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> It's a shame because Perth and even Melbourne used to have a relatively low cost-of-living and high quality-of-life.

I'm British and have just moved to Perth. I am looking at being able to get a house 2-3 times as large here compared to the UK, for similar outlay.

Add to that the weather and the sheer space... the QoL here seems so much higher than back home.

I have spent time in some parts of the US (about 4 months in Texas, probably about a year in other parts in total), but haven't lived in NYC. It always seemed nice, if you like the big city, but I had my fill of that in London some time ago.

Now over east? Yeah housing seems utterly inaccessible in Sydney and Melbourme. But out west here it doesn't look that insane by my (British) standards.

Australia by and large is also much less grubby than the UK.

(I say, 'grubby' not 'dirty', because I don't know whether the UK is actually dirty. Eg all the buildings just look dirty and drab compared to Australia. Perhaps it's a leftover from centuries of burning lots of coal?)

I agree, Perth has always seemed sparkling clean compared to most cities in the UK. Other Australian cities I've visited seemed that way as well.

I think partly it's the light - it's so bright here in Aus that things look cleaner anyway, but also the light and the heat keep things a little cleaner, UV sterilises and the sun bleaches after all.

Aus doesn't have as much of a legacy of concrete brutalism, either, lumpen concrete buildings in the UK that started out grey and end up brown, water-stained from all the rain and oppressive-looking.

And also I think better care is taken. Visiting London after having lived here in Perth for a couple of years about ten years back, I was struck by just how often as I walked around my nostrils were assaulted by smells of rotting rubbish or just plain urine.

So yeah, bunch of things, but it does feel much cleaner here.

Interesting, yes, the UV bleaching things might be a factor.

You are right about the smell of urine and pot in London.

I'm genuinely curious about this. My questions are:

1. What do you do for a living in Perth? What I guess I'm really trying to determine is what income bracket you're in.

2. Where in Perth are you looking at renting or buying? and

3. How much of your ability to buy is because you sold a house in the UK so have a huge deposit to put down?

I've known quite a few British people who have moved to Australia and pretty much all of them had (3).

I would say that QoL is generally much higher than the UK though. Houses and blocks are of course larger. Earning potential in London at least is pretty high though. But if you want a house you're probably commuting for an hour each way when the trains are running, which they generally aren't. Crossrail will be interesting.

> Like when the gay marriage issue was decided even the highly conservative former PM Tony Abbott basically came out and said the matter was settled and it's time to move on.

Australia recognized same sex marriage in 2017. That was 3 years after after the USA did. I'm not sure I would call Australia as being progressive by that measure.

(I am not a lawyer.)

The USA recognized same sex marriage in 2015, but we did so via a Supreme Court ruling. The Court's composition has changed since then, and the new Court has signaled a willingness to overturn settled precedents.

While our current detent may persist, I would imagine that an action taken by the Australian Parliament would tend to be more durable.

> I would imagine that an action taken by the Australian Parliament would tend to be more durable.

I'm curious to understand why you'd think a law passed by elected lawmakers is more durable than a verdict by judges who have their position for life? Obacare was surely very controversial, but despite the best efforts by the conservative and an ideologically hostile Supreme Court, it remains in place after ten years.

> [...] but despite the best efforts by the conservative [...]

Those efforts were actually pretty half-hearted. They talked a big game, but they don't actually want to abolish it. (Reminds me of how the UK doesn't really want to face up to a no-deal Brexit, despite lots of brave talk. Or how no government in the UK has so far re-nationalised the railroads, despite re-nationalisation perennially polling high with the general public.)

This is a really good point. Conservatives had two full years to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They had campaigned as a party for "Repeal and Replace" for nearly 10 years, but then they didn't repeal it.

The Australian Constitution is heavyweight on the mechanics of federal government, and how heads of power are divided between the state and federal governments, and the role of the court to adjudicate, but quite lightweight on peoples "inalienable rights". There's no "bill of rights" - though there are certain principals like "natural justice" and "customary law". Parliaments are empowered to legislate, and that's what they do. So it's comparatively rare that the court will discover some basis to neuter legislation - though it does happen.

Simply put: two of the five justices who voted in favor of Obergefell (the case that legalized same-sex marriage) are no longer on the Court. They have been replaced with justices who would be more likely to vote the other way.

The realignment of the Court, plus this Court's willingness to overturn settled law, together signal that a new law prohibiting same-sex marriage might be allowed to stand if brought before today's Court, returning the US to a country where same-sex marriage is not universally legal.

So I would regard our current regime around same-sex marriage, civil rights, etc. to be subject to not being directly challenged at the Supreme Court.

In Australia's case, the same-sex marriage law was approved by 61% of voters in a national plebiscite, a non-binding referendum (officially it was called a "postal survey") before Parliament enacted it.

