[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).

[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.

[siquick]

I hope it works out for you.

Australia is a great place to live, and although I still get homesick (been here 5 years), I'm not in any hurry to move back to the UK - even less so after the Brexit mess.

Melbourne has some recent new arrivals in the form of Stripe, Slack, Xero and Zendesk opening up offices. It's probably a better all-round place to live and I find it more interesting, but it doesn't have any nearby nice beaches and the weather is pretty temperamental (47C in the summer, -2C in the winter)

Sydney is probably more financial companies but does have some big companies here, Atlassian, HomeAway, Freelancer and Airbnb have offices here. Get ready to pay insane rent and lots of weird rules, but the tradeoff is better climate, beaches everywhere and on a nice day, Sydney truly is a beautiful city.

[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

[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.

[emilssolmanis]

After two years in London, insane rent is kind of the default state I assume for any city. Thanks!