AussieMum

Agreed. If I just need a medical certificate for paid sick leave or need after-hours attention (that doesn't warrant a trip to A&E), I'll go to a bulk billing doctor if I have to. We're lucky that we have one near us who does appointments versus walk-in and wait your turn. On the other hand, the practice I usually attend will bulk bill kids and pensioners, and they can choose to bulk bill other appointments too and forego the extra payment, eg, a quick followup visit to check a dressing or get results that they can't give over the phone. Re: repeat prescriptions, it depends on what it's for and how long it is since you've seen them for the relevant issue. We can ring our GP practice and request a repeat script (I think it's $5 or $10 for their time) and collect it the next day from reception - my husband does this for his migraine meds. However, some medications need the doctor to see you every time or every so often - sometimes it's required and sometimes it's them covering their backside due to possible side effects/complications, eg, drugs that can increase or decrease blood pressure.

Something to bear in mind with this is that some private hospitals or specialists won't accept self-paying patients or only for certain procedures. This is because while they might have enough saved for a procedure if everything goes perfectly, it doesn't take much for things to go wrong and suddenly there can be VERY expensive things needed like additional surgery or specialists involved, ICU stay, extended inpatient stay and/or rehabilitation, etc, etc, which can blow the cost out from $10,000 to $100,000 or more. The other thing to note is that while public is excellent and efficient for life-threatening conditions and emergencies, people can and do spend months and years in excrutiating pain and with very limited function while on waiting lists and having surgeries cancelled and rebooked (to make from for emergencies) - things like joint replacements, for example, make your life hell but it's not going to kill you so if you're in the public system, you just have to wait your turn.

I've never used boiling water in a hot water bottle. Hot water from the tap should be more than enough. But boiling water isn't going to start a fire the way wheat bags can if left unattended in bed due to the way they retain heat.

My mum cleans the offices of a local tax agent and they nearly all take time off in June to recharge their batteries before it gets crazy busy from July onwards. The deadline for either lodging a DIY return or being signed up with a tax agent is 31 October. https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Lodging-your-tax-return/Lodge-with-a-registered-tax-agent/

Lara on the northern outskirts of Geelong. 50 mins by train to Melbourne CBD, 20 mins to Geelong, 40 mins by car to Torquay and the start of the Great Ocean Road, 10 mins to the You Yangs forest park. Not too bad to get to Tullamarine for international flights and Avalon Airport is literally just up the road (going to be international down the track fingers crossed). New shopping centre with the essentials, not too far to large shopping centres in Geelong/Waurn Ponds/Werribee. New estates have a range of block sizes up to 1000 sqm, older properties are on the old quarter-acre blocks (though go for more as a lot of people are subdividing and building a second house in the backyard).

I'm on the outskirts of Geelong less than an hour from Melbourne. For that price around here, at least one and probably multiple of these factors are going to be playing into the price: old but needs work, new but low-quality build, limited number and/or small rooms, small land size, part of a unit/townhouse development (though may be freestanding), in a "lifestyle"/retirement village , or in a lower socioeconomic suburb (eg, Corio and Norlane have their good pockets and their less desirable ones). These first two are less than two miles from me. The asking price was $360K to $390K but no data yet on the final sale price. The carpet would have to go! https://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-vic-lara-127594170 This one is renovated but small with a courtyard as it looks like they've taken their old quarter-acre block and subdivided the backyard into a second house block that's ready to be built on. https://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-vic-lara-127708630

A small place might have a BYO permit instead of a full liquor licence as it's cheaper. Others might stock bottled beer, etc, but have BYO for wine because that way they don't have the expense of having to have a decent-sized wine list for the occasional wine drinker.

At most schools the office will open after holidays either this week or next - I'd give them a call and ask as they will know if you pay a supplies fee to them and they source everything or if you have to buy things from a booklist yourself and your son takes them with him. If the office is still closed, they should have an answering machine that will tell you when they reopen. (source: mum of two and married to a teacher)

Book Depository were great value before Amazon bought them. Now, not so much. I always use booko.com.au as it searches all the websites and gives you the price, shipping and total cost as well as availability without having to go to each site yourself which makes it really easy. You can also create a list of multiple items and it will compile the combined shipping (but if you are happy to mix and match to get the VERY best deal it won't do that, eg, buy books A, B and D from retailer X and books C and E from retailer Y).

My son's birthday is in January and other than him and a couple of mates with birthdays the week after his, he has always been the youngest in his year level. Pretty much everyone whose birthday falls between mid January and the end of April waits until the following year to start school, particularly boys who really benefit from being that little bit older. So when he started Grade 3, he had just turned 8 and turned 9 in the summer holidays before starting Grade 4. As others have said, it's a completely different system over here.

As mentioned in this article linked above, it's all about what is reasonable in the circumstances and is taken on a case-by-case basis, eg, age, capabilities, time, time of day, distance, etc. In Vic the law is "offence to leave child unattended" under section 494 of the Children, Youth and Families Act 2005: A person who has the control or charge of a child must not leave the child without making reasonable provision for the child's supervision and care for a time which is unreasonable having regard to all the circumstances of the case. Re: The original note, "It was written by the Officer in Charge of Miles Police about six months after a six-year-old girl was found walking alone, following a hand-written map to a location "some distance away" she had never visited before." Obviously a 10-year-old walking or riding a route they've done plenty of times before with mum is vastly different. Or compare an 8-year-old going across a quiet road and three doors down to a pre-arranged play date at 10 am vs an 11-year-old being sent to the shops 3 km away in the dark.

