Since 2010
Little tip for anyone moving from the UK to Australia: you need health insurance, but not very much.
I signed up for a health plan which included out-patient care, but the folk contacted me to say that plan wasn’t really necessary when you get reciprocal health care.
Okay, things aren’t as bad as I though they were. My nomination for sponsorship has been lodged, and I completed the first bit of my application tonight. It was all online, and was relatively painless. There were no questions that knocked me for six: just stuff like passport numbers and history of citizenship.
Think I’ve cracked health insurance as well: I need private health insurance until I enrol with Medicare, and I can only enrol with Medicare when I’m in Australia. And I’ve also discovered that if I stick with Medicare, I pay an extra 1% in tax at my level of earning. That’s to encourage me to get my own private insurance.
Next up: sending supporting documentation, which is again all done online. I believe anything I send has to be certified though, and I’ve got no idea how that works. Do I copy said documents, get someone to sign them, then scan the signed copy? Upload a scan of a scan? What’s the point, and how does it prove that the second scan hasn’t been forged?
Watch this space I guess.
I’ve just found out that the immigration and relocation team at the University of Sydney haven’t received the form I sent them with my personal details. This is what stress feels like. I’m told it takes several weeks for everything to be processed, and I was hoping on flying in about 3 weeks.
And then there’s the time difference thing: by the time I wake up, read, and respond to an email from Sydney, and then they wake up and read my response, 24 hours have passed. Aargh!
I told Dad on the phone earlier that I wasn’t really fussed about getting rid of my car today. That’s not strictly true. It was a good car: we went a lot of places together. Hope the next owner looks after it.
A few wee things have happened today which given this whole move a sense of uncontrollable momentum. First, I found out that I won’t have a car in a couple of days. I’ll miss it, but since I walk to work, it rarely actually moves. Pretty expensive luxury really. I also started cancelling some services today: mobile phone, electricity etc.
But then I came home and played with Skype. Made my first Skype-to-landline call. I’m still impressed!