News

Still waiting on your child’s passport?

If you’re travelling in the next 24-48 hours and are waiting to receive your child’s passport, please call us on 131 232.

We normally recommend customers allow a minimum of six weeks to apply for or renew their passport.

While most people are getting their passport within this timeframe, there will always be cases where applications take longer.

Child applications can often fall into this category.

We have to verify all the supporting documents we need as part of a child applications. This means they sometimes take longer to process.

Establishing parental consent is another factor that can add to processing times for child passports.

Each person with parental responsibility for a child must give their consent to the child being issued with a passport. This includes separated parents.

If we can’t get full parental consent, the only other way to guarantee we can issue a passport is for us to be shown an Australian court order which permits the child to:

• have an Australian passport
• travel internationally
• live or spend time with a person outside Australia.

If there isn’t full consent or an Australian court order permitting the child to travel, we may only issue a child passport if we consider special circumstances apply.

These consent requirements are in place for a very good reason. They’re legislated specifically to provide all parents the right to make decisions about their children. Importantly they protect children, including safeguarding them against criminal activities such as child abduction.

For more information, please see how to get a child passport.

Are you a dual national and wondering whether you can leave or return to Australia on your foreign passport instead of your Australian one?

In short, the Department of Home Affairs’ advice is that Australian citizens, including dual nationals, should leave and enter Australia on their Australian passport.

This is because you may experience issues returning to Australia on a foreign passport.  For example, airlines may not allow you to board a plane to Australia without evidence of Australian citizenship or an Australian passport. 

If you have a passport from another country, you can use that after you leave Australia.  But you should also be aware that, by entering the country of your other nationality on that country’s passport, local authorities may also not recognise you as an Australian citizen, which may limit the Australian Government’s ability to provide you with consular assistance.

For more information on travelling as a dual national, see Smartraveller.

Or, to get more advice on Australia’s exit/entry requirements, go to the Australian Border Force website.

If you’ve lodged multiple applications for you and other family members together, they might arrive at different times.

This is because all applications are assessed individually, and passports will be posted or ready for collection as soon as they are completed.

Child passport applications also have extra security checks and can often take longer to process.

You’ll receive an email when your passport is completed and ready to collect or receive tracking details from Australia Post if you’ve opted to have it posted.

We are experiencing high demand for passports since the reopening of Australia’s international border.

In the first three months of this year, we issued nearly 400,000 passports, more than double the total number we issued over the same period in 2021.

With passport demand on the rise, we strongly urge you not to leave your application to the last minute.

You should allow a minimum of six weeks to get a new passport or renew one.

To help avoid delays, before you submit your application, make sure you:

• provide all the necessary information
• meet all the requirements.

For more information, visit our FAQs page for answers to the most common questions we receive.

We apologise to those of you who’ve had difficulty contacting us recently. We want to assure you that fixing this issue is a top priority for us.

Call volumes have increased dramatically over the past six months. 

We now have more staff working in our contact centre than ever before, and we are adding more. Our dedicated call centre staff are doing all they can to assist and we’d be grateful for your continued patience.

While we understand some of our customers prefer to speak to a person to have their questions answered, in most cases our website will have the information you require.  The majority of the phone queries we get can be easily resolved by going to our general advice on passport applications, which provides answers to the most common questions raised.