Why this exists

Everyone who arrives in Australia learns the same twenty things the hard way, usually in the wrong order, and usually after it has already cost them money.

The information is all out there. It is just spread across forty government sites, buried in Facebook groups, and mixed in with a lot of confident advice from people who are wrong. This page is an attempt to put the whole map in one place, in the order that actually works, with each link explained before you click it.

The rules we hold ourselves to

• Official sources first. 63 of the 80 entries here are government or statutory bodies. Where a commercial service is listed, it is because it genuinely dominates its category and leaving it out would be unhelpful.
• No affiliate links, no sponsored placements, no paid rankings. Nobody pays to be on this page, and nothing here earns us a commission. That is the only way a list like this stays honest.
• Say what it costs. Every entry states the real cost, including "free". A surprising number of free government services have paid lookalikes sitting above them in search results — tax file numbers especially.
• Say what to have ready. The most useful thing a guide can tell you is what to gather before you open the form.
• The source is always right. If a figure here disagrees with the government page it links to, believe the government page and please tell us.

How this is funded

Running this costs money, and pretending otherwise is how projects like it quietly die or quietly sell out. So, plainly:

• There is no advertising today. No page carries an ad or an empty ad space. If that ever changes it will be a single, clearly labelled slot on a calculator or lookup page, off to the side, never in the middle of the content.
• Never on the safety pages. Emergency and safety, beach safety, bites and stings and the offline page carry no advertising and never will. An ad next to a crisis line is indefensible at any price, and the site is built so those pages cannot render one even by mistake.
• No behavioural targeting. No tracking pixels, no third-party cookies, no profile of you sold to anyone. Contextual or fixed-sponsor only.
• Advertising can never influence content. Nothing about what appears in the directory, or the order it appears in, is for sale. No advertiser gets a listing, a better position, or a say. This is the line that matters and it does not move.

If that ever stops being true, the sentence above is a lie and you should stop trusting the rest of the page. Hold us to it.

What this is not

This is general information, not advice. It is not legal advice, migration advice, medical advice or financial advice, and it cannot account for your particular situation. For advice on your own circumstances:

• Migration: use a registered migration agent — check the MARA register. Anyone charging for migration advice who is not registered is acting illegally.
• Tax: the ATO answers questions for free, and registered tax agents handle the complicated cases.
• Legal: Community Legal Centres give free advice and exist in every region.
• Medical: healthdirect on 1800 022 222, free, 24 hours, answered by nurses.

Privacy

This site has no accounts and sends nothing about you to a server. What it remembers, it keeps on your own device (in your browser), and you can clear it any time:

• your answers in My guide, and the ticks you make
• the cards you save
• your light or dark choice, and your language
• the home place you pick on the time zones page

We count visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is built not to track individuals: it sets no cookies, keeps nothing on your device, and does not fingerprint you. It tells us how many people visit, which pages they read, which country and kind of device they use, where they came from, and how fast the pages load. It does not tell us who you are, and it never sees what you type or choose in My guide. There are no advertising trackers and no third-party cookies. Like any website, the company that hosts it (Cloudflare) also sees ordinary web server information, such as your device’s address, when a page is requested. If you email us, we see your address and what you write, and use them only to reply.

Keeping it current

Rules change. Tax rates change every July, minimum wages change every July, visa requirements change whenever government decides, and ambulance fees change quietly. Rather than pretend otherwise, this site does two things: every fact carries the date it was last checked, and every entry links to the primary source so you can confirm it yourself in one click.

Where we are not confident a figure is still current, we say so on the page rather than quietly leaving a stale number up.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, out of date, or missing, that is worth telling us about — a wrong number on a page like this costs somebody real money. Corrections that come with a link to the official source get applied fastest. Use the feedback page, or email [email protected].

Credits

The “g’day” recording on the home page is En-au-g’day.ogg by Commander Keane, from Wikimedia Commons, used unchanged under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.