[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.