With only a few notable exceptions, some dying fast (mining jobs), the cost of living in Australia but not Melbourne or Sydney is any chance at meaningful career advancement. Adelaide, Darwin, Perth, Cairns and to a lesser but still noticeable extent Brisbane offer only small firms. Let's not talk about Hobart.
Though, for me personally this is brilliant and one of the reasons why I still live in Brisbane. The small firms have some big clients, and salaries are high if you're good at negotiating as there is a massive lack of talent in Brisbane/SEQ!
1. Higher than average wages mean higher than average prices. It's not much different to Melbourne in terms of house prices. Two full time prof incomes is the norm. Cost of living is higher. Quality is lower. 2. Fed gov is pretty backward and hard to get into (I voluntarily left after 5 years and no real prospect of job progression while still effectively taking below market wages at my org, while non-technical unskilled bureaucrats at other departments got paid 10-20k more, and I was politely informed if I wanted to progress, I would have to become non-technical/non-expert). Job cuts in recent years, promotion based on whether the person above you has died/left yet, and a policy of redeployment rather than competitive rehiring means it's really hard for young people. 3. You have to live in Canberra. Don't get me wrong, you really can make a career of it, and if you and your SO want to plop down, live in suburbia, have a child, and not worry about merit/skills/culture/tech/life while carrying a mortgage for 25 years, I can think of worse places to try to pull it off.
When you're on the outside, you figure all the clever folks in the 'central agencies' have got it figured out; they're tweaking their models and pulling the right policy levers at the right time.
When you get in, the horrible realisation hits you: no-one actually knows what the f* they're doing. There's no plan, no coherent goal, just a bunch of people doing....stuff. It's like you've wandered into the cockpit of a commercial aircraft, only to discover that no-one is flying the plane.
Are you a techie/IT person? It's a criminally under-valued skill-set in the public service.
I never worked in the "IT" streams (backend databases/helpdesk/hardware is kinda what I'm thinking of when I say that), but worked doing analytics for the ABS. Which at least at the time was one of the worse paying agencies in terms of the levels at which tech staff are employed, and by tech staff, i mean, people with specialist skills who actually do work (APS 4 - 6, with a handful of competent techie EL1 - EL2 old timers who are still there mixed in with the incompetent APS 6 - EL 2 rusted-ons). But it was also one with the smartest workforces (if I might say so) and had highly skilled requirements.
I found my time there quite intellectually stimulating at times, and left for a variety of reasons. Part of which was Canberra itself and the public sector attitude.
Part was because they were trying to phase out the higher skilled positions and enforce a mangement-aucracy: only managers get paid high, and we should get rid of EL1/EL2 non-supervisor specialist roles and subsequently they weren't willing to match pay to demand/productivity but had to try to fit everything into the public service predefined heirachy.
And part was a crackdown on social media posts and commentary that was happening at the time.
And part was questions of whether the government would try to claim intellectual property over anything I worked on during a side project, meaning I had some risk of them not letting me do challenging stuff at work any more, but claiming rights over it if i subsequently did it on the side.
Anyway, a whole host of issues. Good luck, hope its managable where you are :)