daily life in Oz

How time flies...
it's been over 6 months since we left. So far life in Oz has been reasonably easygoing. I got a job before we arrived so that was easy. It's very much the same type of job as what i was doing in London, which is good and bad at the same time. The only real difference (for those in the industry, is that now at least i can openly admit that I work for a broker. Something which seemed taboo at my previous company). Also good was that they sent me on an FX trading course: one week to learn all about "legalised gambling in the world's biggest casino" as my colleague calls the FX markets!

Finding a home has also been too easy. Since Irene for now is staying in Melbourne, I had to find a place to share. I found a website specifically for finding flatshare mates and he presto, 2 weeks later I was living in a nice house with swimming pool, near the beach! There's also a big open-air "ocean swimming pool" nearby. Hewn in the rocks at sea-level, its perfect to do laps in ocean water without waves, rip current, surfers, and sharks;-)

Irene is staying in MEL for now we've decided, for baby-purposes. No, not yet, but it's all part of the grand master plan! I will keep commuting or else she'll come to Sydney. Her dad is going back to Philippines soon so she's spending time with him.

So what can we tell you about daily life, in as far as our separated, commuting lives are "standard"? The separation is not fun and also it feels like you're not really getting stuck into either city. You just skim the surface, you're an eternal passenger, a ship in the night. Forming new relations and exploring the city are a bit limited because of this. On the brighter side it does give me the time to focus for 4 nights a week on work and study or research. In my quest for a comfortable retirement at 40 (i wish!), I am going to have to hurry so a bit of extra time is useful.

News themes here in the media are cricket, aussie rules football, rugby and all other sports. Apparently there are also national elections this year and apparently there's a whole wide world out there where sometimes interesting things happen such as the Davis Cup, the 6 Nations rugby, the cricket world cup and the Oscars. Some big local topics are the current drought and water usage and recycling. The drought is indeed a major worry. In the back country, severe restrictions are in place, farmers are selling out, livelihoods are being lost. Though prime minister Howard now finally seems to accept El Nino and global warming (they are investigating clean coal energy and hesitating in developing nuclear power), he still hasn't given in and signed the Kyoto agreement.

A few themes are running in a remarkable parallel with the UK: e.g. there's the discussion pro and contra identity cards. Currently neither country has them and both have been discussing/planning them for a while, bringing along a lD card. From a continental European point of view it's hard to imagine a society without ID cards, but i find the pros and contras an interesting discussion. Then there are the unavoidable muslim issues. Just like in the UK we have some sort of extremist, pardon "misunderstood", mufti whose opinions incite the local non-muslims against the muslims (note to Ward: abu Hamza in GB and Taj el-Din el-Hilali in Australia).

Other than that there is little international news. The USA, Iraq and the commercial interests with Asia still make the news still but for European news we depend on SBS. SBS is a fantastic idea: it's a TV station dedicated to the many nations which make up the current population. It shows films from these countries and the daily news in the original language, be that French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, you name it.

My impression is that the level of participation in tertiary education has only really taken off about 15 years ago. Which makes sense since the big waves of immigration started in the 60's and 70s so their children first started going to university in the eighties. So the general level of education is moving up along with the 30-40 year olds. But in these past 15 years growth has been enormous. When i first landed here in 1997, many cars dating from the 70's were still in use. These have now all been replaced and the proportion of european (i.e. expensively taxed) cars has increased as well. People are richer, the houses are grander, unemployment is at a record low and the consumption society and credit card business are in full expansion. 16 years of economic expansion has left Australia with a very small debt -the only reason the government still issues bonds is to support the share markets which many small investors happily participate in. GST (=VAT = BTW) has been introduced as well as compulsory pension savings which have strongly stimulated the fund management industry. Whereas Melbourne and Sydney used to be finely balanced, since the Olympics the balance of power seems to be tipping in favour of Sydney. Thanks to that publicity a lot of foreigners and companies are opting for Sydney, which in turn also seems to attract more Aussies and Aussie banks to move here.
So the banks' front-offices are now all in Sydney, while many backoffice operations and also many fund managers are based in Melbourne - along with fund management software houses. This is of course a very narrow view of the economy - i hope to expand it in time.

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