How to Apply for Asylum in Australia as an Indonesian

How do you apply for asylum in Australia as an Indonesian?

Applying for asylum in Australia as an Indonesian means lodging one Subclass 866 protection visa application online from inside Australia. The application is made through ImmiAccount. There is no separate asylum process, no asylum office to attend, and no form with the word asylum on it. The Subclass 866 protection visa application is the process.

The order of the steps is fixed. You confirm that you are in Australia and that you are the person whose claim it is. You collect your identity documents and whatever evidence exists of what happened. You have the Indonesian language material translated. You set up or log in to ImmiAccount, and our guide on how to create an ImmiAccount covers that step on its own. You complete the application form, including the parts that carry your protection claims. You attach the documents, pay the charge and submit. After lodgement the Department acknowledges the application, you are usually granted a bridging visa when your current visa ends, you are almost always interviewed, the Department may write to you for more information, and then a decision is made.

This article is about that process, in order, for Indonesian nationals. It does not set out the law you have to satisfy. What you must prove, which of the two legal grounds your claim runs on and what does not count are covered on our Subclass 866 protection visa page and in the complete guide to the Subclass 866 protection visa.

Why there is no asylum visa and no asylum registration in Australia

Australia has no visa called an asylum visa, and there is nothing you register for. This is the single most common misunderstanding among Indonesians who start looking into it, and it wastes weeks.

There is no United Nations office in Australia that assesses your claim. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees does register and assess people in some countries, including in transit countries in the region, but that is not how it works for a person who is already lawfully in Australia. Here the Department of Home Affairs decides the claim itself, under Australian law, on a visa application.

There is also no queue you join and no number you take. Nothing happens because you told someone, filled in an expression of interest, or went to a community organisation. The claim exists in law only once a valid Subclass 866 application has been lodged in ImmiAccount. Until then you have a story, not an application, and none of the protections that come with lodgement apply to you.

The word most people search is asylum. The word the system uses is protection. They mean the same thing here.

What does not apply: the Indonesian Embassy, agents in Indonesia and paperwork from home

Nothing in this process runs through the Indonesian Embassy, the Consulate General or any Indonesian authority. You do not notify them, you do not get a document from them, and you do not need their permission. The Department does not contact them about your claim either.

Nothing is lodged from Indonesia. An application cannot be made from outside Australia, so a relative in Jakarta cannot start it for you and an agent in Surabaya cannot lodge it while you wait here. The offshore humanitarian visas that can be applied for from outside Australia are a different programme entirely and are not available to a person who is already here.

Paid packages arranged in Indonesia are a particular problem in this caseload. Documents produced to order, a statement written by somebody who has never met you, and a set of claims recycled from another person's file all end up in front of a decision maker who reads Indonesian files every week. Australian law also restricts who may give immigration assistance, and a person operating from Indonesia is outside that system entirely. If somebody has already prepared material in your name, say so before anything is lodged.

When can you lodge, and who has to be in Australia?

You can lodge as soon as you are in Australia and you are able to state your claims. You do not need to hold a particular visa, and you do not need to have been here for any minimum period.

Everyone included in the one application has to be in Australia at the time the application is made. That applies to your partner and to your children. A spouse still in Indonesia, a child left with grandparents in Java, and a parent who has never travelled cannot be included in your application, no matter how closely connected the family is. Family who are outside Australia are a separate question, dealt with after a grant, not before one.

Being in Australia also matters at the other end of the process. A protection visa can only be granted to a person who is in Australia when the decision is made, so leaving the country during processing is not a neutral act. That applies to short trips, family emergencies and funerals.

If you are here on a student visa, a visitor visa or a working holiday visa, your current visa keeps running as normal while you lodge. Nothing about lodging cancels it. We have separate articles for Indonesian students and for visitor visa holders.

Which documents should an Indonesian applicant collect before opening the form?

Collect your identity documents first, because identity is where Indonesian applications most often run into difficulty. Your Indonesian passport, including expired ones if you still hold them. Your Kartu Tanda Penduduk. Your Kartu Keluarga. Your Akta Kelahiran. Your marriage book or certificate if you are married.

Then collect whatever exists about the events themselves. Police reports and any written response to them. Hospital and clinic records. Court documents, summonses or charge sheets. Letters, notices or membership records from a church, a mosque, an organisation or a political group. Employment and study records that show where you were living at the relevant times. Screenshots of threats, with the account names and the dates visible in the image rather than cropped out.

What you do not need to chase is your Australian immigration history. Your visa grants, your bridging visa notices and your earlier applications sit in the Department's own systems and can be verified from your passport details. People spend weeks looking for paperwork that nobody needs them to produce.

