
Ask HN: Contracting in Australia / Sydney - emilssolmanis
Looking for info on contracting in Sydney, bonus points for immigrant perspective.<p>This has been covered plenty of times for London (which is where I&#x27;m at right now), something like<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9980264<p>and<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tadast&#x2F;switching-to-contracting-uk<p>or answers covering the similar concepts is what I&#x27;m after.<p>* How hard &#x2F; easy is it to incorporate and pitfalls?<p>* Typical ways the government would try to make things bad for you (e.g., London&#x27;s IR35 equivalent)<p>* Is it even worth it, are the rates as significantly higher and &#x2F; or any tax burdens on dividends etc.? Bonus karma if someone could explain how the whole dividend imputation thing works, since that seems to even everything out to about the current situation in London (i.e., you get shafted for anything above £43k &#x2F; year here)<p>* Suggestions for services also welcome, painless accountancies and the like<p>* Any links to useful information (that&#x27;s not obviously google-able) welcome as well<p>From what I could find, the immigrant part shouldn&#x27;t be a problem. I qualify points-wise, and afaict there are no draconian laws like the H1B in US or similar, at least that I could find, and the points are more about making sure you&#x27;re not a burden on social services and can actually find work, which as a software dev is obviously not an issue.<p>Thanks!
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siquick
(Brit who is now a Australian permanent resident through tech employee
sponsorship and has lived in both Melbourne and Sydney.)

I think your main concern is what kind of visa do you expect to be on?

I have never heard of anyone getting sponsored by a company as a contractor.
If you are under 31 and can get a working holiday visa for 1 year, then this
could be a good route. You can extend the WHV to 2 years years by doing 3
months of work on a farm in rural Australia.

The points system can take a long time to get through, up to 18 months, and
often they will only grant you a visa for specific states, rather than the
state of your choice.

If you see your future in Australia, then you might be better off getting
sponsored by a company on a 457 visa (mine took 5 months for approval but
apparently this is long), then staying with that company for 2+ years and
switching to Permanent Residency through Employee Nomination (ENS).

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emilssolmanis
To be honest, I haven't studied the visa types _that_ deep (i.e., I probably
know everything there is to know about the US ones, almost nothing about the
Australian ones). I'm an EU (Latvian) citizen looking to get away from the
clusterfuck that is post-brexit London to somewhere I haven't been an annoying
number of times before.

Australia is on the shortlist of places I'm considering, so I'm not sure about
the "see your future" part. It does generally sound nice and aligned with my
views of the world, and it's definitely not a 1 year thing, so that sounds
plausible.

From what I could find just now, a 457 does sound like the easiest path
legally.

That sort of answers my question as well then I suppose, since the laws _are_
stricter than what I found at first and contracting right away is a legal
minefield.

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yen223
There are ways to gain permanent residency in Australia directly without
having to be sponsored. Look up SkillSelect:
[http://www.border.gov.au/Trav/Work/Skil](http://www.border.gov.au/Trav/Work/Skil)

~~~
siquick
That visa is probably more useful for jobs where there are regional shortages
such as nurses in rural towns.

Basing on the OP posting on HN, I'm taking a wild guess that he is in tech,
and unfortunately there are a ridiculously small amount of tech jobs outside
of Sydney and Melbourne - one of my biggest hates about Australia.

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atsaloli
If you want any help with your immigration, I recommend Robert K. Steain in
Sydney.
[http://www.rksteainmigration.com.au/](http://www.rksteainmigration.com.au/)
He can give a free consultation. (I'm a US citizen with Aussie permanent
residency. He helped me with my application.) Top pro, knows all the laws and
knows the people in the immigration department.

