[thmcmahon]

Australia has an uncapped temporary migration program for skilled workers (http://www.immi.gov.au/Visas/Pages/457.aspx), the situation described in this article can not happen in Australia.

On a permanent level, Australia has a permanent program of around 180,000 places a year in a country with only 22 million people.

[vorg]

And those 180,000 places is only the front door into Australia. The back door is to immigrate to New Zealand, become a NZ citizen, then move to Australia. Because Australia and New Zealand have a single labor market, citizens of both can live and work in each others countries without any special permission or numerical restrictions. From my personal observations, virtually all immigrants to NZ move to Australia once they can, and frequently refer to New Zealand as Australia's back door.

[dwd]

While true it's potentially harder to immigrate to New Zealand unless you come from Kiribati, Tuvalu or Tonga which have an extra entry option.

[vorg]

Not sure what you mean by "potentially harder". I've met many people who immigrated to NZ because they couldn't get into Australia. They then moved to Australia within a month or two of qualifying for and getting NZ citizenship. It used to take 3 yrs of NZ residency (tho with very lenient allowances for time out of the country every calendar year) to become a citizen but was changed to 5 yrs around 10 yrs ago, so maybe the situation's changed a little since then.

[lancewiggs]

Much easier as NZ has a simple points system.

But I don't understand why you'd want to leave, having lived in the US, UK, Australia, South Africa and NZ, the choice of NZ for ease of doing business and life is easy.

[dwd]

Happy to stand corrected. Curious as to how they were disqualified. Was it current demand for their trade/qualification or something else?

[vorg]

In the 1990's it was easier to immigrate to NZ than Australia under the different points systems of the two countries. Virtually immigrant I spoke to in NZ got in because of qualification and work experience in China.

[tibbon]

Given that, why aren't more people trying to get to Australia to work? Aside from spiders (a personal fear of mine) it seems to be a pretty awesome place.

[gregsq]

I'm from the UK but have been staying in Australia for a little over a year now. I'm making a hardware gadget from scratch, and some of the people involved are here. I've also lived in the US for a while.

On Bloomberg I listened to an interview with the founder of Jetstar airlines, currently owned by Qantas, and who is now expanding a renewables business, who called Australia a resource exchange economy. Reading how cooks can earn $325K a year in gas projects, and noticing that the just signed Australia - Japan free trade agreement is mostly beef and agriproducts in exchange for TV's and other electronics, the sense initially is of lack of diversity in tech.

There's no way I could make my hardware project in Australia, not that I ever intended to. I haven't been able to find a single viable option for PCB manufacture. And if a company can provide them they're almost always farmed out to China in any case.

In the UK and the US, but also Europe it's just much richer in scope and size. There are some outstanding hardware facilities in the US. They're virtually non existent in Australia, at the right level of expertise and scale.

[benjamincburns]

Lots of people are moving to Australia.

However, one big deterrent is proximity to the rest of the world. If you want to travel home to visit family, or due to an emergency - it's going to cost a lot of money and time.

Because of the distance, the logistics of physically moving there are also that much more difficult.

Then there are the mainstays - cost of living in/around major cities is quite high (though in the ICT sector earning potential is quite good), there are lots of scary critters, etc.

[jpatokal]

Lots of people are trying, but it's not that easy. You can't get a 457 temporary working visa without an Australian company willing to sponsor you. The hurdles for skilled migration are fairly high (and getting higher all the time) and the process takes several years.

http://www.immi.gov.au/skilled/general-skilled-migration/

[untog]

It's far away, and as a developer I don't think you can earn as much as you would in the US. Certainly to be more HN specific, the startup scene is not much to talk about.

[wyclif]

I was interested in migrating to Australia for a while, mostly because it's closer to where my wife's family lives. But it's just so expensive to live in Australia and the pay scale isn't nearly as good as the US or UK. On top of that, they have so many barriers to getting a skills visa it's just not worth it.

[jedmeyers]

Earning less than a unionized plumber is sometimes degrading.

[xyzzy123]

Why? It takes about 5 years to become registered plumber in NZ/AU.

Many plumbers are also qualified in drainlaying, gasfitting and roofing as well. If you work with gas then lives depend on the quality of your work.

You also have to be physically fit, willing to get up early and sometimes deal with really unpleasant situations (e.g. wade through shit).

"Average" plumbers in AU might only get 60-80k (seriously, check the ads), which is actually not that great an ROI on the investment.

It's not until you specialise, become senior, go out on your own or start doing lots of overtime that you make money.

[jedmeyers]

Can I do my own plumbing if I do it according to the codes and I am not in a union? Also why do I have to pay for a plumber that is qualified in drainlaying, gasfitting and roofing when all I need is to fix a small leak in my faucet? It's like when you need to reinstall Windows on your PC you cannot do it yourself and have to get a software engineer for $500/hr who can write assembly code and knows the difference between merge and quicksort.