Calculating whether you have met the requirements for Australian Citizenship can be one of the trickiest things you will encounter. This is because over a 4 year period people can forget when they traveled abroad and this is further complicated when you change passports or if the travel dates are not captured in your emails.
Here is a Residence Calculator released by Immigration to help assess your eligibility: https://www.border.gov.au/Trav/Ente/Retu/residence-calculator
The alternative is to call Immigration and ask them if you qualify or not.
What can be EVEN MORE frustrating is incorrectly thinking you meet the requirements, only to find out after lodging the application that you did not meet the requirements. This means you have wasted TIME and MONEY.
GOOD NEWS. Whilst you may never recover the time, you may be able to recover your money under the new changes:
- refund the whole or part of a fee payable for an application for a notice of evidence of citizenship if a person has made the application as a result of incorrect advice given by the Department;
- if you made a genuine error in your first application and lodge the subsequent application within one year after the first application was refused, there is no further application fee.
