Where skilled visas ask "what can you do?", family visas ask "is this relationship real, and does it fit the definition?" Both halves of that question matter, and they're assessed on paper, by a stranger, sometimes years after you lodge.
Partner visas: the shape of it
The partner program is generally a two-stage process: a temporary visa first, then a permanent one assessed later, once the relationship has been shown to be continuing. You must be married or in a de facto relationship that meets the legal definition, and a sponsor (your partner) must be approved — sponsorship has its own requirements and limits, including how many times a person can sponsor.
What "evidence" actually means
The Department looks at the relationship across four aspects: financial (shared accounts, joint commitments), household (living arrangements, how domestic life is shared), social (how the relationship is known to family and friends), and commitment (the history of the relationship and plans together). Genuine couples get refused not because the relationship is fake but because their file doesn't show it — everything was in one partner's name, or the paper trail has gaps that were never explained. Couples separated by distance for stretches of the relationship need to document how the relationship continued through the separation, because unexplained gaps read as breaks.
The timelines nobody warns you about
Partner visas are notorious for long processing, measured in months to years rather than weeks, and the fee is one of the largest in the program. Lodging a complete, front-loaded application — rather than waiting for the Department to ask — is one of the few levers applicants control. Meanwhile, applying onshore versus offshore changes what you can do while you wait, so the choice of where to lodge is a real decision, not an afterthought.
Other family routes
Parent visas exist in contributory (expensive, faster) and non-contributory (cheap, decades-long queue) forms, and child visas cover dependent children. Each has strict definitions — "dependent", "aged", "balance of family" — that decide eligibility before any discretion enters the picture.
Partner points inside a skilled application are a different thing entirely — that's covered in the points test article.