Ask HN: Contracting in Australia / Sydney

7 points by emilssolmanis 9 years ago | 7 comments

Looking for info on contracting in Sydney, bonus points for immigrant perspective.

This has been covered plenty of times for London (which is where I'm at right now), something like

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9980264

and

https://github.com/tadast/switching-to-contracting-uk

or answers covering the similar concepts is what I'm after.

* How hard / easy is it to incorporate and pitfalls?

* Typical ways the government would try to make things bad for you (e.g., London's IR35 equivalent)

* Is it even worth it, are the rates as significantly higher and / 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 / year here)

* Suggestions for services also welcome, painless accountancies and the like

* Any links to useful information (that's not obviously google-able) welcome as well

From what I could find, the immigrant part shouldn'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're not a burden on social services and can actually find work, which as a software dev is obviously not an issue.

Thanks!

siquick 9 years ago |

(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 9 years ago | |

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 9 years ago | | |

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 9 years ago | | |

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

atsaloli 9 years ago |

If you want any help with your immigration, I recommend Robert K. Steain in Sydney. 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.