DIAC has finally released legislation on the Post Study Work Rights visa.
The visa will be one of two streams within what used to be called the Skilled Graduate Visa Subclass 485.
That visa is now being renamed and it will be called Temporary Graduate Visa (Subclass 485) and the 2 streams under it will be the Graduate Work Stream and the Post Study Work Stream. The visa will allow students who graduate from certain courses in Australia while holding a Student Visa to stay longer (from 18 months to 4 years) while being granted full time work permission.
The Graduate Work Stream:
It will have the same requirements as the previous Skilled Graduate Visa Subclass 485, and the main ones are as follows:
- Applicants will need to nominate an occupation featured on the Skilled Occupation List (SOL) at the time of lodgement;
- Applicants must obtain a positive Skills Assessment with the authority commissioned for their occupation accordingly;
- Applicants must meet the Australian Study Requirement by having completed a course that awards a Diploma, Advanced Diploma, Bachelor, Masters or Doctorate
* More on this requirement below
The Post Study Work Stream
It will require applicants to:
- Meet the the Australian study requirement by completing a course that awards a Bachelor, a Master or a Doctorate, named here below as Higher Education courses;
- It will not be necessary for applicants to nominate an occupation on the SOL or obtain a positive Skills Assessment. This in practice means you could choose any higher education course, even if its occupation is not in demand on the SOL.
- Now the most controversial requirement: Applicants for this stream must have applied for their first student visa (including subclasses 570, 571, 572, 573, 574, 575, 576 or 580) from 5 November 2011 onwards.
This in practice mean that if you were in Australia with a Student Visa before 5 November 2011, you will not be eligible for this visa.
Even if you were here on a Student Visa as a Secondary Applicant (i.e. your husband was studying and you were on his visa as a dependent), you will not be eligible.
When DIAC first released information about this new visa, back at the end of 2011, they gave the impression that anyone who started their Higher Education course after 5 November 2011, would be eligible to apply.
That was until December 2012, when they released more information about this visa and to everyone’s surprise the requirements exclude students who were here before 5 November 2011.
There has been petitions and pleas with the government but recently in late March the legislation has been confirmed and it is as above.
What DIAC is trying to achieve here is to ensure applicants for this visa are genuine students. Measures to strengthen the integrity of the Student Visa Program have only been implemented after the 5 November 2011 with the introduction of the Genuine Temporary Entrant, the now famous GTE.
In other words, only if you were assessed as a genuine student, likely to return home after your studies, will you be able to take advantage of this visa, which allows you to stay longer… seems contradictory to us.
The common criteria to both streams are: you must be under 50 years of age, must take the IELTS exam and score 6 in every component, pass character and health tests and as above, meet the Australian Study Requirement.
Be careful when assessing if you meet this requirement or not: we recommend you check with a professional if you do, because sometimes you may think that you are satisfy this requirement when you don’t, as well as the other way around.
The Australian Study requirement involves completing one or more courses registered for a minimum of 92 weeks with CRICOS, that were closely related to the nominated occupation (if you had to nominate one) and that awarded a qualification at the minimum level of a Diploma for the Graduate Work Stream or Bachelor for the Post Study Work Stream. Courses must have been completed within a maximum of 6 months before lodging your Subclass 485 visa application.
Once the visa is granted, if you applied for the Graduate Work Stream, your visa will be valid for 18 months, and if you applied under the Post Study Work Stream, your visa will be valid for 2 years if you completed a Bachelor or a Master, 3 years if you completed a Master by Research and 4 years if you completed a Doctorate.
Contact Visa Globe to check your eligibility.