Slean Wolfhead

Once you get south of Wollongong it's stunning, and the further you go the less people..probably culminating way down at Merimbula and Eden which are pretty mindblowing but quiet places. It's not commutable distance though. I looked at the rates and owners stats last year and a startling number of properties are owned by people with Canberra postcodes....a quick bolt across country for a weekend at the beach.

Australia isn't right for everyone, it's a cultural change. There are some high earners here and $1500 per day is attainable in IT, we have people on up to $350 per hour depending on the specialism. We've found that the squeeze and cuts haven't affected much at all....if you're good enough then the skills are actually more in demand. You might get 6 months instead of a year, but that would make somebody that's more flexible more desirable...as a migrant you're likely to be flexible in your outlook and not holding out for the perfect deal in your own backyard, or forced back to a hometown you didn't really want to go back to. However i stress, you need to come here for the right reasons and the lifestyle is different to the UK. If you want that lifestyle, then money isn't everything...you just earn it, invest it and forget it. Lots of free stuff, walking, swimming, relaxing, making yourself healthy and forgetting the rat race of London. We prefer that to the UK for a few years and can't see a reason to move back yet, economy or no economy. We're still ahead overall. It's quite laid back and quality of life and being able to enjoy it is paramount. It's a skill to be able to slow down.

You mean the UK wants to be like America. Australian's don't put up with Starbucks or chains, the Canberra one went bust because nobody used it.

It's been a cold one in Canberra so far, last year we had a few cold nights but nothing major, this year it's been continual minus figures for the last 6 weeks. I've had my first Aussie cold after 3 years. I have the feeling this is El Nino kicking in and we're going to get some very hot dry weather for a few years, so it's a good job we're getting rain at the moment.

Googong Dam has big murray cod, over 1 metre. A pommie first-timer I know caught two on his first day ever fishing, apparently that's quite rare... :-) There 's a fly fishing place on the way to Bungendore that's meant to be good. Also, if you like sea fishing...google Bermagui. Not very far away from Canberra, tuna, marlin, sailfish.

Gungahlin Lakes in the north, Hellenic Club in Woden are two i know of. Time difference is a problem though, it's the middle of the night so some matches might not be on if nobody can be bothered. Foxtel have pretty much every game on live.

They've been worried about poor Aussie exports for the last few years, but every time they cut interest rates the UK would announce even poorer economic figures and the USA would print more money...so the AUD was being kept artificially strong despite best attempts to let it weaken. The pound is now rising but i don't think the UK is out of the woods at all. They still borrowed 10 billion in May and poor economic growth hasn't made the deficit reduction targets that the Tories predicted way back in 2009 (as the reason for austerity)...there's an argument for saying that even with no austerity, any economy would have rebounded to the current levels if nothing had been done whatsover. The worry i have for the UK is that interest rates must start rising soon and the deficit will start accelerating again before they've really been able to take a huge chunk out of it.

http://www.carsales.com.au/ For private cars, you can check http://www.revscheck.com.au/ to ensure it's not been written off. We bought a car for about $5000 initially, a nail but it lasted a few months and then we part exd it when settled. Don't be afraid of vehicles with mileages that would make you wince in the UK. Canberra cars trundle about slowly with little braking and accelerating, Toyota's can do 300,000 km easily. Some will rarely have been driven above 55mph because the drivers think they will suffocate (and that's almost not a joke). Groupon.com.au do Canberra car services. http://www.groupon.com.au/deals/canberra/5a-mechanical-repairs/719889043 Just book, print off and take the voucher. Registering is a funny thing, you can go in to Dickson's Canberra Connect and register the vehicle and pay some cash inc compulsory 3rd party liability insurance, then top up online with your own insurance on top. Have a look online for the process of purchasing.

This is a great, but very comprehensive article by Paul Krugman on how the UK has been behaving and how it definitely has not worked, and won't work. Obviously destroys the Tory coalition's economic policy, but also criticises Labour for their very weak opposition. http://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2015/apr/29/the-austerity-delusion

And that is the answer to pretty much all these questions.

Is Perth humid? Over in the SE inland we get virtually no humidity so I can handle 40+ without much of a problem. Last June in the UK i was sweating every night, t-shirt soaking wet at the back. Not had that once in Oz.

