We just had our second baby

A photo of here in her cot. Blurred of course.

And it is a girl this time! 

And she was born in a whole new country -  different to where my wife and I were born and different to where my elder kid was born as well. 

And she is actually an Australian citizen!

This is a long story, so I will be splitting this story into several posts.

Remember, we just moved to Australia. We used to live in Japan before that. That's where our elder kid was born. But he is not a Japanese citizen - he is still a Sri Lankan citizen.

My wife got pregnant couple of months before we left Japan. She knew there was a few months’ down time between the point when we left Japan and the point when we would be settled down in Australia. During this time, she would be in Sri Lanka, so it was a great time to be pregnant as she would get all the help from everyone around. Plus, she would get a chance to eat all those tasty food that she missed last time.

Everything went according to plan – my wife getting pregnant that is. I was still a bit weary because I wasn’t all that sure that we would be able to settle down properly in time to have the baby in Australia. Having family here without a job would have been really stressful and it would drain our savings. I could not ask my cousin to let all of us live there (I believe he still would have helped though). But we took the risk. The worst thing that would have happened was to have the baby in Sri Lanka and needing to apply for Child Visa as mentioned here. It would have cost us a lot of money as well as a lot of time, but it still would have worked. And, my wife had made up her mind and there was no way I could change her mind unless I was willing to live with a grumpy wife for a few months.

After moving to Australia, I found a job in no time. Then I moved to an apartment and bought a car. Those were pretty much the prerequisites for my wife to plan the journey here. We had already decided that my parents would travel with her to Australia. It was impossible for my wife to look after Sonath (that’s my older kid) who is passing one of the most mischievous days of a person's life. She would definitely need help after the new baby comes out as well. This is another reason why finding a job was imperative. To get Overseas Tourist visa for my parents, I had to send a sponsorship letter to the embassy saying that I would bear all their expenses here.

Moved to Australia with a Permanent Resident Visa

I did not mention on my blog as to what was going to happen after I moved back to Sri Lanka from Japan. Now you know. I decided to move to Australia.

Why? I have my own reasons, which I do not wish to talk in this post. I will address that topic on a later day. More than anything else, I need to convince myself that I made the right decision.

This post is about the whole story of applying and getting the PR. It is quite a bit of a long read though.

The start

We, obviously, applied for the Australian Permanent Residency while we were in Japan. We applied through Skilled Migration. The whole process started in April 2014, not too long after my kid was born.

I was first going to go through an agent, because I did not want to mess it up. My friend Saman referred me to the agent he used. I talked with him, but there were some issues that I was afraid of which might pop up half way through. The main problem with using an agent is that as he does everything on behalf of us, we have to send him money to his account using some way. We cannot pay him via a credit card, and Japanese banks aren't that easy to deal with. Heck, sending money back to Sri Lanka is a pain, and there are large bank charges to deal with. I could send money to my dad using my NRFC account, and then give him LKR, but it is too much work. But that was probably the way to do it.

But that's when I contacted one of my senior colleagues who had also moved to Australia. She told me that there was no reason to use an agent; everything can be done online, and she had documented the whole process; which was almost identical to mine. Almost, because she did not have to take her family as she was single. However, this not only could saved me some time & money, but I could actually use my credit card to pay for everything. So I decided to drop the agent. He was not too happy about it, as he had to devote some of his precious time to discuss matters with me, and I was not paying him for his time. Well, it was unfortunate and I wish it did not have to happen that way. If he could have suggested me a reasonable way to send the money, I would have still gone with the agent. I hope I did not cause too much of a loss to him anyway.

Skill Evaluation

The first thing I did next was to apply for Skill evaluation. As I had work experience in the field of Software Engineering, I decided to apply as a Software Engineer. To get the skills evaluated, I had to apply to the Australian Computer Society or ACS. They didn't reduce any points for my education as I have an IT degree as well. Even then, the Engineering degree from the University of Moratuwa probably would have qualified fully, as it had many modules in the ICT field. It took about 3 months to receive their evaluation results. This cost me about JPY 50,000. Sadly, they only approved me as skilled for 4 years. You get 5 points for 3 years, 10 points for 5 years and 15 points for 8 years. So I got only 5 points for my skills.