Does age matter? Can you get an Australian partner visa when you are 20, 30, or even 40 or more years older than your Filipina wife or Filipina fiancée?

Australian visa applications are matters of migration law. The Case Officers at the Embassy make their decisions based on what is written in the Migration Regulations and the Migration Act, which make up Australian Migration Law. Meet the Regulations, and you get a visa. Don’t meet the Regulations and the application will be refused. Those Regulations can sometimes be tough to meet (especially without the help of Down Under Visa), however they are there to protect the interests of the country and to ensure fairness and clarity for those who make visa applications. The law is there to ensure that the decision-makers can’t grant or refuse visas based on what they themselves think.

And guess what? There is NOTHING in the Regulations that mention age differences at all! If a 93 year old meets and marries an 18 year old, as long as they meet the rest of the Regulations then she can get a visa.

From our perspective? Your job is to choose your fiancée, wife or de facto partner. Our job is to get partner visas for couples who meet the Regulations. That’s it!

And what do we see in our migration agent practice?

We see a whole range of couples and different age-gaps. We get the occasional couple where the lady is older than the man, but mostly the man is older. There are 6 years between Mila and myself. We see gaps of up to 20 years all the time. That’s not even unusual. And we see gaps of 30 and 40+ years regularly too.

Any problems from these age gaps?

Again, from the perspective of an Australian visa application and the opinion of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP), age differences in themselves are not even a factor they consider. So stop worrying!

Our opinion? It’s completely up to the couple themselves. We see couples with very large age gaps where the love and affection between them is very real, and where they have a great deal of respect for each other. We like this, because we believe in what we’re doing. We want to bring couples together, and we want to see these marriages last. It’s distressing for us when they don’t work out.

From a practical point of view? A bit of advice here for men with younger ladies! She is or will be your wife, and you are or will be her husband. She is not your daughter! Don’t treat her like a helpless little girl! If you want to take care of a little girl? Make one! I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how. But this Filipina lady whom you are applying for this visa for, she is far from hopeless and she does not need wrapping in cotton wool.

She MAY need help with language issues, ie. she may not understand what I’ve written in English, or may get confused or get things wrong. This has nothing to do with her overall capability, and you need to realise this. If she needs further explanations in Tagalog, let us know and it can be arranged very easily. Mila can email her, or she can email Mila. Apart from that, you’ll find she can do everything else she needs to do and you need to let her.

The Philippines is a tough country to get things done in. Getting birth certificates, marriage certificates, police clearances, etc, these are hard work. But this is her country and she has lived here all her life. She knows all about traveling for hours on non-aircon buses and jeepneys, and she knows about queuing up (aka “falling in line”) to get documents. Don’t underestimate her abilities and don’t patronise her. Please have a read of THIS for a more detailed and blunter version.