Hello,

I am the Australian sponsor of my foreign partner. We are applying for a spouse visa and wanted to know if our situation would cause confusion and may result in a visa not being granted from the DIAC.

We are getting married in July after which we are putting in our application. However, in January we applied to register our relationship with Births Deaths and Marriages and while a decision was being made we decided we wanted to get married. We put in our NOIM form and organised our wedding while we still had not received an answer in regards to the relationship being registered.

As registering a relationship voids the 12 month period for a de facto visa, we are scared that the department will think that that was our plan (to go de facto and void the 12 months), but really we had not decided on getting married at the time and decided to do so later – we still haven't got a response from BDM so we didn't wait to get a no before marrying: we just wanted to get married.

But becaue we're getting married on July 8th and my partners current visa expires July 13th we are worried that they will think we married for the visa, but this is not the case. Are we in trouble ? Do we need a migration agent to help us with our application ? How much would it cost if we only need a small amount of help (are application is basically complete we  just don't know what to do about this BDM thing). We don't know whether we should just not mention BDM at all…. 

Kind regards,

Sarah