Scrutineer

On this particular point I can say from experience that childcare support in Britain is a total joke compared with Australia and significantly more expensive. You do mention other potential European destinations and I know places like Sweden have better childcare than Australia, so my comment is limited to the UK. As for citizenship, I think if it comes down to working it out in terms of dollars and cents gained then it's not something you should be pursuing. Citizenship is a privilege that can be costly and you have to accept that on its own terms. From my point of view I am a proud citizen of both the UK and Australia but it brings as many complications as it does freedoms.

My experience of many years in Australia is that the only thing that works is staying inside. We've lived in our present home in the hills since March and we've had mozzies every month except August. I went outside for sixty seconds at the weekend to put a plant on the patio and got bitten twice. To be honest, along with the barking dogs the mosquitoes are one of the biggest pains in the arse about Australian life and while the former could be dealt with in five seconds by the stroke of a pen, the latter are here to stay for eternity!

It depends on the article though. For instance, I wanted a book a few months ago that was £15 in the UK, but $60 in Australia, so I bought it on Amazon and it was here 10 days later. Same thing with a box set I wanted. £50 on Amazon UK, but $40 per series (10 series) in the ABC Shop, the only place I could find it, making it $400 in Australia. I'm happy to wait a few days to save hundreds of dollars. It's about purchasing power as much as exchange rates. Aussie wages relative to Aussie prices are weaker than UK wages relative to UK prices. But there are other advantages to Australia that make it worthwhile to be here. Lots of them - retail prices are not one of them and I won't lie to myself about it because I just don't see the point.

Struggling to think of many things cheaper in Australia than the UK to be frank, but I'm open to enlightenment, as ever!

The best place to shop in Australia is the UK, via the internet.

In Adelaide, it's not unusual to have 40 on a Wednesday, 17 on the Thursday, and 35 on the Friday. In fact that is pretty much what happened this week.

Can't speak for every Coles store, but be advised the ones here in Adelaide we have used charge a nice little surcharge for the delivery. I'm not talking about the $20 delivery fee - I'm talking about the fact all the online prices are 10% - 15% more expensive than the shelf price in the shops. A nice little blag because it took us a couple of goes until we realised it and then we stopped using the service.

Australia's economy is slowing down in response to changes in the Chinese economy, so I would be genuinely surprised if rates went up any time soon. I think stable is the best case scenario, and we could even see a slight reduction in rates to induce higher aggregate demand. Good news for homeowners, as such an environment will hold house prices up and mortgage repayments down, but bad news for first-time buyers or savers, much the same as in the UK. I see the PM is talking up coal exports to developing countries, not unconnected to the reduction in demand from China.

UV is only a problem during the days in high summer, and is long gone well before sunset so you can go out without block earlier or later. There is no UV issue here in Adelaide at all for the winter half of the year either. I personally find it a pain, but others get along just fine with it - wearing block and a hat is really no more of a hassle than wearing gloves/scarf/coat/hat in the sleet or snow. The thing that can be a real​ pain though is the flies and mozzies, but I won't bring them up.......

Beaches in Adelaide are first class. I used to go for a 10km walk on the beach, round trip, every morning and rarely saw another person. Plus we could go out swimming every night and very often had the water to ourselves. Because it's a gulf the water was often as smooth as a mill pond and you can float there watching the stars come out, which was pretty amazing. I've seen many dolphins, a few metres from the shore there, plus rays as well. Just had some more thoughts about Adelaide - there are a lot of festivals in Adelaide as well like the Fringe and WOMADelaide, plus the Clipsal 500 if you like car racing. The main attraction for us are all the vineyards, where you can visit at their cellar doors and try wine before buying (or not, depending if you like it). We can drive up to the vineyard of our choice in half an hour and buy great wine unavailable in the shops. Adelaide has an increasingly busy rush hour but generally you can drive around the city with zero problems and there's always cheap parking as well. It's perfect for us because my wife loves city life but I prefer rural, so on the outskirts of Adelaide you get a good compromise on that. We had a koala in our tree two weeks ago, and see kangaroos on the way into the city, where we can visit hundreds of restaurants, etc.

We were actually the last people in the Western world to get a dishwasher, washing by hand until this year, so... my understanding is they cost more money to run, but they use less water. Also as far as the tablet goes, you only use one per day because you stack the thing up as you go, but with hand washing you wash up several times a day to clear the draining board. All I know is it saves me a lot of time and effort and I'm not going back!

I've been giving this some more thought and I can't think of any more saving tips specific to Australia besides buy more online from overseas and forget supermarkets for fresh produce. As we have said, the wages are strong in Australia so they go further in the Aussie marketplace. This obviously depends on where in Aus but don't get too excited about internet speed here either. Average speeds in Australia are way below European and even British speeds, and it can be frustrating. The fuel prices go up and down like a yo-yo here so try and wait until they drop right down before filling up. You're not going to like Australian stamp duty either, sorry, but the house-buying system is vastly superior to the English one, which is a worthy compensation in terms of stress not suffered.

