Daphne wrote:Just had to ask , why would anybody choose Europe over Australia? Our neice and family moved to Brisbane 17 months ago and it's incredible what they have acheived in such a short time. She was working as a solicitor but without much hope of promotion and her husband a teacher also at a dead end in the UK! They are very impressed with the education and health service and general way of life. Maybe the services aren't so good everywhere in Australia, I only know about Sydney and Brisbane. Martyn 94 seems to be quite an expert on Australia ................
Not really. My sister is the expert: she's naturalised, but still ended up back here. But I have had the advantage of seeing it from outside.
What follows is a wild generalisation. They live on vast mountains of cheap natural resources which they have sold to China at very good prices for a few decades. They are not called the "lucky country" for nothing. Hence they have been able to combine very good pay for gifted people like your family, decent pay for plain folk, and generally very adequate social support for people who need it.
The downside, over time, is that they are extremely urbanised, centralised, and suburbanised (with one consequence, among others, that they are even more obese than us). They have combined that with a very "extensive" pattern of urban development, which means that only very affluent people live close to the action (especially in Sydney) and everybody else lives 50kms out of town and spends half their life commuting in a car or on mediocre public transport.
That's OK if the aggravation is the price of economic advancement, and you have kids to distract you. But once you are retired, it might seem decreasingly attractive. If you live 5 or 10 kms from your local shopping mall (which is nowhere much to go to in any event) and aren't so confident about living entirely dependent on a car, either now or in 10 or 15 years time, or just no longer think it's a good trade-off, Céret could begin to seem like paradise. Since Australian pensions are generally very adequate, and selling up there would generally set you up here pretty nicely, it could seem a no brainer if you think you can hack the change of culture.
It's not very different from the itinerary that brought many of us here: we have made some money where we had to, and are spending it where we want to.
I have no idea whether that reflects ShazzaandPete's thinking or situation but it certainly has been my thinking. I spent many happy months in Canberra over the years, thanks to friends and family, but you would have to chain me down to live there, genteel and pleasant as it is.