It's common for clients on temporary visas to have a baby while living in Australia. And if you're one of those clients, congratulations! We know you have questions about your situation. This article outlines what you should do from an immigration perspective in order to add your child to your visa (if you hold a temporary visa).

Please note, if one of the parents are a permanent resident or citizen, they may be eligible for Australian citizenship. This video is specifically done for someone who is on a temporary visa (student, working holiday etc..). Fortunately, if you hold a valid Temporary visa, you should be able to add the child to your visa easily.

Once you have a baby, you will be given a birth card from the hospital and a few weeks later you will usually receive the birth certificate in the mail from the state deaths and births registry.

Once you have received the birth certificate you should do two things:

 

Notify Immigration:

Firstly, notify the Department of Home Affairs that you've had a child. If your visa application is in ImmiAccount, sign in and upload the required documents there. This is the quickest and most common way to do it.

If your application isn't linked to ImmiAccount, you'll need to send the documents to the office handling your case instead.

The documents you'll need are:

  • A completed Form 1022 (Notification of changes in circumstances), available from homeaffairs.gov.au/allforms
  • A colour scan or certified copy of your baby's birth certificate
  • A colour scan of your baby's passport pages, if they already have one (you can send this later if not)

Your baby will generally be considered to hold the same visa as you and the other parent at the time of birth, so there's usually no need to lodge a separate visa application for them. There's no fee to notify the Department or to add your baby to your visa.

The way that we do it here at Pathway to Aus is notifying immigration via post. We would provide a change of circumstance form (1022). Notifying immigration that when you first lodged your visa you had no children. However, you have now had a child.

You would post the requirements to your closest immi office. Immigration will then email you the visa grant notice. The child will also show up in your immi account under dependents.

This is just one way of notifying immigration and there are numerous other ways to do this.

You can find more information through this link - https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/change-in-situation/had-a-baby

Note: your baby is only an Australian citizen by birth if you or your partner are an Australian citizen or permanent resident at the time of the birth. Otherwise, your baby will hold a visa rather than citizenship, and you'll need to follow the notification steps below.

Request a Passport:

The next thing that you should do is contact your closest Embassy or Consulate and request a passport for your child. Your child will usually be a citizen of your country of passport.

Now each country has a different process of applying for a passport, so follow the procedure of your Embassy. Often you may need to go to the embassy to apply directly.

Passports can take several months to return, so I would recommend organising this as quickly as possible.