The 30 per cent threshold will rise to $25,001.

The 42 per cent rate will be cut to 40 per cent and the threshold increased to $75,001.

The 47 per cent marginal tax rate will be cut to 45 per cent and the threshold increased to $150,001.

We also pay medicare but that’s much, much less than National Insurance in the UK.

Looking to the (my) future, superannuation for people aged 60 and over will be paid tax free from July 2007.

It looks as if Australia is proving to be the lucky country. Developing countries are hungry for metal ores – which Australia has in abundance. Australian exports are fetching record prices and the economy is very healthy. For years now we’ve been getting tax cuts. Compare this with the UK where Gordon Brown is scratching around for every possible way of increasing taxes.

Australia’s needs for skilled migrants are going to be all the more easily met. It used to be that Brits looking to emigrate to Australia traded off the fact they’d be financially worse off for more sunshine and a better lifestyle. It looks more and more as if Australia may soon offer a higher wage packet as well as the sunshine and better lifestyle. Finding more migrants for Australia is becoming easier every year.

Homesickness is something we’ve never really felt. We both feel it would be nice if we could see our relations in the UK more often, but it’s not something that’s tearing strongly at our emotions.

But last night we met – I’ll call her Jenny. Jenny and her husband have been in Brisbane for about a year now and Jenny still finds herself crying almost daily with the pain from homesickness.

It’s not as if she doesn’t like Brisbane. She says it’s a far, far better place to live than Manchester, where they emigrated from. Yet her close family isn’t here. Other familiar people and smells and scenes aren’t here. The effect seems to be tearing the poor woman apart.

If you haven’t been away from Britain for an extended period before, homesickness is something you should watch out for. It could wreck your whole emigration and, if it strikes you, I don’t think there’s much you can do about it.

I’m certain Jenny and her husband will be back in Manchester within 12 months. They’ll have a lower quality of life in many ways but it’ll be worth it to Jenny because she’ll have all those familiar things again that she can’t have in Brisbane.

Poms are everywhere in Australia. In Brisbane alone there’s almost 100,000 people who have emigrated from Britain. Most of us have gone native so you’ll find it difficult to tell us from the Aussies – until we open our mouths .

You’ll find that the vast majority of Aussies are very welcoming and friendly to Poms, so don’t worry about opening your mouth and revealing your Pommieness.

When you arrive, you’re going to need to find a house to rent, buy furniture and household goods, buy a car and do all sorts of other things. Even though there is air-conditioning in many areas, you’ll find all of these activities are tougher if you’re melting in summer heat that you haven’t adjusted to.

To make things worse, this time of year is a bit like August in France. It’s the time when lots of people take holidays. You often can’t find people as easily as at other times of the year.

In my opinion, the best time to move here is in April or May. Then the hottest, wettest, stickiest weather is over. In April and May, the sun isn’t as strong as in summer so, with a bit of care, you won’t have to worry as much about getting sunburnt.

Coming in April or May, you will be greeted on many days with perfect weather – blue skies, moderate humidity and daily maximum temperatures somewhere around 25 degrees C. Perfect weather, giving you lots of time to acclimatise before the heat of next summer comes along.

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.

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.

My take on the numbers is that a lot of Poms are choosing smaller cities for quality of life reasons while less than you might expect are heading for Australia’s big two – Sydney (New South Wales) and Melbourne (Victoria).

Since we arrived in Brisbane, we’ve added to our family and our son is a little Aussie. We wondered though if, legally, he was also British. It turns out that he’s not completely British – he is British by descent. This means he has the right to live and work in Britain as a citizen. If, however, he does not live in Britain for at least three years, his children will have no right to be British or to live in Britain.

We prefer living in Australia but it seems strange to think of our “mother country” disowning people whose family’s association with the British Isles goes back thousands of years simply because their grandparents decided they would prefer to live in Australia.

I suppose that’s the situation many young Australians find themselves in today when they’re looking to work abroad for a few years. Their ancestry is entirely British but they are not British and, unless they follow the same immigration procedures as people whose anscestors have never had any association with Britain, they can never be British.

So they stay in Australia.

Often they do casual work. There’s a shortage of casual workers and fruit pickers etc here so it’s fair to say that many people turn a blind eye. Not the authorities though. If you’re found out, you are deported and most likely banned from coming back to Australia for a few years.

The typical overstayer is a man aged 31 to 50 or a woman over 60.

According to the Dept. of Immigration, more than 40,000 overstayers came to Australia on visitor visas and most had stayed up to a year longer than they should have. In the last 12 months more than 18,000 overstayers and illegal workers have been deported.