Legally, Parliament could repeal it tomorrow and ban same-sex marriage again. Politically, that would be impossible without another plebiscite, and there is no reason to believe a new plebiscite would deliver a different outcome; it would almost certainly return the same result, and likely by a bigger margin.

No conservative politician in Australia wants to talk about this. I'm sure some of them are still personally opposed to same-sex marriage, but they all realise trying to repeal it is hopeless, and so they'd rather talk about things that they have some hope of achieving.

Cannabis laws as well...

Also vaping.

So, for the record, I 100% support gay marriage and abortion rights.

What you have to realize about the US is that the Supreme Court deciding these issues is... controversial. Many view it as undemocratic (although it's worth noting that many of those same people don't feel the same way about the Supreme Court's pro-2nd Amendment interpretations of modern times).

We're still seeing the ripple effects of Roe v. Wade being decided almost 50 years ago.

As others have pointed out, Supreme Court precedent is only that until a later Supreme Court comes along and changes it and that could very well happen with the current court composition. And you need look no further than the Court's refusal to stay the Texas abortion law pending a full judicial review.

So the date this was decided doesn't really give any moral superiority here of the US over Australia for two reasons:

1. Australia's position was decided by a democratic process; and

2. With 62% (IIRC) of people approving of the change, the matter is effectively settled. No one can complain about it. As such you don't see any real conservative Christian blowback like you do in the US as witnessed by the statements of Tony Abbott and others.

>doesn't really give any moral superiority here of the US over Australia for two reasons:

I wouldn't call the US morally superior here anyways. In fact, i think anyone after the US is really late to the party. The first US law was MA legalizing gay marriage in 2004. It took 11 years of fighting after to get to supreme court.

> We're still seeing the ripple effects of Roe v. Wade being decided almost 50 years ago.

Abortion is far less of a political and cultural hot potato in Australia than in the US. While no doubt some of that is due to other cultural differences – for whatever reason, conservative Christianity has never been quite as strong an influence in Australia as in the US – I think a big factor is the difference in how abortion was legalised.

In Australia, there is no constitutional right to abortion. And yet abortion is legal nationwide. Its legality was achieved through a gradual process, involving state legislation, and state court decisions – those state court decisions were not based on constitutional law, rather the state courts simply decided to reinterpret the existing criminal laws against abortion to not apply to medical procedures. The federal courts stayed out of it completely, and constitutional rights never came into it, only statutory law – if they wanted to, the state parliaments could have overturned the state court decisions effectively legalising abortion, but they chose not to.

The fact that the process was much more gradual, and had greater democratic legitimacy, has helped make it less of a controversy. And since it happened through a series of state laws and state court decisions, opponents of legal abortion don't have one single highly visible event to focus all their opposition upon, like Roe v Wade is in the US. Almost every American has heard of Roe v Wade – even many non-Americans have – by contrast, few Australians know about the Menhennitt ruling (which de facto legalised abortion in the state of Victoria in 1969) or the Levine ruling (which did the same in New South Wales in 1971). American opponents of legal abortion focus most of their energy on trying to get justices appointed to the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v Wade – the main purpose of this latest Texas law is to get a case before the Supreme Court which will give those justices an opportunity to do exactly that – its Australian opponents don't have any national focus, which in practice makes them a lot weaker.

It is totally consistent to support legal abortion, but to also think that Roe v Wade was a strategic mistake.

American liberals have a bizarre authoritarian idea of how governance/power works because they were spoiled for the Warren court for so long. They think of government as a tree of daddies and mommies of increasing wisdom and credentials with SCOTUS at the root, to gift you civil rights if you're pure of heart and can just word your petition correctly. They've completely given up on getting buy-in from the ignorant, downtrodden, misunderstood, and miseducated masses that vote for them (don't even ask about the ones who didn't.)

The recent ruling on the Texas heartbeat law might make a dent in that, although I doubt it.

Changes made by pure fiat don't last. Gay marriage in the US could absolutely turn out to have been temporary for just the reasons you explained.

Surely you could have mode your point ("Changes made by pure fiat don't last") without the diatribe overgeneralizing and insulting a large percentage of the American population?

> Australia recognized same sex marriage in 2017. That was 3 years after after the USA did. I'm not sure I would call Australia as being progressive by that measure.

The US was only the 17th country in the world to allow same-sex marriage nationwide; Australia was the 23rd. Still only 28 out of 193 UN member states have it fully nationwide – less than 15%. Only a 3 year gap, when any country having legal same-sex marriage is just over 20 years old. If we look at this in a global and historical context, both countries are very progressive on this particular issue. To argue that the US is in some significant way "more progressive" than Australia just because it got there a few years earlier, you have to be looking at things from a rather narrow perspective.

