To emigrate or not to emigrate!

You need to get a card with the Union Flag on one side and the Flag of Australia on the other side, that is the official way to decide

We have been doing a lot of research in the last day and we are coming to the conclusion that the risk is even greater than previously we thought.

We can only and want to go go to south Australia (northern territory and Tasmania do not appeal) so it would be the Adelaide area and everything suggests there job market is though to crack. Youth unemployment is massive abd businesses are making redundancies.

I read that apparently 80% of Jobs created in Australia go to Sydney or Melbourne.

Adelaide apparently has a network where Jobs go together people who they know (ie it's all about contact's) so being friends or related to the right people makes a massive difference

Death's Head wrote:Not really, it is all our convicts anyway. Poshrule will be raped in his sleep, murdered and then his house set on fire.

Yep, you are either a convict or a prison guard. There are no other options in Oz, other than being a spider farmer.

poshrule_uk wrote:We have been doing a lot of research in the last day and we are coming to the conclusion that the risk is even greater than previously we thought.

We can only and want to go go to south Australia (northern territory and Tasmania do not appeal) so it would be the Adelaide area and everything suggests there job market is though to crack. Youth unemployment is massive abd businesses are making redundancies.

I read that apparently 80% of Jobs created in Australia go to Sydney or Melbourne.

Adelaide apparently has a network where Jobs go together people who they know (ie it's all about contact's) so being friends or related to the right people makes a massive difference

Sounds like you're talking yourself out of it. You would obviously only move if you had a job on the other side (doesn't Oz immigration law work like that anyway?) so why is that an issue?

My family emigrated to Australia when I was a kid. They regretted it and so did most of the other British expats they met there. I have citizenship, but I haven’t been back since I was a kid. I probably wouldn't want to live there again personally.

poshrule_au

BBC News did a feature article on this a couple of years ago: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-36299682

A neighbour of mine went to live in New Zealand about 20 or so years ago and never looked back. Loves it by all accounts.

Wasn’t there a daytime TV show that followed Brits moving to Australia? Maybe it’s still on.

Just to echo other posts, if you can give it a good go and not finally ruin yourselves have you much to lose if you go for a few years at least? You may later regret it if you not give it a go sooner than later.

Personally it's not something I'm currently considering, obviously I can't see what the future may hold but currently I don't see myself ever leaving the UK. Despite my family doing my head in quite frequently I just couldn't move to the other side of the world and my only contact be via Skype, just wouldn't feel right to me.

Not something I'd ever do.

I'd definitely consider it. Not Australia though, maybe New Zealand. I haven't looked into it in a lot of detail though. Maybe I will.

Corazon de Leon wrote:My GF is from Australia(Sydney/Brisbane though, not Adelaide) - she emigrated to get away from there as there’s a lot of stuff you don’t really think about associating with the country. Very right wing, constantly in flux, anti-environmental politics, for example. And the stories she tells about the size of the insects there gives me the fear.

With that said, she reckons the food is much, much better in australia and that depending on where you’re living, the people are much friendlier and welcoming than Scotland/the UK.

With all respect, you can't necessarily take a native's word as gospel, as they'll view the country differently having been born there. They'll be well aware of its problems and possibly have a more negative picture of the place. People from the UK could say the same thing about our politics at the moment, being deeply divisive over Brexit and the raise of child poverty, hate crime etc.

Likewise, your girlfriend emigrated too, so someone who actively sought to leave Australia is going to have a slightly biased viewpoint. I've known a few Australians over here and they've sometimes said they were sick of the politics or whatever.

You probably want to be looking at the viewpoint of British expats. They were in a similar position to you now and may very well be currently in a similar position to what you'd be in in the future.

Though like Dual said, you do sound like you're talking yourself out of it. You say "we don't want to live in the Northern Territory or Tasmania" as if that really narrows your options. So you don't want to live on a small island detached from the mainland or the uninhabited widlerness. There are plenty of other options.

