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.

It’s important for everyone with fair skin (and not so fair skin too) to take on board a simple fact. The UV from the sunshine in Australia will take the skin off you - literally.

People get sunburnt here much, much faster than in the Mediterranean. I’d say the sunshine in Australia is stronger than in the Greek Islands by the same amount as the Greek Islands are stronger than the south of England.

If you expose unprotected skin to the sun for half an hour here at midday here you could be burnt badly.

I’d never been a regular hat wearer until I came here. The first few days here - and ears and nose burnt so badly that the pain was excruciating - changed all that. At this time of year, I’ve learnt not to go outside for more than a few minutes between 9am and 3pm. If I really have to, I wear sunblock, hat and sunglasses and move quickly from one clump of shade to the next.

Fortunately the sun rises at around 5am in summer in Brisbane so you can get in plenty of outdoor activity before it gets really strong.

If you’re coming here in summer for the first time, please be safe rather than sorry. Cover up until you can judge safely for yourself the extreme effects of the Australian sun.

Very sad reading about the young lady killed by sharks just off the coast near Brisbane. I’ve been myself to the island (Amity Point – a weird coincidence with Jaws being set on Amity Island.). Amity is a beautiful place with clean, white sand and calm shallow water. Apparently the water was muddier than usual when the attack happened.

According to the newspaper,

“Another island visitor, who wanted to be identified only as Jess, 18, said she had been about 20m from the shore when she heard a woman screaming from the beach for her to get out.

“I saw dolphins and thought she might have been talking about them,” she said.
Amity Point fisherman Miles Scott, owner of Fresh Local Seafood at Amity Point, said locals had long been concerned about sharks.

“We’ve been waiting for this for a long time. We’ve always thought someone was going to be taken here.
“I’m a crabber and at this time of the year massive bull sharks come over the bar.

“It’s nothing to see 10 or a dozen bull sharks under our boat when we are crabbing and they are really aggressive – they are not like normal sharks.”

Rod Farrell, who owns Amity Point Waterfront Cabins, said the woman had been swimming in a channel that locals avoided.

“We’re forever telling little ones and tourists not to swim late in the afternoon or at night, especially in the summer,” he said.

Water police and parks and wildlife staff plan to search for the shark this morning, with a 2km stretch of beach to be closed during the hunt.

Will it put me off swimming? Putting it in perspective, more people in Australia are killed by bee stings than sharks. I think I’ll stick to beaches with shark nets for a while though.

Australia works hard at attracting British people to move here. There is sometimes an element of over-projecting an image of Australia as the land of milk and honey but most Poms who move here don’t regret it. The quality of life is better here for most of us.

If there’s one thing the Aussies love to crow about, it’s their sporting success. Beating the Poms is their greatest ambition. Reading a press release from the Minister of Immigration (Senator Amanda Vanstone) a few days ago made me smile. She said:

“People arrived from more than 200 countries, with the largest influx coming from the United Kingdom. A total of 18 220 now call Australia home - maybe keen to be part of a successful sporting nation!”

http://www.minister.immi.gov.au/media_releases/media05/v05164.htm

I hope the minister and her advisors are more on the ball with immigration matters than they are with sport because - whisper it- The Poms beat Australia in Sydney to take the Rugby World Cup in 2003 and we’ve just won back the Ashes.