"Fully nationwide" above is only counting the main national territory of the country, not overseas territories. Even for the US, same-sex marriage is not legal in the territory of American Samoa – the territorial government of American Samoa claims that Obergefell v Hodges doesn't apply to them due to some legal technicalities, and it appears nobody has yet challenged that claim in court. Likewise, Netherlands, New Zealand, and UK all have legal same-sex marriage throughout their main national territory, but not in some of their overseas territories.

So if you want to be hyper-pedantic about it, the US still doesn't have legal same-sex marriage (throughout all of its territory), Australia does.

I mostly agree with everything here but will point out that SE salaries have risen quite dramatically over the past 10 years in Aus. If you are a (genuinely) senior engineer you should be on $170k+. In a place like Brisbane (if you can handle the summers) that's a reasonably liveable salary. But yeah - I fear it's going to end up like the rest of the country fairly quickly...

One of my major gripes is that education here is not at all egalitarian.

> Property in Australia is like a game of musical chairs but the music stopped in Sydney in 1978

Can you explain this analogy?

The ones that got chairs back then got them, its not feasible to get property now unless you cheat or someone else gives it to you.

At least that's how I interpret it.

The central premise of musical chairs is that there are less chairs than people but every round everyone gets an opportunity to get a seat.

So in my analogy, the last round ended in Sydney in 1978 meaning if you weren't sitting then then you didn't get another chance at a seat.

I remember seeing property shows in the 2000s and there'd be a young couple in their mid-20s with a baby looking at houses that were up to $800K. You'd really need to be earning $200k+ then to afford that or, more realistically, $250k+. Not a lot of jobs in Australia (even Sydney) paid that then (and still don't for the record).

So how were such people affording houses? The Mum and Dad Bank is how. Their parents who were sitting down in 1970s were now sitting on considerable unrealized property wealth and this gets passed along to the children.

Ahhh right... I didn't realise Sydney got so unnaffordable that long ago which is what I think threw me off.

Some important context here: this applies to probably every Australian city but is particularly prevalent in Sydney I feel. And that is that the notion of what Sydney in keeps changing.

So when I say Sydney became unaffordable in the 1970s, I mean what people viewed as Sydney back then, which is inner Sydney, the North Shore and coastal suburbs. But these have now been so out of reach for people who aren't wealthy for so long that people don't think of them as Sydney anymore.

Now when people talk about the affordability of Sydney they're talking about the areas where "normal" people buy. Sydney has expanded far to the West, basically to the Blue Mountains (eg Penrith). It's also expanded south (eg Campelltown). But somewhere like Mosman isn't part of the normal person's mental picture of Sydney property where it was 40+ years ago.

This reminds me of something that happened to me in university. I mentioned to someone the suburbs I'd be staying in over the summer when university was out and they literally said "la di da" like it was fancy. To them it was because they were part of a newer generation who lived very far north (I remember they took 3 buses to get to university). To me, it was just where my grandparents lived and had done so for 40-50 years. When they bought that house it was literally the edge of the city, as in the other side of the street was bushland.

You see it on the train too. When I went to university the one where all the students and twentysomethings lived was 5 stops from the CBD. 15 years later it was 8-9 stops.

As another senior SE in Brisbane I can 100% back up what BrissyCoder here is saying.

Its even more so right now, if you're up for contracting. $1000+ a day is common. Kind of nuts, but hey its been good for my wallet.

While that's an improvement and a welcome one, Sydney (and even Melbourne) seem to still be lagging in cost-of-living terms.

But, more importantly, Big Tech senior engineer total comp is rapidly pushing to $US500K+.

levels.fyi does not agree with you. I feel we are making more software engineers than jobs that are available. Many are offshoring product development to India.

> But, more importantly, Big Tech senior engineer total comp is rapidly pushing to $US500K+.

Is it really though? I'm looking on glassdoor and it's saying average is $130k with high at $180k. And yes I realise that just salary not total comp.

GlassDoor is like asking your grandma.

levels.fyi is widely known to be accurate.

1000 AUD is about 100 USD an hour. That's laughably low for any Brisbane sized city in the states. Not nuts at all.

You have to remember that tax regimes are different in different places. In the UK I’ve been on about $120 an hour, equivalent after tax to a salary of about $200k, and your health care is already paid.

Comparatively it seems like contractors in the USA get punished by the tax system.

1. Tax matters 2. COL matters 3. AUD-USD conversions aren't that straightfoward when discussing this.

$1200 a day puts you into the top few percent of salaries here in Australia. I don't really care what a "brisbane sized city in the states" might be doing, because moving there means I have to live in a country that I'm not a good fit for culturally.

The replies to you seem a bit off to me. $1000 a day is plenty to live on in Brisbane.

