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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.