Guide and Suggestion for people migrating with kids and family to sydney from worldwide.

Hi,
After the overwhelming response from world over to my previous article Ten step guide for people migrating worldwide to Sydney, Australia. (http://rsaini77.blogspot.com/2010/09/informative-article-regarding-people.html),
i have been asked to write an article for people who are migrating with families to sydney.

So here I go with this article. First I will talk about the different type of child care facilities that are available in sydney. The basic child care/day care cost to send your child is around 80 dollors per day. There are some family day care centres as well, which cost around 55 dollors per day.  Child care is divided into three groups. Kid with age 0-2 years, 2-3 years and 3-5 years. The child care with 0-2 years is very hard to find and some have a waiting of nearly 6 months. It is best to fill out the forms when the child is born if you plan to send him/her to child care in 6 months time. 2-3 and 3-5 are available and it is best to start with one day per week and then gradually go upto five day per week, depending upon how the child is adjusting to the new centre. Nappies and food, milk etc are all covered in the fees as described above. Now about the fees, if the combined income of the family (husband and wife ) is more than 100K per annum, then you donn't get any daily rebate from the government, but you can still claim the child care rebate at the end of the financial year. Therefore for example if you pay at the rate of 80 dollors per day, then you pay 20800 in a year for the childcare, then you can claim 50% of this amount(capped at 7500 per annum). Therefore you pay the total of 13300 from your pocket per annum. In case the family(husband and wife) earns less than 100K per annum, then you get a rebate of approx 20 dollors per day in addition to the above.


Therefore annually you pay 60 * 5 days * 52 weeks = 15600 - 7500 = 8100 from your pocket.
Family day care center is like the child care center but it is run by the lady in the house and she cannot employ anyone else. Therefore a lady can get a permission to run a family day care and keep upto 5 children during the day. You get the same type of rebates as explained above.
Now let me explain about the kids who are above 5 years of age. Kids from 5 to 12 years go to primary school, which is from kindergarten to year 6. How goo dhte primary school will be depends on the area where you live. There are various websites which give ratings to the primary schools, therefore you can see the ratings of your local school to find out how good is the school. Now the interesting point is that the school is until 3:00 PM only, therefore if the couple is working until 6pm, then you have to find a school which has after school facility. One point to mention is that every school has an area allocated to it, such that it can take admit students from that particular locality only. Therefore it is quite possible that your house is allocated to one school and the house opposite to you is allocated to a different school. Therefore it is best to go to the website of the school and see if you are under its area or not. But having said that, no one is stopping you from applying at various other schools. The only point is that you should have a valid explanation in doing so, such as the school is near your area of work, it is on the way to work or some other explanation. Other than the govt. primary school, there are catholic schools and private schools. Catholic schools are strictly for catholic religion people and they are considered as good schools. Private schools are for people who have loads of money and don't have other places to spend money. Therefore they can send there children to private schools and then have regular kitty parties and parent get together with other rich people through rich social school networking. 
Now let us talk about kids from class 7 to class 12. There are various options available. You can go to your local area high school. Other option is that you can sit for selective school entrance test in year 6 and if you clear it, you can go to selective schools in sydney.


Now the concept of selective school is that some schools are marked as selective, which means that kids who are god gifted in intelligence can go to that school and can learn particular subjects or can learn along with other like minded intelligent kids.
How to inject intelligence into your kid or how to make him intelligent even if not god gifted, needs an article on its own.
I hope you will enjoy this article and if i missed something you can always email me at rsaini77@gmail.com or write a comment regarding this article.
Thanks for your time.
Happy Blogging.

Ten step guide for people migrating worldwide to Sydney, Australia.

Hi,
Let me first introduce myself. I am Rajeev Saini (rsaini77@gmail.com) working as an engineer in Siemens in sydney.
From linkedin groups , I see that many people are migrating from USA/Europe/Russia to sydney and they have many questions, therefore thought of writing an informative article about this place.
No doubt, sydney is a great place to work and stay. It has got almost everything, let me list down some of its characteristics:-
- Pleasant weather, no extremes.
- Beaches
- Mountains
- Great city life.


Now for the people that are migrating here, sydney can be divided into the following:-
Pls open up google maps http://www.google.com.au/maps and type sydney into it.
- East sydney, with suburbs like rockdale, padington, bondi,etc
- North sydney, with suburbs like  hornsby, chatswood.
- West sydney, with suburbs like parramatta, blacktown
- South sydney, with suburbs like ingleburn, liverpool.
- Inner sydney, with suburbs like strathfield, burwood etc.

