pintpot

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Evolution. Males will boast/fight/compete to get jiggy with as many females as poss, whilst females do the actual choosing as to who gets to make the beast with two backs. Same goes for most if not all mammal species and plenty of examples in other classes in the animal kingdom I think it's great. When I'm tom-catting about, it's not my fault, my genes made me do it. "Don't have a go at me, love, give Darwin a call". We can't help it and should therefore be left to get on with it :biggrin:

It's worth emphasising that. On $67K a year and with 3 or 4 kids in school, I would have to say do not come to NSW on a 457 visa. You will be paying $15-$20K out of your income after tax, which will make life unaffordable - unless you are fortunate enough to get let off the school fees on grounds of income. This has happened, but it is uncommon and you certainly can't rely on it. With the ages of your older kids you also need to consider what they will be doing when they graduate from high school. If they want to go to Uni I think you will be copping for international student fees and these are also high

Construction industry is pretty strong over here - much stronger than at home - but it varies from state to state and sector to sector, as of course you would expect Commercial and resi building are the two weakest sectors in general but this varies a lot and from all the data I see both are strongest in WA, so that is good news for you (or more specifically your OH). Civils/infrastructure is more solid, especially in transport (esp rail) and resource related areas I don't think you have much to worry about - at the risk of speaking for others you might try contacting bensdad and weegiedave, both of whom have gone to WA in the past 6-9 months and found construction work no bother You don't say if you have any family, this obviously would mean you'd want to be a bit more careful and certain before you jumped. If you don't have kids I'd say don't hesitate, not a lot to hold you back and with fewer ties and dependencies you have a lot less to lose, not that I think you would lose

Fair enough, not looking for a row, honest guv :-)

Cobblers. You - no one else - introduced a spurious and invented "statistic" to presumably make some sort of point, humorous or otherwise. Can't see what "30 years ago" has got to do with the price of fish tbh, from where I'm standing I reckon you just thought you'd get universal acceptance, sorry to disappoint you Admirable Facts? You seem pretty light on them. You've given us one which is perfectly plausible but hardly presented in any sort of context. I'm not surprised if interpreter services cost 50 quid an hour for an outsourced professional service, tbh that sounds pretty cheap. Some other professional services the NHS buys in will cost them a lot more. Without some sort of perspective on how much of a burden interpretation services place on the NHS that one "fact" is meaningless. As it happens (you may be surprised) I think there's way too much pandering to multilingual issues in the UK public services in general but councils and the NHS are between a rock and a hard place - in order to deliver services they have to communicate with people and some of the service recipients can't speak English. Would be great if they could, but in reality they can't. Same goes here fwiw - primary visa applicants need to prove language skills but the secondaries don't, so there are plenty of people here without good English as well. I suspect what the NHS spends on interpreters is a tiny sum compared to what it spends on some other professional services. Lawyers and accountants for a start, architects, engineers and so on I wouldn't know what "benefit a mosque gets" tbh. Not that there were any facts damaged as a result of making that post, of course

lolz :biggrin:

Not particularly fussed either way - I was just pointing out that saying 99% or virtually all English people have a problem with migrants, is silly Anyway, I thought you were a (born) Aussie and living in the UK, making you a migrant yourself? Apologies if your PoV is coloured by having been the victim of anti-migrant actions/feeling/prejudice as a result

Same goes for you - you may like to think that the vast majority of people think in the same way as you but, fortunately, they don't. A simple majority? Quite probably. 99% or anywhere near it? No, and it is stupid and insulting to suggest it is

As per previous Aussie posters not long ago - please don't presume to speak for me.....even if it's by implication by inventing silly statistics

No, it isn't. Given by what you say your lifestyle is in the UK, you can't afford that in Australia on $55K I don't think. I don't know costs in Melbourne specifically but by all accounts it's not that cheap (for housing especially, which is the big one) From a cost of living standpoint, however you cut it you're looking at an effective pay cut, on top of that there's the one-off costs of moving. Think you're being short-changed tbh

I would have thought somewhere south along the Illawarra/Wollongong rail line would be the most realistic for a commute to BJ - direct trains or one easy change I shudder to imagine the commute from the Central Coast to there, to be honest. Maybe it's better than I imagine it Loads of families seem to find areas of the Shire good for them and affordable (for Sydney) - certainly much cheaper than the Northern Beaches. And it's an easy journey to Bondi, to boot

