To Do

Well the passports were sent off last week for Tom and Moo, hopefully we should receive them back at the end of this week or at the beginning of next week. That's all we have done though, still need to sort out the house and get it ready to sell. Next door have just put their house on the market, it went on the web last Wednesday and had approx 4 viewings on Saturday which is a good start for them, hopefully they will generate enough interest to be able to sell there's and ours :-)

This morning we got up to an email from from a lady called Maria at E&Y, who have received instructions from SMS to assist us, in obtaining a temporary residence (Subclass 457) visa to work for them in Australia. The Subclass 457 Visa Application Process involves three steps:

(1) A business sponsorship application by SMS;
(2) A nomination application by SMS in regards to our position; and
(3) A visa application by the nominee (us).

A Business Sponsorship application will not be required as SMS has already been granted Business Sponsor status by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

E&Y will liaise with SMS regarding the nomination element, which relates to the position that Jason will fill and the salary he will be paid.

For the Visa Application, they included a visa questionnaire which is used to capture the required personal information. The questionnaire also contains a list of the supporting documents that we will need to provide to E&Y. They will then use the details from this questionnaire to complete the relevant visa application form. They have asked us to complete the questionnaire and get this back to them as soon as possible and not delay while we wait for the documents that they have requested and need for the application. We will start to complete the Q, but can't complete and return until we have the passports back.

We will need to undertake health examinations as part of the visa application and E&Y will send us the details shortly to tell us where we need to go and the references to provide.

Once they have all the info and the meds completed they will then prepare our application based on our completed questionnaire and the documents provided. Apparently they expect the visa finalisation to take approximately 8 weeks from the time that our visa application is lodged with the Department of Immigration. Will be a nice New Year present for us :-) But we really do need to get our fingers out between now and then.