How Much Do Things Cost in Australia?

I had an chat with a man named Murray who runs Melbourne’s Best Bicycle Tours yesterday. We sat by the Yarra river and sipped lattes and talked about how much people get paid here. Then we asked the waitress how much she made, and she wasn’t at all shy. “$18 to 20 minimum,” she said. That’s per hour. I told her that at our cafe we have baristas who make between $8.50 and $11.00 per hour. But the coffee here is $3 minimum for a small, and I’ve noticed that the drinks in bars are way higher, as our the menu prices. Everything here is racheted up higher, because wages are so much higher.

The whole system, said Murray, comes from the days when Labor ran the country. So wages are set much higher, and in this country there is no tipping. There are giant apartment buildings for the unfortunate, the crippled, and those who have no homes…and there is a safety net of health insurance that isn’t like a complete HMO but covers the basics.

People work as waitresses and bartenders and at service jobs for careers, because the average wage is about $50,000 a year. That means they have the money to go out for dinner, and to pay a cover charge of $32 to see a comedy show, or spend $89 for a bike tour. It all works well for Aussies, but not as well for Americans, since we exchange our dollars for basically the same amount of Aussie dollars. But we are used to adding twenty percent on top of everything, so it’s closer than we think.

One thing that Murray was not pleased about was when he tried to take his kids to an American football game in the states, and was shocked at the $65 minimum ticket price. “Here we can take the kids to a footie (Aussie football game) and it’s a twenty for me and just $3 for them….so the whole family can watch the game for not that much.”