I absolutely love my home here in rural-ish North Yorkshire. We live on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors, less than an hour away from the most gorgeous Yorkshire coastline imaginable and honestly couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
I would be lying however if I didn’t enjoy having a nosy at how the “other half’ live. I’m a fan of trawling around Right Move to see inside other properties and even looking at other countries. Friends of ours are seriously looking into emigrating to Australia and I have to say I had no idea how much of a minefield emigrating is.
Emigrating Should Be Easy in 2015 – Right?
I thought that when it came to emigrating that it was a case of getting a visa, filling in some forms and then planning your accommodation and your trip. It turns out there is a lot more to it.
Finding a job in Australia for example could be fairly easy if you know someone over there. You could interview over Skype, via email, be accepted and quite literally the job’s a good ‘un. That is until you realise that you need permits to work and that there is a whole load of ( I think rather confusing) red tape to cut through.
I did watch something once (a rare jaunt into the world of weekday day-time TV) which showed a family moving to Australia and the mother, a very highly qualified nurse in the UK was not able to work as a nurse in Oz for months as her registration had be checked and transferred or some such thing. She hadn’t realised this and thankfully was able to work as a carer in the same place that offered her a nursing position, albeit at a much lower wage, until she got the all clear but still! Something like that has to be a blow, especially when you consider that the last thing you want is an unexpected cut in income on arriving in a new country.
Your Emigrating to Australia Checklist
Out of pure nosiness I decided as part of this post to include a checklist of everything you need to apply for, everything you needed to get permission for and everything that had to be legally completed before being allowed to move to Australia. I couldn’t find one. It would appear that the process is not only complicated but shrouded in mystery. I’ve no idea whether our friends have hunted down information and gone through the process themselves or whether they’ve sought help from those in the know, such as Legal Vision who have the expertise in dealing with Australian emigration matters. I know which way we’d go!
I have to wonder actually whether the process is so difficult so as to really make it clear to people how big a thing moving to the other side of the world actually is and to give them time to fully consider their decision and how they’ll manage away from “home”.
Would We Ever Emigrate?
Don’t get me wrong, I think the idea of moving to another country sounds like an amazing opportunity and an incredibly exciting idea. For me though I think that aside from leaving family and the place I love behind being the primary idea killer that the complicated process would turn me off the idea. It isn’t just gaining access and being allowed to work, there would be transferring finances, leaving the NHS and working out how to register for services elsewhere, gaining access to school, working out rules for self-employment for me etc. If we were ever to consider it we would need a specialist to help, especially with the legal side as you wouldn’t want to get it wrong.
Despite it being a minefield there are of course some fabulous reasons for emigrating. Have you done it? Would you consider it? I’d love to hear!