Also stock up on shoes before you come as well. The range here is more restricted, and also they are very expensive. I bought some boots in the UK that cost $60, but the same ones are $180 in "cheap" shops here and $400 in RM Williams. Kids' shoes here also require a small mortgage, so bear that in mind.

Absolutely, but this complicates things further because now we have to go into mandatory/discretionary expenditure, etc. As I have said, we have a higher standard of living in Australia than in the UK, and part of this is because of strong wages. Let's also consider the impact of such an expensive country on PT workers, low earners, unemployed people - Australia now has higher unemployment than the UK, marginally, but trending to a wider disparity. Aussie retail prices are not jokes to many people, but my point here is that more competition would bring those prices down.

I refuse to see this issue as being on one side of the fence or another. Australia has given me and my family more than Britain ever did, and I am proud to be Australian. Some things in Australia are significantly better value than in Britain and we have a better standard of living here. This doesn't change the fact, and it is an undebatable fact, that Australia has the most expensive goods and services in the G20. That is a fact of life in Australia. Being in denial about that in pointless, and really is an immigrant thing because Australians are perfectly aware of how expensive it is.

I have found that too - less of a sense that government/business should be held to account and more willing to take what's dished out.

Adelaide feels like a large town - a sort of Cheltenham-on-Sea with palm trees and vineyards. It's a charming place with cheaper housing than Melbourne, but then some like the buzz of bigger cities. in Adelaide you can drive from a rural division to the CBD in 25 minutes, which is impressive for the year 2014. You must decide based on what you rank as the most important things about moving. Adelaide is hotter, though, and that can be a factor. It's not just the overall temperature that gets higher, but the length of the heatwaves. Could be worth considering.

They were $17 per kilo during the crisis, and even now $3 per kilo is much more expensive than the price per kilo in the UK, US, and even notoriously expensive Japan, where they are less than $2 per kilo. There is no debate here - Australian bananas are a luxury item compared with other countries and that is because of market manipulation and lobby groups.

And what about Australians who don't have that option? Why should simple bananas be a luxury product for Australians just because of one lobby group?

I would make sure there is a market for your business in Australia as well. The economy is different here and so are consumer tastes.

Your mention of Gumtree reminded me of Freecycle, which we have used here with great success, but only for getting rid of stuff. I would get in the habit of looking overseas for things like books, DVDs, clothes and even electronics. Australia is so expensive for most of these items that even when you factor in postage costs you still get a better deal, plus the internet naturally offers practically an infinite range. As I said before, this is really about how protected Australian retail was before the internet brought transparency to just how much Aussie retailers were ripping off their customers. This is why they are fighting so hard to bring down the import tax allowance, and why billionaires like Gerry Harvey constantly lobby government to end the various tax exemptions offered to online sellers.

I don't know if banana production is integral to the Qld economy or not, to be honest with you. I can be a critic of laissez-faire, but if an industry needs government subsidy (or other protections) to survive then it is costing the taxpayer to keep it alive, remember, so they are paying for their product twice. On the other hand, cheap third world produce is wrecking our economies - look at the devastating effect all this cheap Chinese junk is having on our manufacturing base. It's a tough call. Going back to my point on logistics though - I was really questioning how Coles cannot bring fresh carrots to my local store when they are grown in this very state, when Sainsbury's can get carrots from Israel to the UK stores and still be fresh. I'm just making another criticism of Coles here. I would make the point again though that I don't see why I should have to pay so much for bananas just to keep 6000 people in work. It is a tiny industry in terms of human employment, and we could easily import a small proportion of bananas from the Philippines and make them much more affordable for all of us. In fact, our membership of the WTO makes our import ban illegal, and the Philippines have raised this point on more than one occasion.

I accept your point, and have made the argument in the past. We are talking about protectionism though, which raises its own problems. Back when Yasi was wrecking the crop, as I mention above, bananas in Australia were the most expensive in the world - higher than NYC or even Tokyo. There were stories on the TV at the time of a massive increase in the theft of bananas because people simply couldn't afford to buy them for their families. So the interests of 800 banana producers, who use largely mechanised techniques and employ less people than you think, were put before the interests of 24 million people.

We talk about the logistics thing you mention a bit, and I've looked at it from all angles. It's good, in principle, that the supermarkets try to protect Australian producers, but if that means very expensive produce, restricted range or low quality then that is putting the interests of Australian producers above those of the general public. A good example is bananas. A few years ago there was a major problem with the Qld banana crop and because imports are not tolerated the price when to the moon and you just saw piles of them left on the shelves because they were so expensive.

Do you think it's wise to make an assumption about somebody's view of an entire country based on a discussion of Coles?