What was the dollar worth then? My parents first house in the UK (1969) cost them £6000, then they moved up in 1979 and it cost them £18000.

Got an Aussie mate in London. She said she was laughing on the tube when it was announced that the temperature was 25 and that "passengers should be carrying a bottle of water".

Borrowing to produce growth to increase revenue was their plan. It would probably have worked better, compared to what's actually happened. What's happened is that the austerity measures were designed to prune fat and public sector services to make us lean, with the assumption that private industry would fill the gaps and produce tax revenue from invention and job creation. That didn't seem realistic at the time and it hasn't worked at all, with pretty much every target missed. We are still having to borrow huge amounts because our income targets have been missed, partly because there hasn't been private lending available to support the expected small business sector that was supposed to sprout up and save the nation ! The bottom line is tax revenue, and income tax. It doesn't matter how many non-jobs or part-time work is now re-classified as a "job" to make unemployment figures look better...it's income tax revenue that counts. Many of the "new" jobs are minimum wage which pays no income tax, part-time, or zero hours that doesn't pay regular income tax. The amount of workers earning below the tax-free threshold has risen from 20% to 35% in this parliament. It defies belief that the desire for a low wage economy could somehow produce the same amount of income tax, so maybe it was all a trick to widen the gap whilst looking after big business interests at the expense of the little man, many of whom thought they were voting for less red tape and the ability to run small businesses successfully, and just haven't been able to do that. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9f242cd2-e337-11e4-aa97-00144feab7de.html#axzz3XkrSSmw4 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29587711

The massive pension fund holidays were mainly taken in the late 80's/ early 90's in the days of high Tory interest rates, when the thinking was that interest would make up any shortfall. Employees were not given the choice to suspend their contributions and didn't know that their employers had stopped paying in their own share. Can hardly blame Brown for that, they didn't get into power years after that. He did sell off the gold though, that was bloody stupid.

Evidence? I think this is untrue. Inner City populations have been falling since 1950, but populations have been increasing in new urban towns. 10% minimum depopulation in the 1970's, up to 20% in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow. The reason is economic, not due to immigration and not due to density of population (which is tiny in inner cities, there is huge capacity available to expand, but it's not been utilised). Low skill manufacturing jobs have been replaced by autonomy and we have had a commuter workforce for a very long time, especially in Inner Cities, with rich well-paying jobs created in previous areas of low-paid low skill jobs that just do not exist anymore (London Docklands for one). Immigrant populations have tended to consolidate in manufacturing industrial towns outside the inner city, such as Yorkshire, West Midlands, Greater London, Greater Manchester. They won't be moving into inner cities, they'll be continuing to live outside them. There is an argument they should disperse more for greater integration into wider British society instead of living in enclaves, but this doesn't follow with your line of argument of immigration as being a catalyst for accelerating depopulation, it's just not based on fact.

Yep, and good luck to them. It was the British and Irish who went over to Poland, Romania, Czech, Bulgaria after communism to build Buy To Let apartments when the local Eastern Europeans couldn't afford to buy a house in the towns they were born in. The UK expected them to migrate to the UK and settle there as full investors to our society. They didn't expect them to live cheaply 10 to a house and send all the money back to Eastern Europe, but they should have done. A huge miscalculation by British social and economic policy, we'd even made our own TV programme, Auf Wiedersehn Pet, showing our British workers doing exactly the same to the Germans. We never showed them deciding that Germany was actually a better place to live and invest with Oz, Barry and Neville deciding to become German and foregoing the pleasures of returning to Newcastle and Wolverhampton! If anything, by investing Western European money into Eastern Europe, it improved it and made it a place they'd want to return to. We created the aspiration for them to come over to the UK, earn as much as they could, and remove it from the country straight back to Gdansk where they could now afford an apartment that we'd already built for them ! It's like a swinging pendulum, back and to.

Exactly. This is just a fantasy thread built on madness, not even worth thinking about it any further.

The bit you miss Thom, is that a huge proportion of the UK's land is privately owned from feudal times, so unless you've got a huge wedge of money and an aristocratic title, it's unlikely that you'll ever be in a position to "sacrifice" anything because it's got sod all to do with you anyway. You're in effect, a proletarian who's allowed to look at it, maybe walk on some of it where it's not fenced off to keep YOU out, perhaps doff your cap to somebody who owns it, but you have no ownership rights and bear no responsibility for it. You go on to ask about food production from land and economic growth. A bit of research for you to carry out if you can. Compare the price of farming land in the UK, with the price in Germany and ask yourself why German land is 10 times cheaper.