If a document exists but you cannot get it, that is a fact to record and explain, not a reason to delay lodging. If a document does not exist at all, say so plainly. A missing document with an explanation is survivable. A document that turns out to have been bought is not.

How do Indonesian language documents have to be translated and attached?

Every document that is not in English has to be translated into English, and both the original and the translation are attached. Translators in Australia must be accredited by the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters. A translation done by a friend, a family member or an agent in Indonesia is not what the Department asks for, and using one invites questions you do not want.

You do not need to have documents certified. That surprises people who have been told to find a Justice of the Peace for everything. For an online application, what the Department asks for is a clear colour scan or photograph of each document, saved as a single file where the document runs to several pages, with photographs saved under the name of the person shown in them and every other file clearly labelled in English.

Attach each document once, even where it proves more than one thing. A file that contains the same passport four times under four labels makes the material harder to read, and a decision maker who cannot find a document may proceed without it.

Do this before you start the form rather than after. An application sitting half finished while you wait for a translator is an application that is not lodged, and in protection matters the date of lodgement affects your status, your bridging visa and your work rights.

Who is allowed to help you complete the application?

Only three categories of person may lawfully give you immigration assistance in Australia: an Australian legal practitioner with a current practising certificate, a registered migration agent, or an exempt person. That is the law, and it applies whether or not the person charges you.

You can separately appoint anyone to receive your correspondence. Those are two different things and two different forms. Form 956 appoints a representative to act for you and give immigration assistance. Form 956A appoints an authorised recipient, who receives documents only. People routinely sign the second one believing they have engaged a representative. They have not.

A representative does not take responsibility for the truth of your claims. You do. That is why you must read the completed form before it is submitted, understand every claim in it, and never sign a blank page or a blank declaration, whoever asks you to. If material has been added that you did not say, it has to be corrected before the interview rather than at it.

What a lawyer actually does on these files, stage by stage, is set out on our protection visa lawyers page.

What does the Subclass 866 application form actually ask you?

The application form asks for your whole life, in order, and then asks separately for your protection claims. The two halves fail for different reasons, so treat them as two pieces of work.

The first half is history. Your identity and every name you have used. Your family. Your addresses, in Indonesia and in Australia. Your education. Your employment. Your travel, including trips you made years ago and trips to countries other than Australia. Your relationships. The Department asks for these histories continuously, which means there must be no unexplained gaps. If you were out of work for eight months, put the eight months in and say what you were doing. A blank period reads as something withheld, and the officer will ask about it at interview.

The second half is the claims. Each applicant who is raising their own protection claims answers those questions themselves, in their own account, in their own words. A wife whose claims are her own does not rely on her husband's answers.

Accuracy in the first half protects you in the second. Almost every credibility problem in an Indonesian file starts as a date or an address that does not match something the applicant wrote on an earlier student or visitor visa application years before.

How do you write the part of the application that carries your claims?

State each claim expressly, in its own terms, and attach a full personal statement rather than relying on the boxes in the form. The Department is not required to go looking for a claim you did not make, and a claim that is implied is a claim that can be missed.

A statement that works is chronological and dated. It names places, people and organisations. It says what happened, who did it, what you did afterwards, and what you believe will happen if you return. It explains anything that looks odd before the officer has to ask: a delay in leaving Indonesia, a return trip home after the event you rely on, a change of account, a period when you said nothing to anybody.

Write it in your own voice and have it translated if you write it in Bahasa Indonesia. A statement that sounds like a legal submission, or that arrives in polished English from a person who needs an interpreter at the interview, creates the exact problem it was meant to avoid.

You are the person who will be questioned on every line of it under oath or affirmation. Do not include a sentence you cannot answer questions about.

Who else can be included in your application, and why the timing decides it

Members of your family unit who are in Australia can be included in the one application, and a family member included that way does not need a protection claim of their own. In practice that means a spouse or de facto partner and dependent children.

Timing is what catches people. A family member has to have applied before the visa is granted to the main applicant. Section 91WB means a person who becomes the spouse of a protection visa holder after the grant cannot be granted a protection visa on the basis of that relationship, and neither can a person who was already the spouse but lodged too late. Once the main applicant's visa is decided, the door closes and any family member left outside has to find their own pathway.

Family members can be added to an undecided application, and a child born while the application is pending is dealt with without a fresh application. What cannot be fixed later is a partner who waited to see whether your application would work before joining it.

There is also a choice to make before lodging. Where two people in the family both have claims, and one claim is stronger, it matters who is the main applicant. That decision is very difficult to unwind after lodgement.

What happens the moment you submit the application?

You get a Transaction Reference Number, and you should keep it. It identifies the application in every later dealing with the Department and you will be asked for it.

