Character / police check

Before you get your visa, you will need to be assessed against the ‘character requirements’ of Australia. This is known commonly as a ‘character check’, which may include a police check (or ‘Overseas Penal Clearance Certificate’).

The Australian Citizenship Act 2007 requires all Australian visa applicants to be of ‘good character’ if they are aged 18 or over at the time of the application.
It is the responsibility of an applicant to show they are of good character, by declaring any spent convictions when applying and providing a police certificate.

Spent convictions

On the visa application forms, applicants are required to disclose all convictions, including those classed as ‘spent’.
A ‘spent conviction’ is a conviction for a commonwealth, territory, state or foreign offence that satisfies all of the following conditions:

• it is at least ten years since the date of the conviction (or five years for juvenile offenders)
  and
• the individual was either not sentenced to imprisonment or was not sentenced to imprisonment for more than 30 months
  and
• the individual has not re-offended during the ten-year waiting period (five-year period for juvenile offenders)
  and
• a statutory or prescribed exclusion does not apply.

All convictions are counted in assessing whether or not applicants satisfy the good character requirement.

Police check – Overseas Penal Clearance Certificates

For the Australian Government to determine whether you are of good character, you may be asked to provide police certificates for each country you have lived in for 12 months or more, over the last ten years since turning 16.
For the UK, you can download your police certificate by clicking here.

Use this link to find out how to get Penal Clearance Certificates for other countries

Click here for more information on the character check and police check.

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