Life In Australia

Immigration stats released in the last week show that Western Australia (Perth) is the most popular state for British immigration to Australia, followed by our very own Queensland. The numbers for 12 months were,

My take on the numbers is that a lot of Poms are choosing smaller cities for quality of life reasons while less than you might expect are heading for Australia’s big two - Sydney (New South Wales) and Melbourne (Victoria).

As 2005 draws to a close, I was thinking about the future - not just mine but my children’s.

Since we arrived in Brisbane, we’ve added to our family and our son is a little Aussie. We wondered though if, legally, he was also British. It turns out that he’s not completely British - he is British by descent. This means he has the right to live and work in Britain as a citizen. If, however, he does not live in Britain for at least three years, his children will have no right to be British or to live in Britain.

We prefer living in Australia but it seems strange to think of our “mother country” disowning people whose family’s association with the British Isles goes back thousands of years simply because their grandparents decided they would prefer to live in Australia.

I suppose that’s the situation many young Australians find themselves in today when they’re looking to work abroad for a few years. Their ancestry is entirely British but they are not British and, unless they follow the same immigration procedures as people whose anscestors have never had any association with Britain, they can never be British.

We came to Australia the official way - playing it totally by the book. Not everyone does though. Funnily enough, the biggest single nationality of illegal workers in Australia is British. Most of them come here on holiday and find the thought of returning to the grey skies of Britain makes them miserable.

So they stay in Australia.

Often they do casual work. There’s a shortage of casual workers and fruit pickers etc here so it’s fair to say that many people turn a blind eye. Not the authorities though. If you’re found out, you are deported and most likely banned from coming back to Australia for a few years.

The typical overstayer is a man aged 31 to 50 or a woman over 60.

According to the Dept. of Immigration, more than 40,000 overstayers came to Australia on visitor visas and most had stayed up to a year longer than they should have. In the last 12 months more than 18,000 overstayers and illegal workers have been deported.