Hope you have found these suburbs on the map by now, therefore if you are planning to come here, the following is the general guideline of each part of sydney
East sydney - this area is regarded as the most expensive and fit for the affluent people.
It is close to the beaches and linked by buses to central part of sydney.
North sydney - this area is also close to the beaches and most of the computing jobs are concentrated in this area, with major companies having offices in chatswood, st leonards, noth ryde etc.
West sydney - it is generally regarded as the crime capital of sydney, it is linked to the central sydney by train network, has lot of asian population and caters to the needs of the people from asian countries.
South sydney - Generally not very well connected to central sydney, but can cater to the needs of the people who are low on budget . you can find cheaper accomodation and low rentals in this part of sydney.
Inner sydney - Is the place where most of the migrants land up, it is high in rental and is the most connected part of sydney, therefore if you get an interview call, you can generally be ready and can reach the interview place within 20 minutes.

For the people coming from USA, the major difference that you will find here is that train journey is given utmost importance here in sydney.People in USA generally go by car and consider 30 km to be a close enough area. Therefore they need to get out of this mindset after coming here, you will see that some rental accommodations in the same suburb fetch more rental income (or you need to pay more rent) if they are next to train station. And by the way 30 kms either way of central sydney is either forest or deep water, therefore donn't consider 30 km to be close enough.
People coming from europe will find that the train network is same as that of there home country.

The other difference is that sydney is much more expensive than compared to USA. I have realised that it is due to less competition in any chosen field. Therefore a person residing in USA will laugh if i him the following-
1) There are only 2 major superstores here, namely woolworths and coles.
2) There are only 4 major banks here, though none collapsed during GFC.
3) Ginger in sydney is about 15 AUD per kg. Therefore pls bring some ginger alongwith from your home country.
4) Banks charge 5 AUD a month to keep your money.
5) Home loan rate is about 7%.
6) Bread cost is about 5 AUD per bread.
7) Rental is about 400 AUD per week.
8) There are 3 major job search sites and 3 major car buying sites.
9) Train journey is expensive, a peak hour ticket can cost you about 10  AUD  a journey from say parramatta to north sydney.
10) Leather goods cost a lot here, therefore buy your leather jackets before coming.

There are many other points, therefore if you like this article, i will come up with more info in my next article.
To summarise some more points:-
If you land up as a permanent resident there, there are loads of things to do in first month:-
1) Apply for medicare card, so that you can go to a GP doctor without any charges.
2) Go to centrelink office, to get some financial assistance if you are eligible.
3) Find a rental accomodation depending upon where you want to live.
4) Make a monthly or quaterly rail pass.
5) Register with the job agents.
6) Get a tax file number.
7) Apply for a learner driving test or find out whether your home country license is valid here.
8) Prepare to say mite, slang for mate.
9) Find cheaper chinese shops in your local area so that you get used to chinese stuff as it will become part of your life.
10) Open a bank account and deposit your cheques or cash that you have brought alongwith from your home country. It is no brainer, there are only 4 banks here and they rip you off in similar way.

Please let me know if you like this article. Click on like button, share on your facebook, send me email or any other form of appreciation.
Enjoy!!!!!!!And welcome to sydney.

ATL/COM - Passing UDT in an IDL file.

There are two general scenerios that needs to be discussed.
1) The user wants to put an array field inside a structure, something like
struct DVDStructure
{
SAFEARRAY(long) *m_dvdID;
BSTR m_comment;
}

To put elements into this safearray, you need to create a safearray using the function

SAFEARRAY *dvdArr;

dvdArr = SafeArrayCreateVector(VT_INT, 0, len);
// iterate and put elements into this safearray.
SafeArrayPutElement()

To get the elements from this safearray,
SafeArrayGetLBound();

SafeArrayGetUBound();
//iterate from lbound to ubound and then get the element.
SafeArrayGetElement();

2) The user wants to pass the array of UDT from the IDL file.

HRESULT PassStructure([out, retval]SAFEARRAY(struct CdvdGenStruct) *vecObjects);

The structure needs to be defined in the library section of the idl file(if you donn't follow this you get element not found error at runtime) .
[uuid(give a guid here)]

struct CdvdGenStruct
{
long m_id;
BSTR m_comments;
};
 
HRESULT hr = GetRecordInfoFromGuids(LIBID,
1, 0, 0x409, __uuidof(CdvdGenStruct),
&pRecInfo);

// Create SafeArray
SafeArrayCreateEx(VT_RECORD, 1, rgbounds, pRecInfo);
hr = SafeArrayAccessData(CdvdGenStruct,(void **)&actualData);
// put the data inside this safearray
hr = SafeArrayUnaccessData(CdvdGenStruct);

Whereever you need to access the data , simply do
SafeArrayAccessData(*vecObjects,(void **)&pActualData);
and then use the pActualData.

In case , you have a UDT inside a UDT that needs to be passed through IDL file, then the inner UDT also needs to have a GUID of its own.