How about "Pietersenland" :wink:

Yeah.....the best ones I've found to date have been from SA though. But we're talking a very limited sample

Well, tbh I'd only get a car to ship if it was going to make you good money. I'm not an expert but maybe a 1-2 yr old German model. They seem to go for $stupid over here, and second hand values hold up much stronger in Oz too. So if you bought one in the UK that had taken its big first year depreciation hit and shipped it over, you could be quids in. But you'd want the money in the first place to buy it Me personally, I have a low tolerance for faff and bureaucracy so I don't think I could be bothered unless I had the free cash to buy now and tie it up for a year, and if I was going to make plenty. If I knoew I were staying just for a year I'd be inclined to buy a cheapy in the UK (piece of cake to buy something perfectly serviceable for 1K or so there) and accept I was going to lose that when I shipped out, and then buy again in Oz. But that's me. Shipping cars seems to work quite well for many

Not really worth buying loads of stuff IMO as you don't know where you'll be living or whether it will fit That said, we bought a pushbike and some furniture to bring with us, and brought some old (antique) furniture we probably would have sold in the UK normally. Didn't regret any of those, as all those items are quite a bit more costly here and we don't like much of the furniture we've seen here either in terms of style. We would have bought a new Mac to bring with us as the old one was due for replacement anyway, but they're cheaper here so we didn't bother The only thing we didn't bring and should have done is a washnig machine - we bought one here but it cost a fair chunk and we don't like it much. We probably just bought wrong. I wouldn't worry too much about the 12 month thing, so long as you're not bringing loads of brand new stuff in original packaging you shouldn't get caught out. The one caveat to that is vehicles, when of course it's very obvious when you bought it. High-end cars are one of the things you can apparently make good money on - I know a bloke who is bringing 2 Porsches over - but it (importing cars) is a load of hassle by most accounts, so it has to be a good financial deal to be worth it. I would add that we weren't paying for shipping. But if you're bringing a container anyway and there's space in it, you may as well stuff it

lolz @ getting the day wrong :wink: I think it is the NSWRL who have put the game in Melbourne (as they would normally be hosting two games this series) I bet my house the reason is $

You reckon? Asylum seekers are a pretty small part of the sum I think Petals is closer to the mark - Australia continues to expand its economy and population but without making the proportionate investments in infrastructure, coupled that with a general air of apprehension about the short-medium economic future (especially in some sectors and localities) and you can see how plenty of Aussies think there's no need to keep inflating in the way they have been But then I would say that, wouldn't I? My work/business is to build infrastructure so it's in my interests to pump up the need to provide it a bit. We're all biased in some way

Definitely will be watching.....the quality of competition and intensity in NRL is superb at club level - this is another step up again

Swore I'd posted on this thread a couple of days ago? Anyway, I said the shares were stupidly overvalued at a p/e of about 100:1, despite fb's obvious massive reach, potential to grow that reach yet further and potential to further monetise that reach. Honest guv. Looks like I was right, eh? :wink:

Totally agree with you about the trajectory of the way the big two are taking the supermarket business.....it's not just the local shops, it's the suppliers that get squeezed too, and some of them will be crushed I'm less convinced the quality is "superb" - it's all right IMO, not markedly better or worse across the board than the UK, but then we always shopped for quality stuff and used local shops (we were fortunate to still have them in rural Suffolk) back home, too. I do notice that seasonality matters so much more here, principally because the vast majority of fruit and veg is Aus grown rather than imported, but that's also a good thing IMO If people cook and shop more seasonally, and shop around and use local and/or quality suppliers, then that's all good I think. And I would echo the implication of "be careful what you wish for" when it comes to cheap supermarket food; it comes with a lot of collateral damage

Presunming you're talking about government schools - In NSW and ACT, yes; elsewhere, no You have to pay to send them to private schools everywhere, of course

Cooperia?

Let us know how you get on - are you looking at areas to live whilst you're here?

I'm trying not to be harsh about this, but he is an adult, why should Australia (or any other country) allow him to freely migrate just because he wants to? Also I don't see what introducing the question of asylum seekers has got to do with the price of fish