Agree that Cottonelle is rubbish - falls apart, clogs the toilet and leaves a layer of "dust" everywhere. A year or so ago we switched to Who Gives a Crap and love it - it looks like el-cheapo but is fantastic. https://au.whogivesacrap.org/

You can also contact the Tenant's Union in your state for advice. Even just using their factsheets to make sure you know your rights is helpful. https://www.tenants.org.au/factsheet-06-repairs-and-maintenance They also supply sample letters, eg, https://www.tenants.org.au/sample/urgent-repairs

Not only that, depending on where you or your husband are going to be working, commuting from outside of Melbourne is also an option. A LOT of people commute from smaller cities like Geelong and Ballarat. I commuted from Lara (a town on the northern outskirts of Geelong) up until a decade ago and it was faster for me to get to work on the Vline train than it was for people living out in the South East or even those commuting on the metro lines from places closer in like Werribee.

We built two years ago and the biggest recommendation I can give you is to research and educate yourself. I spent at least a year reading the HomeOne forum (which is specific to building and you can get lots of good info there) and we visited a LOT of display homes to suss out the different builders and get a very clear idea of what we did and didn't want before we started talks with one builder in particular. We also engaged an independent building inspector who made sure that the work met the Australian Standards. On the flipside, a lady I know was building at the same time as us and she was unhappy from the day she moved in. Part way through her build I asked her how it was going and she didn't even know the name of the building company let alone what stage they were up to. I was driving past nearly every day and peering in the windows to see what had been done and we got a weekly call from the builder to let us know "X and Y were done this week, Y will be finished by Tuesday and then Z will start on Thursday" We are really happy with what we ended up with - we went with a small franchisee (Hotondo) here in Geelong because we needed a custom design - our block is short and wide as opposed to most modern blocks (and therefore house designs) which are long and narrow. It wasn't any more expensive that getting a bog standard house from the huge project builders and we had a lot of input and felt the builder worked WITH us. We had a reasonable choice of fixtures and fittings and we able to provide some lights and taps ourselves to get exactly what we wanted, as well as vinyl planks. We got to have a couple of meetings on site with the cabinetmaker to discuss the exact kitchen/bathroom/laundry layouts as well as going over the light switches, etc, with the electrician before they were finalised. The main culprits for going over time seem to be the project builders who promise to churn out a house in 14 to 16 weeks (and the workmanship tends to reflect the speed of the build in my opinion). Our contracted build time was 9 months and handover was bang on time. It was a longer build but, for example, we had one excellent brickie working for six to eight weeks as opposed to a team of six who slap the bricks up in less than a week. Yes we had a couple of hiccups along the way but anyone who builds a house and says everything went 100% to plan is lying (or has been lied to by their builder). Thing will go wrong, it is how the builder solves problems that is the important thing. For example, the slab was poured 10 cm short on one 4 m long wall (due to a simple human error of misreading the plan and reading an internal wall's length instead of the external wall). He called us at 8:30 am, less than an hour after the issue was discovered by the framers, to let us know and with a plan and timeline already in place to fix it and offering a meeting on site to show us exactly what was what.

I don't think anyone's saying kids should ONLY start at a new school at the start of the school year. But if the choice is between starting on the first day and starting a week later, then I think the first day is definitely preferable. Starting on the first day means they are included in all the classroom "getting to know you" activities - even in the same school, there's plenty of kids who won't have shared a classroom before or know the teacher and vice versa. School offices open at least a week before the first day (if you ring them once they've shut for the year, usually their answering machine will let you know what their first day back is) and the first official day is always a student-free day. As the wife of a teacher, most teachers are there two or three days before then anyway, setting up their classrooms, etc, as the first official day is often taken up with meetings. It's not like the entire staff turn up half an hour before the students on day 1 and wing it!

So if hospital parking is free, who pays for building/maintaining the parking? Imagine the outcry if a hospital said "oh, we're going to spend $x million dollars on our carpark but that comes out of our funding pool so which piece of medical equipment should we forgo to pay for it?"

Double check that BUPA offer the exact same coverage as Ambulance Victoria membership, ie, ALL ambulance transport. I know when we were with GMHBA we had AV membership and they just reimbursed us the annual fee on production of our receipt which was great (not with them now so not sure if it's still the case). However, most private insurers are only covering the cost of limited services with exclusions. They might have exclusions for non-emergency transport (their definition of emergency, not yours!) or air ambulance (which is thousands of dollars) or over a certain dollar amount or number of trips per year. I have heard of people not being covered by their private insurance because someone called an ambulance but they didn't actually transport anyone or they weren't admitted to hospital, or not covered for transport from one hospital to another for specialised treatment (from maternity hosp to one with a NICU, or from a local hosp A&E to one with a spinal unit after a car crash, etc). Many schools will call an ambulance if they feel it's warranted before they can get a hold of you and the cost will usually be on you/your coverage, not the school. Plus, AV membership money goes to helping make up the shortfall in government funding for the ambulance service (it shouldn't be needed, but that's another discussion entirely). Ambulance cover through PHI just goes into the insurer's profits.