The application is not processed until the charge is paid, so lodging without paying leaves you with nothing. Once it is paid and the application is submitted, the Department sends an acknowledgement letter confirming that it has received a valid application. That letter matters beyond the file: it is the document you take to a Medicare service centre if you are enrolling, together with your supporting documents.

The online form asks whether you agree to the Department communicating with you by email. Agree. Email is the Department's preferred and fastest method, and correspondence by post is slower and less reliable, particularly for a person who is moving between share houses. If you have already lodged and did not choose email, Form 1193 exists to change it.

From that point you can log in to ImmiAccount to check the status of the application, attach further documents, update your details and open a copy of what you lodged. The Department does not give processing updates by phone.

What happens to your visa while the application is being decided?

A valid protection visa application generally attracts a bridging visa, which takes effect when your current substantive visa ends rather than on the day you lodge. A student with a year left on a student visa stays a student, on student conditions, for that year.

Work rights on the bridging visa are not automatic and depend on the class of bridging visa and the conditions attached to it. A person who lodges while still holding a valid visa is usually in a materially better position than one who lodges after becoming unlawful. That is one of the reasons waiting is expensive, and we deal with the rest of them in our article on whether delaying a Subclass 866 application affects your claim.

If you have submitted a valid application and you cannot support yourself, the Status Resolution Support Services programme exists and provides financial or other assistance to some applicants. Eligibility is assessed separately by the Department.

Why your ImmiAccount details decide whether you keep your rights

Every letter that matters in this process is sent to the address the Department holds for you, and the law treats you as having received correspondence sent to that address whether or not you actually read it. That includes a decision.

The practical consequence is severe. Review rights after a refusal run from the day you are taken to have received the decision, the period is short, it is applied strictly, and it cannot be extended. An old email address or a share house you moved out of eight months ago can end a review right before you know a decision exists.

So keep the details current, check ImmiAccount rather than waiting to be contacted, and tell the Department in writing when you move. If you have appointed a representative, correspondence goes to them as well, which is the practical value of having one during a long wait.

Changing your representative does not restart anything. A new Form 956 is lodged, the earlier authority is withdrawn, and the application continues where it was.

What do you do if you remember something after you have lodged?

You can provide more information in writing at any time until the decision is made, and you should. Attach it in ImmiAccount rather than emailing it into a general inbox, and say what it relates to.

This is the safety valve for the most common situation in Indonesian files, which is a claim the applicant was not ready to disclose at the beginning. Something about sexuality, a religious conversion, an event involving family, a criminal allegation they are ashamed of. Late disclosure is harder to run than early disclosure, because the Department will ask why it was not mentioned before. It is still far better than never disclosing it at all, because after a refusal there is generally no second application.

The Department can also decide the application on what it already has once a deadline it has set has passed. Do not assume you will be asked again.

What letters can arrive before the Department decides?

Two letters matter, and they are not the same. A request for more information asks you to provide something by a set date, and after that date the Department can decide the application on the material it holds.

The second letter is more serious. If the Department has information that could result in refusal, it must put that information to you and give you the chance to comment before it decides. Receiving that letter is not a formality and it is not a good sign, but it is the last opportunity to deal with the problem while the application is still alive.

Both letters have deadlines, both deadlines are short, and both are applied strictly. Answer exactly what has been put, with evidence that meets it. Long general replies that do not engage with the specific concern are the most common way this stage is wasted.

What happens at the protection visa interview, and what do you take?

Almost every protection applicant is interviewed, and the interview is where the claim is tested. The officer checks your documents, including proof of identity, nationality and citizenship, asks you to make an oath or affirmation that what you say is true, and then asks about your claims, your identity and everything else you have provided.

Take your original documents. Take your Transaction Reference Number. Ask for an interpreter, and ask for one in the language you are actually strongest in, whether that is Bahasa Indonesia, Javanese, Sundanese or another regional language. Struggling through in English to appear cooperative is how misunderstandings get recorded as inconsistencies.

You can correct information you gave earlier. If something in your application is wrong, the interview is the place to fix it rather than defend it. What is not survivable is inventing a detail to fill a gap. An officer who is comfortable with "I do not remember" is not comfortable with an answer that turns out to be untrue.

Our protection visa interview page sets out the format of the day in more detail.

What does a Subclass 866 grant actually give an Indonesian national?

A grant makes you an Australian permanent resident immediately. There is no probationary stage, no second application two years later and no sponsor.

Permanent residence brings the right to live in Australia indefinitely, unrestricted work rights with no occupation or employer limits, Medicare enrolment, access to certain social security payments under the usual rules, access to domestic tuition rates and Commonwealth supported places where you are eligible, and a pathway to Australian citizenship once the residence requirement is met. Family members granted on the basis of your application hold the same visa and the same rights.