I don't mind disagreeing, it's just a discussion. I think the UK has it's head to close to the paper and has a view that's too insular to be successful. Change is inevitable and constant. We used to lead this change and make the impossible happen, but now we're incapable of responding to it or even imagining it. To think that we're not capable of expanding by 10 million in a world of 4 billion is a good example of that, but as i said, I think we'd really struggle to make it happen anyway because we don't really have an achievable plan for anything.

Didn't Westminister Council outsource their HR function to near there some years ago, compulsorily, with staff transferring? OK, the intention was obviously to make staff resign so they could replace them with cheaper Scots (who may be from Timbuktu), but internal migration has already started. Look at the BBC and Manchester.

It's not too broad a brush, this is the basis on which the UK Chancellor makes his budget. You talk about "some", but you don't base economics on that because it's impossible to get granularity at that level. Politics is broad brush and everybody has to try and be successful within those broad rules. A French worker (who could be from Timbuktu) can take Friday off and still produce more than a British worker (who may also be from Timbuktu); an Italian worker (also from Timbuktu) is 9% more productive than his Malinese brother, who's working for Britain. http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21646235-if-britain-cannot-get-more-its-legion-cheap-workers-recovery-will-stall-bargain?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/bargainbasement

We're horrendously inefficient on both, look at the mess with power stations and the threats of power cuts because we've been incapable of sorting it out, now looking to the French EDF to come and save us, or resorting to burning stuff to make power. We have plenty of water in the UK, but the network is like a leaky bucket and none of the privatisations have worked for the purpose they were intended, they still pump **** into the sea and give the money to shareholders. What is UK culture these days? It's unrecognisable from 25 years ago, but native people didn't change with it. The country they feel entitled to isn't the country that exists now, let alone in the future. It seems to me that many of the immigrants are improving the culture and they're better educated than the natives.....we need their skills to support the rest of country. Our workers are less efficient than the Italians and the French already, which is startling.

I remember working on a report for Birmingham about 20 years ago when they were looking at feasibility to change the Rotunda into apartments. The official population living in the City Centre was something astoundingly tiny like 600....nobody lived there. Shops were using the ground floors of the old buildings on New Street, a few had offices above, but there were 10's of thousands of square feet lying empty or being used to store cardboard boxes and the like. Potentially hundreds of millions of pounds lying dormant, in the form of taxes and rates. Hence the policy change on shops and eateries opening at night, and the mad conversion to get people living in the City. Many cities in the world grew like this, but the UK always preferred to live in suburbs and shut the regional cities at night. We also have the remnants of the feudal system in place where posh people live in the expensive countryside, a lot of which is still privately owned and restricted to public use or development, and poorer people live in the suburbs created for them. In many places the countryside is cheap to live in and farm (Germany for instance), whereas the UK has ended up in the utterly stupid situation where farmland is so ludicrously expensive it's better for a farmer to claim an EU subsidy rather than bother growing food. These are the sorts of fundamental problems the UK faces in the 21st Century, it's policies are completely out of touch with the way the world is progressing elsewhere, not really an immigration problem as such. Immigration will just carry on happening, it's whether the UK can ever gear itself to accept this and improve life quality. There's no need to concrete over national parks in the UK, just build Cities up to 70 stories which is common in accelerating dense cities, and build down about 8 levels under the ground. Private developers will be up for that like a shot, but the UK problem is that we have no money to keep up with the supporting infrastructure required outside London and Governments have become poor and weakened to the point of ignorance. Trains are a mess, roads are underfunded, buses can't get through the traffic, we push cheap car sales but don't keep up with roadbuilding for them to run on etc.. You can't just dump people in poorly provisioned areas unless you want more ghettos, the country has to be able to support them. I reckon they could double the population, but they won't be capable of doing it.

The joke about the Canberra rush hour is that it lasts 35 minutes, it's not really a problem if you're coming from the UK and used to proper gridlock, here it keeps moving except for right in the city centre approaches. It's like Sunday everyday. City Centre parking is chargeable and around $50 a week, so is Belconnen town shopping mall above 2 hours. Gungahlin is still free.