FAQ page where you can ask questions that can be answered by us and other readers.

Shipping Your Stuff To Australia

This was the most uncertain aspect for us because we had never moved any of our stuff overseas before. So, starting from scratch, we employed our trusty friend Google for a bit of help. We really wanted to start with a rough idea of how much it was going to cost so that we could decide whether to take all our bits and pieces with us, or to take the bare minimum and just spend an afternoon at IKEA Melbourne buying all the stuff we left behind (and probably save money by doing so).

Unless you have bucketloads of cash, shipping the majority of your stuff by air isn't going to be an option. Besides, container ships don't take that long to get from New Zealand to Australia (our stuff took just over 3 weeks in the end). With that decision made, the next thing to think about is whether you intend to pack your belongings yourself or have the professional movers do it all. Note that if you intend to pack your belongings yourself, you might find it a lot harder, or impossible, to get a reasonable insurance premium for your valuable items. This was what we found at least.

To get an accurate quote to decide if it might be cost effective to pack things yourself, you need to give the moving companies a good idea of the volume and types of things you are going to be moving. We found that Crown Relocations had this very useful online tool for getting an accurate quote. You basically pick the rooms that contain the stuff you will be taking with you, and then go through each room telling Crown how many of each type of appliance or other possession are in that room. You can also specify the number of boxes that you will need to pack loose bits and pieces into.

At the end of the process, an email is sent to both you and Crown summarising the items you want to move with you. You will also be given login details so that you can return and modify the list you compiled, just in case you find that you've forgotten one or two things (or 30, in our case).

The Crown tool is great for going through the process quickly just to get a rough idea of how much it is going to cost to get someone to pack and ship all of your stuff for you. You can then use this list as the basis for getting a quote from several moving companies, if you want to shop around and get the most competitive price you can. It works too - we saved just over $700 on the price originally quoted to us by Crown Relocations just by going back to them with a more competitive quote from another mover. Based on the inventory below, we ended up paying NZ$1,600 (insurance was an additional $530) for Crown to come to our home and pack everything for us, ship it to Melbourne, clear it through Australian Customs, and deliver it to our new home and unpack everything. We can highly recommend Crown - they were professionals in every respect and we had no issues at all. The moving side of our big shift to Australia was made very easy by them.

Here's the inventory of items we submitted to different international moving companies for a quote:

So you can see we didn't take heaps of stuff, but it still cost us a reasonable amount of money to take our belongings with us - although less than to replace it, for sure. You'll note that we didn't take anything very big. The single biggest item was the queen mattress, as we sold our larger appliances, lounge suite etc. If you are planning on selling your stuff too and replacing it when you get to Australia, expect to be able to replace the types of things you can get at IKEA for less than what you might have paid for them in New Zealand if a) you don't mind shopping at IKEA - it's not for everyone, and b) you didn't get a bargain on your original stuff in the first place.

Still have questions about shipping your stuff to Australia? Check out our FAQ page where you can ask questions that can be answered by us and other readers.

Health Care In Australia

Like New Zealand, Australia has both public and private health care systems. The public health services in Australia are provided by Medicare Australia, an Australian Government agency.

Public Health Care

Australian taxpayers fund the public health system, just as NZ taxpayers do in New Zealand. There is a specific levy in Australia called the Medicare Levy that is paid by each taxpayer.

As a New Zealander living in Australia you are entitled to free emergency hospital care but generally must pay full price for all non-hospital treatment (medicines, doctor visits, etc) unless you hold a Medicare card. Being a New Zealand citizen residing in Australia qualifies you for enrolment in the Medicare program, so you will want to make sure you do this soon after arriving in Australia.

Even if you don't apply for Medicare until after you have been in Australia for a while, you are entitled to retrospectively claim a wide variety of medical expenses incurred since you arrived in Australia, so long as they fall under the Medciare umbrella.

See this page of the Medicare Australia site for the latest information on the eligibility requirements for the Medicare scheme.

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