Australia

Australia has no visa waiver. Section 42(1) of the Migration Act 1958 forbids a non-citizen to travel to Australia at all without a visa already in effect, and the only general exception in that subsection is for a New Zealand citizen producing a New Zealand passport. What looks like visa-free travel for a British, Japanese, Korean, American or Canadian passport is an Electronic Travel Authority or an eVisitor - real visas, granted electronically before departure, each lasting twelve months and allowing three months in the country after each entry. Which passports qualify is not in the Regulations: regulations 1.11B and 1.11C delegate the lists to instruments made by the Minister, and those instruments name thirty-three kinds of passport for the Electronic Travel Authority and thirty-six for the eVisitor. The two lists are not the same list, and the clearest place they part company is the United Kingdom.

The definition that decides Australian tax residence for an individual is still in the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936, section 6(1), and it has four limbs that operate together rather than in sequence. The opening words - a person who resides in Australia - are the test, and the three paragraphs that follow extend it rather than replace it. Only one of them counts days, and even that one is defeasible: more than one-half of the year of income makes you a resident unless the Commissioner is satisfied both that your usual place of abode is outside Australia and that you do not intend to take up residence here. Being a resident is not the end of the question. A person who holds a temporary visa and is not an Australian resident for social security purposes is a temporary resident under the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997, and a temporary resident's foreign income is non-assessable non-exempt income. That is where the Trans-Tasman arrangement reappears: whether a New Zealander in Australia is a temporary resident turns on a date in February 2001.

Medicare benefits are payable for a professional service rendered to an eligible person, and an eligible person is an Australian resident or an eligible overseas representative. The definition of Australian resident in section 3(1) of the Health Insurance Act 1973 is not the tax definition and not the social security definition: it requires residing in Australia plus one of a short list of statuses, and the third item on that list is a New Zealand citizen who is lawfully present in Australia. No qualifying period, no permanent visa, no waiting. Holders of ordinary temporary visas are outside it unless they have applied for a permanent visa and clear a set of exclusions. For visitors, section 7 authorises reciprocal agreements with other countries under which a visitor is treated as an eligible person - and it names no country at all.

Citizenship by conferral under section 21(2) of the Australian Citizenship Act 2007 needs permanent residence at both ends of the application, the general residence requirement in section 22, a test, good character and an intention to go on living in Australia. The residence requirement is two periods at once: four years present in Australia immediately before the application with no time as an unlawful non-citizen, and twelve months of that four years spent as a permanent resident. Absences are tolerated up to twelve months in the four years and up to ninety days in the final twelve. What changed the shape of this for New Zealanders is not the Act but an instrument made under it: section 5(2) lets the Minister determine that holders of a Special Category visa are permanent residents, and the determination in force does exactly that from 1 July 2023. A New Zealander on a Special Category visa is a permanent resident for citizenship purposes without ever holding a permanent visa.

The ordinary way to work in Australia as a non-citizen is the Skills in Demand visa, Subclass 482, and it is a sponsored visa in the strict sense: the applicant cannot start the process. An approved work sponsor nominates an occupation, the nomination is approved under section 140GB of the Migration Act 1958, and only then can the visa criteria be met. The applicant needs twelve months of full-time-equivalent work in the occupation or a related field within the previous five years, the skills and qualifications the Minister considers necessary, a language test where one is specified, and health insurance for the stay. The visa lasts for the period of stay proposed in the nomination, with a fixed five years for a holder of a Hong Kong or British National (Overseas) passport. The salary floor sits on the nomination rather than on the visa, and this is where the published law and the practice part company: the Migration Regulations 1994 as compiled on 1 July 2026 print 73,150 dollars and 135,000 dollars, and the Department applies 79,423 and 146,576 to nominations lodged from 1 July 2026. Both are correct, because regulation 5.42A replaces the figures by operation of law and publishes the replacement on the Department's website instead of in the Regulations.

Australia belongs to no free-movement bloc. The one arrangement that behaves like one is with New Zealand, and the striking thing about the Australian half of it is where it lives. Section 32 of the Migration Act 1958 creates a class of temporary visas called special category visas, and the criterion is that the Minister is satisfied the applicant is a New Zealand citizen holding and presenting a New Zealand passport in force who is neither a behaviour concern nor a health concern non-citizen. Section 42(2A) excuses that person from needing a visa before travelling at all. The Migration Regulations map the class to Subclass 444 and give it one sentence of duration: a temporary visa permitting the holder to remain in Australia while the holder is a New Zealand citizen. No conditions are imposed and there are no secondary criteria. The words Trans-Tasman appear nowhere in any of it. What a reader of the Australian statute book sees is not a treaty being implemented but a country legislating, unilaterally and by name, about the citizens of one other country.

Australia licenses drivers State by State and Territory by Territory. The Commonwealth has legislated on the subject exactly once in a way a search of the Federal Register of Legislation turns up, and that instrument settles the question rather than muddying it: the National Transport Commission (Road Transport Legislation - Driver Licensing) Regulations 2006 set out the text of a National Driver Licensing Scheme and carry a note saying the legislation set out in its Schedules does not have the force of law, and a further note recording that the documents were never converted into formal legislation. What governs is each jurisdiction's own law. In New South Wales it is the Road Transport Act 2013 and the Road Transport (Driver Licensing) Regulation 2017; in Victoria the Road Safety (Drivers) Regulations 2019; in Queensland the Transport Operations (Road Use Management-Driver Licensing) Regulation 2021. The rules are not the same in each, and the New South Wales rule produces an outcome worth knowing: a visiting driver with a foreign licence is exempt from needing a New South Wales licence, and that exemption expires after three months only for an Australian citizen, a permanent visa holder, or the holder of a New Zealand licence. A person on a temporary visa from anywhere else does not lose it - and Queensland, which drafts the rule the other way round, leaves the same person out by the same accident.

