ojc80

I think the trip took about 2 hours so if my wife's time was worth $400 an hour then I'd be one staying at home changing nappies and burping babies, not her! Seriously though, the only reason we needed to visit the office was to find out what the procedure is. We made the application ourselves directly via email, as can anyone else in our situation. As I said the applications were processed in 3 days and I have the grant notifications in my inbox. So yes, I am counting chickens, not unhatched eggs

Thanks for the tips. In the end my wife visited the DIBP office in Sydney, who told us what the process is. It's actually very simple and easily done yourself, assuming the child was born in Australia, and you haven't yet left the country with him or her. For anyone else who needs to know: - Get Form 1022 and fill it in - Get scans of: - The child's birth cert - The child's passport if you have it. - The parents passports - A copy of the visa grant notification for your 457 - Email everything to 457@border.gov.au. Include an explanation of what you need and your circumstances. If it's urgent, then tell them. Our request was processed in about 3 working days. When you email the request, you receive a response with lots of helpful information on how to do various things related to your 457 visa, including this information. It's a shame the information isn't available on the web, so I'm posting this in the hope that it will help someone else in our situation. One agent quoted us $800 to do this for us, which is frankly a huge amount of money to fill in a simple form and send an email. About 15 minutes work in total!

My wife recently had twins (born here in Sydney) who we want to bring back to the UK for Christmas. We have birth certs & passports for them but only realised last night that we need to register them against my 457 before leaving the country. I couldn't find any info from IMMI about this, and I just wasted a lot of time on the phone waiting to be put through! There are lots of forum posts which all seem to contradict each other. I'm hoping the helpful people on here can help me out with three questions! 1. Do I need a letter from my employer supporting the addition of the twins to my 457? 2. What process should I follow to do this? I think I need certified copies of all our passports and the twins birth certificates. Anything else? Do I need to fill in a specific form? 3. What's the fastest process to register the twins? Can I go into the Sydney office and have it done straight away? In order to get back for Christmas we need to get this done as quick as we can, so I'm really hoping you can help us out and point us in the right direction. Thanks!