I do fear that housing here is going to end up like the other major Aus cities though. I think Brisbane house prices are rising at like $500 a day or something. An amount I couldn't have fathomed paying in rent weekly when I first moved to Sydney.

Yeah agreed. $200k a year is more than enough to live on. Heck, I'm saving 80% of my pay cheque -- specifically to save enough to offset this crazy property price capital growth.

But a simple example that shows how lucky I and others are: I can rapidly, from $0 (if I was silly enough to have no savings for this exercise) save up a deposit within a year or two, less if one has a partner.

Any of my friends and acquaintances, unless they also went into high-paying jobs and industries here in SEQ, or unless they have parents well-off enough to help them, are writing off being able to enter the property market for years or decades.

Its worrying, for sure.

>I really think Australia desperately needs this system but negative gearing is so ingrained in Australian culture now that it's political suicide to try and change it. I believe Labor made noises about this in a recent Federal election and suffered the consequences.

The senior ministers of the ALP came to a similar conclusion. Mid this year they announced no changes to negative gearing or capital gains tax offsets.

For the non-Australians following along, this means both major parties support rampant speculation on the residential property market.

negative gearing allows the average person investing to have the same tax advantages as a company investing (in anything), because for a company, only profits (revenue minus expenses) are taxed.

If there were no "negative gearing" for investment properties, then either there would be fewer such properties, or people would have to form businesses to perform such investments (which adds an extra bit of friction with accounting and tax).

Making it possible to deduct "expenses" from "revenue" of a person doing the investment makes sense.

> negative gearing allows the average person investing to have the same tax advantages as a company investing (in anything), because for a company, only profits (revenue minus expenses) are taxed.

From a quick Google, it looks like companies are not entitled to CGT discounts. This means that forming a business would increase the tax you pay for almost everyone.

>If there were no "negative gearing" for investment properties, then either there would be fewer such properties, or people would have to form businesses to perform such investments (which adds an extra bit of friction with accounting and tax).

This doesn't sound like a bad thing. It would discourage people from speculating on the property market and outbidding owner/occupiers (which is a net negative for society) and encourage them to invest their money in productive businesses (which is a net positive).

The problem with negative gearing is the 'average person' can't participate in negative gearing.

Negative gearing only works for those who have a high level of income with the corresponding high level of taxation.

Why it works so well for these individuals is they can greatly reduce their tax liability by using the property deductions negatively gearing has to offer.

As a secondary benefit, those same investors also win on the capital gain side of the equation as these negative gearing tax incentives create massive demand for property.

Your 'average person' living on the average wage can't benefit from negative gearing as their wage bracket does not attract a high enough level of taxation.

In fact it hurts this group of people only because those higher property prices also means they are priced out of the housing market.

> It's a shame because Perth and even Melbourne used to have a relatively low cost-of-living and high quality-of-life. I honestly don't know how anyone does it now.

The experience of living in Melbourne in 2000 as someone not on the property ladder is very different to now.

In 2000 it was possible to be on the poverty line and still live within an easy bike ride of the CBD. Now everyone I know lives increasingly on the fringes of the city.

This change is not unique to Melbourne but I can't help feel something is lost when you go to a house party and the only people you meet are ones who can afford property.

I'm increasingly assuming anyone who buys in Melbourne is doing so with the assistance of multi-generation wealth.

I'm at the age where a lot of friends are beginning to buy (in Melbourne). There's basically two classes: the people buying houses in the outer-inner-suburbs that would still be vastly outside their price range without massive help from both sets of parents; these buyers are unfailingly couples. And second, single friends buying without parental assistance, but buying off the plan apartments not much closer to the city but which at least offer a deposit low enough for someone to get on the property ladder. One is taking on a lot more risk than the other to enter the market.

> the people buying houses in the outer-inner-suburbs that would still be vastly outside their price range without massive help from both sets of parents; these buyers are unfailingly couples.

I suspect there is a big difference between the long term wealth implications of buying a house vs buying an apartment. There are never going to be more houses in outer-inner-suburbs. There is going to be a constant supply of new apartments as we move towards higher density living.

People who have wealthy parents are in the best position to make better housing investments.

> Property in Australia is like a game of musical chairs but the music stopped in Sydney in 1978 (in Perth and Melbourne it was more like 2003).

Sounds like Vancouver

With regard to gay marriage - Donald Trump ran and won in 2016 on a platform that included the recognition of gay marriage as a settled right. AU and US aren’t so different!

That's kinda my point. It is of course unknowable but I really wonder if Trump could've won the 2016 election if the Supreme Court hadn't handed down that decision.

This has happened before. Dubya largely got reelected in 2004 because Karl Rove tied the campaign to blowback against states and plebiscites in favour of gay marriage.