Schedule 1 to the Migration Regulations 1994 is a closed list: it names every class of visa and states how an application for one is made, and an application that is not made as Schedule 1 sets out is not a valid application at all. Reading that list through, no class is granted on the strength of money arriving from abroad. The two that come closest are both retirement classes and both are shut. An application for an Investor Retirement (Class UY) visa may be made on or after 1 June 2018 only by someone who already holds one or whose last substantive visa was one; the Retirement (Temporary) (Class TQ) class carries the same restriction from 17 November 2018. A person with a pension, an investment income or a remote salary who wants to live in Australia has to qualify on some other ground - work, study, family, or the skilled points test - or hold a Visitor visa and leave when it ends.

Australia had two retirement routes and shut both. The Investor Retirement visa, Subclass 405, required sponsorship by an appropriate regional authority and an applicant aged at least 55; since 1 June 2018 an application may be made only by someone who already holds that visa or whose last substantive visa was one. The Retirement visa, Subclass 410, closed the same way on 17 November 2018. Neither class was repealed - the items remain in Schedule 1 with their charges, because people are still on them and still renewing - and that is precisely how a closed route can look open to a reader who sees the item and not the restriction at the end of it.

Every entry stream of the Business Innovation and Investment (Provisional) visa, Subclass 188, requires in terms that the application be made before 31 July 2024. That applies to the Business Innovation stream, the Investor stream, the Significant Investor stream and the Entrepreneur stream alike, and each of them also required an invitation from the Minister and a nomination by a State or Territory government agency, or in the Significant Investor case by the CEO of Austrade. Only the extension streams remain open, and they are reachable solely by people already holding the visa. The class that took the programme's place is the National Innovation visa, Subclass 858, and it is not an investment visa at all: the criterion is an internationally recognised record of exceptional and outstanding achievement in a profession, a sport, the arts, or academia and research, attested on an approved form by someone with a national reputation in the field.

Nothing in Schedule 1 to the Migration Regulations 1994 grants residence on the basis of an ancestor. The family classes in that Schedule run through a living relationship - a partner, a child, a parent, a carer, a remaining or aged dependent relative - and each requires an Australian citizen, permanent resident or eligible New Zealand citizen to sponsor. What Australia does offer is citizenship by descent, which is a different thing: under section 16(2) of the Australian Citizenship Act 2007 a person born outside Australia on or after 26 January 1949 is eligible to become a citizen if a parent was an Australian citizen at the time of the birth. One generation. Where that parent was themselves a citizen by descent, the parent must additionally have spent at least two years in Australia before the application is made, which is the provision that stops the line running indefinitely through people who have never lived there.

Opening an account with an Australian bank, building society, credit union or credit card issuer is a designated service under item 1 of table 1 in section 6 of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006, and the customer is the holder of the account. Since the customer due diligence Part of that Act was rewritten, section 28 states the obligation as a prohibition rather than a procedure: a reporting entity must not commence to provide a designated service to a customer if it has not established on reasonable grounds each of the matters listed in subsection (2). There are seven of them, and only the first is identity in the ordinary sense. The others reach the people behind the customer, politically exposed persons, targeted financial sanctions, and the nature and purpose of the relationship. The Act does not list documents: it requires the entity to collect know-your-customer information appropriate to the money-laundering risk and to verify it using reliable and independent data, with the detail left to the AML/CTF Rules.

Australia has a single student class, Student (Temporary) (Class TU), and a single subclass within it, Subclass 500. The criteria are enrolment in a course of study, a genuine intention to come and stay as a student judged against the applicant's circumstances, immigration history and record of compliance, English at a level set by ministerial instrument, and genuine access to funds. The visa itself has no fixed term: clause 500.511 permits the holder to remain until a date specified by the Minister, which in practice tracks the course. What is fixed is the conditions, and they are imposed in every case: eight of them must be attached whenever the primary criteria are satisfied, and two further conditions apply specifically to citizens of Iran depending on the kind of course they intend to take.

The partner route is a single application that produces two visas. Subclass 820 is granted first and runs open-endedly: clause 820.511 keeps it in effect until the holder is told that the application for the permanent Subclass 801 has been decided, or until that application is withdrawn. The permanent visa then requires, among other routes, that the applicant still holds the Subclass 820, is still sponsored by the same person, is still the spouse or de facto partner, and that at least two years have passed since the application was made. Who may sponsor is the part worth reading twice. The sponsor must be an Australian citizen, an Australian permanent resident or an eligible New Zealand citizen, and an eligible New Zealand citizen is defined in regulation 1.03 as a New Zealand citizen who is a protected SCV holder within the meaning of section 7 of the Social Security Act 1991 - which is to say, someone who was in Australia on 26 February 2001. A New Zealander who arrived after that date is not an eligible New Zealand citizen and cannot sponsor a partner.

Schedule 4 to the Customs Tariff Act 1995 is the list of concessional rates, and item 15 is headed Goods that are personal effects. It sets the rate of duty for passengers' personal effects, furniture or household goods at Free. The qualification is in the first line of the item and matters as much as the rate: the goods must be as prescribed by by-law. The tariff therefore settles that the concession exists and says nothing about who gets it, what counts as household goods, how long they must have been owned, or what happens to a car. Those conditions are in customs by-laws, which are published separately and were not read for this record. The same item also carries a Trans-Tasman trace of a different kind: paragraph (d) admits free of duty goods imported by members of the forces of Canada, New Zealand or the United Kingdom.