Sure, I rent a large, new, 3 bedroom house 20 minutes by train from the Melbourne CBD for $2250/month. It's great. I certainly couldn't do that in Toronto or Vancouver.
Granted if you want to buy a house, Australia (especially Sydney) is expensive for a bunch of reasons (negative gearing etc). But Toronto is still more expensive than Melbourne and Vancouver is much more expensive.
The median salary in Vancouver is substantially lower than Sydney, and its property values are similar.
Vancouver salaries are also lower than almost all of Canada's metros, while having the highest property costs. Vancouver also has the best weather. The Canadian metro with the best opportunity and lowest comparative costs is Montreal.
You have only 30 million people, living on an island continent the size of the United States. And is the country with probably the longest warm water coastline on the planet.
Something to think about: with so few people we can only sustain a handful of metro centers, for many reasons metro centers need to be of a certain size to be effective as a hub for business, jobs, social aspects and policy making, so people gravitate to where the cities already are. So "property in a busy metro" is still a scarce resource in Australia.
Another aspect is we quite simply have an inflated market, driven by foreign investment, speculators, government policies and incentives that help investors at the expense of home buyers. We also have thousands of citizens with outsized investments in real estate, and the government is doing everything it can to make sure that house of cards doesn't topple down and cause a recession.
One of our last government's policies to "Help ease house prices" was to give grants to corporate investors, so that they could buy up land and rent it back to people. That's the kind of policy making we have here at the moment
South Australia is moving toward that, which is largely desert despite it's temperate climate south eastern region and coastlines.
They recently started putting together an interstate connector to other states, which allows the state to export excess power from renewables. In part to help offset grid reductions as NSW brings some of it's fossil fuel plants offline. They already have had some 100% renewable days, but plan to be 100% renewable by 2030.
Another quirk of SA's energy history was Elon Musk offering to help solve grid costly instability with a battery solution within 100 days or it was free. Odd tactic, but it happened and they have a 100MW battery reserve in Hornsdale that is set to expand to 150MW.
In order to crack water, you need water, which is in short supply in the desert. Desalination + massive pumps and pipelines from the ocean would soak up any increase you get in price efficiency compared to batteries or even compressed air.
Liquid hydrogen and liquid ammonia have almost 10x the energy density of current battery technology. If you could go all the way to synthesized hydrocarbons it's another 2x.
I'm not sure efficiency matters that much when you have far more energy production capacity than you need but it's concentrated in places and times where you can't use it.
As for costing more: compared to what ? Batteries don't seem like an economically effective option for storing solar energy at massive scale, do they ? And in any case they don't allow the stored energy to be shipped to other locations.
Out of the 8 zones, zones 3 and 4 don't seem to inhabitable, they're probably the "outback" aka desert. 1 seems to be the subtropical jungle bits. They're huge, however doing a silly size comparison with Romania, which has around 20 million people ( https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!NzkwMTU3Mg.NDI0MDg2OQ*M... ), it seems that even considering just the temperate zones, Australian population density is low.
I guess it's more an issue of bad urban planning because of economic pressures. Everyone bunches up in the same centers of population, which cover a very small area, in relative terms.
Probably the same as anywhere else. Many people want to live in a limited area, house prices go up. People who can afford them buy them, which keeps house prices there.
> The median salary in Vancouver is substantially lower than Sydney, and its property values are similar.
Not that you actually own that property value in Vancouver. If you run away and go work somewhere else for a year, and don't rent it, you owe Vancouver a hefty empty home tax.
Granted if you want to buy a house, Australia (especially Sydney) is expensive for a bunch of reasons (negative gearing etc). But Toronto is still more expensive than Melbourne and Vancouver is much more expensive.