Life In Australia

Our daughter went back to school on Monday of this week, after the summer holidays. She’s one of the lucky ones. Her classroom is air-conditioned.

Many Brisbane and Queensland schoolchildren are not so fortunate and are forced to sit stewing in swelteringly hot classrooms trying to do their schoolwork.

In a relatively wealthy state and country, it’s intolerable that classrooms aren’t air-conditioned in mid- summer.

You can bet your bottom dollar that the state government has all of its own buildings air-conditioned. As far as schools are concerned, the government says they plan to air condition all state schools in the “long term”. (I’d interpret that as a politician’s euphemism for “sometime never”.)

If you are planning a move to Brisbane, you really need to ask schools whether they have air conditioning or not. For the sake of your kids, find one with air-conditioned classrooms.

I was reading some gloomy jobs news in The Age today.

Apparently employment in Australia fell in the last three months – including in Queensland.

Funnily enough, figures from the ANZ Bank are showing that, at the same time as employment is meant to be falling, the number of jobs advertised in Queensland is actually increasing. More and more of the jobs being advertised are appearing on the internet – good news for anyone thinking of moving here.

I know for a fact that businesses all over Australia, not just in Queensland, are crying out for skilled workers in all fields – just a couple of days ago there was a report that Queensland was short of around 500 aged-care nurses.

It seems that unskilled jobs may be being lost, leading to the decreasing employment figures. At the same time there is increasing demand for skilled people, leading to more internet job ads.

The skills shortage is very good news for skilled people who want to live in Australia.

A word of caution though. An employer who advertises on the Net may not be interested in hiring someone from overseas. Most newspapers here circulate in only one State – they don’t have Australia-wide coverage. The Net is a convenient way for employers to get their vacancies in front of readers all over Australia.

I see the Housing Industry Association is saying that houses here are at their most affordable for three years.

Interest rates have been steady, people’s incomes are rising and house prices are falling. House prices have fallen by 5 percent in the last three months.

The average price paid by a first-time buyer for a house still seems quite high to me at $342,900. Typical first-time buyer repayments are $1,992 per month.

Houses here are still expensive compared with the late 1990’s. Then the average buyer needed to devote 17 percent of their take home pay to mortgage payments.

Now the average buyer needs to devote 29 percent of their income to mortgage payments.