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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

You might want to brush up on your history.

Aside from the peer comment pointing out the bleedingly obvious, there's also a bit of history here:

  In 1907 Justice Henry Bourne Higgins, President of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court, set the first federally arbitrated wages standard in Australia.

  Using the Sunshine Harvester Factory as a test case, Justice Higgins took the pioneering approach of hearing evidence from not only male workers but also their wives to determine what was a fair and reasonable wage for a working man to support a family of five.

  Higgins’s ruling became the basis for setting Australia’s minimum wage standard for the next 70 years.

that you're clearly unaware of.

* https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/harvester-...

* https://www.fwc.gov.au/about-us/history/waltzing-matilda-and...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvester_case

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Can a man support a family of 5 on minimum wage in Australia, or did it stop working?

Minimum wage is more complicated in Australia. There are effectively minimum wage levels set per profession, known as awards.

This is the list of awards: https://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment-conditions/awards/lis... it's pretty extensive

Each award is also complex, and covers a range of issues in the employment. For example, this is the Professional Employee award: https://awards.fairwork.gov.au/MA000065.html just working out what the minimum wage would be for a graduate engineer with 2 years experience is a complex, detailed matter.

But yes, probably, for most professions you could reasonably expect to support a family of 5 on the award, depending on location and definition of "support". Affording a house would largely depend on an additional inheritance, though.

Is "inheritance" used in a different way here similar to how "award" is, or are you saying you often need to inherit money from your family in order to be able to buy a house in Australia?

> or are you saying you often need to inherit money from your family in order to be able to buy a house in Australia?

Tell me a place in any Western society (outside of run-down rural areas/flyover states) where an average employee (i.e. no ultra-rich tech hipster bros) is able to afford a home before the age of 30 purely by his own savings and income. That is frankly no longer a reality for most people.

You seem pretty defensive over me asking whether a word was used in the way I expect it was.

No, it's used in the same way as elsewhere in the Anglosphere. And yes, as in the rest of the Anglosphere, generally you need an inheritance to be able to afford to buy property.

"in the high cost of living areas" is the rest of that sentence.

It is perfectly doable, even common, to buy a home in low and medium COL areas without any assistance from family, living or dead. The fact that you can't do this in NYC or SF is not an indictment of anything other than NYC and SF.

And yeah, you can buy a house in the bush in Australia if you want.

But there aren't any jobs there, so you're going to need an inheritance to support your family of 5.

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