Living in Australia the Expat's Guide

With its golden beaches, stunning and vast interior, famous outdoor lifestyle and a really good quality of living, Australia still remains one of the top destinations for Brits who want to live overseas.

A continent in its own right, Australia still excites the imagination for many and offers the promise of new adventures and a fresh start for those looking to make a change in their life.  If you are under 45 and have a skill, or you have family already living Down Under, you can apply to live there, but once you get to Australia what are the most important things to organise?

In this article we’ll look at living in Australia and setting up your new life there for would be expatriates planning a new life in the sun.

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Ask anyone thinking of living in Australia to tell you the name of the nation’s capital city and chances are they’ll tell you that it’s Sydney.  Well it’s not!  For those wishing to emigrate to Australia you need to brush up on your facts, the capital city is Canberra!  It’s a bustling city of 336,000 inhabitants set in the Australian Capital Territory and surrounded by New South Wales.  Canberra is 150 kilometres inland from the pacific ocean, and just a 3 hour drive from Sydney, 2 ½ hours from Australia’s snow fields and a couple of hours from some of Australia’s best beaches.

So what’s the attraction for expats wanting to emigrate to Australia?  Why are they going to choose Canberra as their place to live down under?
Most importantly for expats emigrating to Australia, Canberra boasts one of the lowest levels of unemployment in the nation, with the median figure consistently under 3%.  Put that beside the fact that workers in Canberra receive the highest average wages and employers are crying out for skilled and professional labour, and you can see why so many expats relocating to Australia choose Canberra as their final destination.

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The introduction of a rigid and structured points system has made emigrating to Australia far more difficult than back in the days of the “ten pound pom” when a desperate government would allow any reasonably healthy, criminally unhindered European to enter Oz with a view to starting a new life in Australia.

Now, anyone between the ages of 18-45 can live and work in Australia providing they can accumulate enough points to get a visa.  Points are allocated according to occupation, age and proficiency in English for example.
 
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics census of 2006, 24% of the Australian population were born outside of Australia; the largest group of 1,153,264 having been born in the British Isles, but if you don’t get the required points you won’t be emigrating to Australia!

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