Two things work differently for protection visa holders, and both surprise people. Travel back to Indonesia is restricted by a condition on the visa. And the travel document you use is not the one in your drawer. Both are dealt with next, because Indonesian clients ask about them more than anything else after a grant.

There is also a family reunion pathway. A person who holds a permanent protection visa may propose eligible family members under the offshore humanitarian programme. That is a separate application with its own criteria, made after the grant, and it is not a way of bringing forward family who could not be included in your application. Ask first.

What happens if the application is refused?

A refusal carries a right of review to the Administrative Review Tribunal, and the deadline to apply is short, runs from the day you are taken to have received the decision rather than the day you read it, is applied strictly, and cannot be extended.

Lodge the review first and build the argument afterwards. A review application that is lodged on time can be supplemented. A review right that has expired cannot be revived, no matter how strong the underlying claim is.

Review at the Tribunal is a full merits review. The Tribunal decides the matter again, can take new evidence and usually holds a hearing at which you give evidence yourself. It is a genuine second chance rather than a formality, and many protection matters are resolved there. The detail is on our protection visa refusals page, in our Administrative Review Tribunal guide for Subclass 866 refusals and in our general article on what to expect at an ART review.

Your bridging visa position also changes at refusal, on its own timetable, which is why a refusal is dealt with as urgent rather than as something to think about over a fortnight.

Which process mistakes cost Indonesian applicants the most?

Signing something you have not read. This is the single most damaging thing an applicant does, and it is usually done out of politeness to somebody who said they would handle it. You are responsible for every claim in the form, including a claim somebody else wrote there.

Leaving gaps in the history. Unexplained periods in the address, work or travel sections turn into interview questions and then into credibility findings.

Recycling somebody else's statement. Decision makers read a high volume of Indonesian files and phrasing that has appeared before is noticed.

Producing a document whose origin you cannot explain. The Department's own country information records that fraudulent Indonesian documents and fraudulently obtained genuine documents are readily available, so provenance is examined. One unexplained document can damage a truthful claim.

Going home. A trip to Indonesia during processing can end the application, and after a grant it can end the visa.

Waiting until you are unlawful. Lodging while you still hold a visa produces a better bridging visa outcome and removes a question you otherwise have to answer about why you did nothing for two years.

Treating the application as paperwork. It is a legal claim with one attempt at it, which is the subject of the next section.

Why the decision to lodge matters more than the lodgement

Once a protection visa has been refused, you generally cannot make another protection visa application while you remain in Australia. That is why the work that matters happens before you submit, not after.

It means every claim you have must be identified and stated in this application, including the ones you would rather not discuss. It means a claim that cannot meet the criteria should be tested before lodgement rather than after refusal. And it means a protection application lodged to buy time is a poor trade, because it spends the only application you have and leaves a record that follows you into every later visa application.

Sometimes the honest answer is that protection is the wrong application. If you are in a genuine relationship with an Australian citizen or permanent resident, a partner visa is often the stronger path, including for same sex couples. See our partner visa lawyers page, the Subclass 820 partner visa page and our page on LGBTIQ+ partner visas. If another visa has been refused or cancelled, the answer may be a review of that decision instead. See visa refusals and visa cancellations.

Where the rest of this material is covered

The substance of a claim depends on what it is based on. Claims based on sexual orientation or gender identity are covered on our LGBTI protection visa page, with the evidence question dealt with for LGBTI Indonesian students and the elements set out in LGBTI protection visas in Australia.

Claims based on religion, including conversion and leaving a faith, are covered on our religious persecution page. Where a claim does not fit the refugee definition, the second ground is explained on our complementary protection page and, for sexuality based claims, in complementary protection for LGBTI applicants.

If you are on a student visa, start with can international students apply for a Subclass 866 protection visa. For the process without the Indonesian detail, see applying for a protection visa in Australia.

How My Migration Lawyers works on an Indonesian protection application

The work starts before anything is lodged. The first step is an assessment of whether a protection claim exists and which ground it runs on, because the application cannot be made twice. Where the answer is that there is no claim, you are told that plainly, and where a different visa fits better the conversation moves to that instead.

If the firm acts, the work is the application itself. Verifying your immigration history rather than asking you to find documents you do not hold. Drafting the statement with you so that every claim is expressly made. Assembling and indexing the translated documents. Completing the form so that the histories are continuous and consistent with everything you have lodged in Australia before. Preparing you for the interview. Responding to departmental letters within their deadlines. Running the matter at the Administrative Review Tribunal if it is refused.

Protection matters are supervised by Weiwei Zhang, Principal Lawyer. You can read more about Weiwei Zhang, about the firm on our about page. Consultations are held by video with clients anywhere in Australia.

To have your situation assessed, request a consultation. If you would rather set the situation out in writing first, contact us.