Parksey wrote:

Corazon de Leon wrote:My GF is from Australia(Sydney/Brisbane though, not Adelaide) - she emigrated to get away from there as there’s a lot of stuff you don’t really think about associating with the country. Very right wing, constantly in flux, anti-environmental politics, for example. And the stories she tells about the size of the insects there gives me the fear.

With that said, she reckons the food is much, much better in australia and that depending on where you’re living, the people are much friendlier and welcoming than Scotland/the UK.

With all respect, you can't necessarily take a native's word as gospel, as they'll view the country differently having been born there. They'll be well aware of its problems and possibly have a more negative picture of the place. People from the UK could say the same thing about our politics at the moment, being deeply divisive over Brexit and the raise of child poverty, hate crime etc.

Likewise, your girlfriend emigrated too, so someone who actively sought to leave Australia is going to have a slightly biased viewpoint. I've known a few Australians over here and they've sometimes said they were sick of the politics or whatever.

You probably want to be looking at the viewpoint of British expats. They were in a similar position to you now and may very well be currently in a similar position to what you'd be in in the future.

Though like Dual said, you do sound like you're talking yourself out of it. You say "we don't want to live in the Northern Territory or Tasmania" as if that really narrows your options. So you don't want to live on a small island detached from the mainland or the uninhabited widlerness. There are plenty of other options.

All due respect to what you're saying, but I'm not thick enough to blindly believe what anybody says about anything - Australian politics *is* very right wing and the reason I know this is that I had to do a bit of work on their relationships with the US and UK for my PhD, and the two of us keep fairly up to date on what's going on over there now anyway. It would be singularly nonsense to discount what somebody says about the place they lived for 32 years just because they don't live there now.

She's over here on a five year visa and though she does want permanent residency, she wants to move back to Oz eventually - I'm utterly uninterested in living there. It's a source of mild friction. Without going into the full details of her personal life on a public forum, there were push and pull factors in her decision to leave and she's certainly not wholly negative about Aus, as I think my first post describes.

I recommend it. You and your wife are similar ages to myself and my girlfriend. We moved to Rome a few years ago as she is an English teacher, and at the time I was working a freelance project. Then we moved to Hamburg a year ago.

We loved living in Rome, but obviously there were some annoyances, such as health and the bureaucracy. Plus moving there from London we had to get used to dogshit transport. But walking past 2000 year old ruins everyday is one of the best feelings. Going for a stroll to the Colosseum to get some fresh air . Hamburg is a lot more like Britain, but we are still enjoying it. I managed to get work here pretty easily speaking English. We are in the process of choosing where to go next, which will probably be somewhere in Asia. We just want to do this kind of thing whilst still relatively young, and the world hasn't gone completely to gooseberry fool.

We didn't have any real reason to stay in the UK other than friends and family, but I don't think that's reason enough to not go for something you want to do, no matter how daunting. We don't have and don't want kids and were renting when we were in London. I guess if you have a long term job that's well paid it makes the decision a bit more difficult, I was recently out of uni, then moved to London for a couple of years doing random bits and bobs so I had no commitments.

If you have an urge to do it, I'd say do it. However, you should certainly seek out advice from British expats who can give you an idea of what it's actually like living there. We knew people who moved to Rome from America because they loved it on holiday and assumed living there would be just drinking Aperol Spritz and riding around on a vespa everyday . I've heard some good and bad things about moving to Australia so you'd have to decide what your needs are really.

After a lot of talking we have decided against it. It boils down to the following points.

If it goes wrong we have no back up plan, it means selling our house and we have worked hard to get our dream home. If it was mortgage free it would be different.

Jobs market is not great in the areas we would have to go to.

Standard of living would likely go down.

Far away from family.

I could name more but neither of us takes massive risks and the pressure was killing us so if we we had gone through with it I think it would have tortured us.

As a final point when we made our mind up, we actually felt relieved so I'm comfortable we chose correctly

It sounds like you made the right decision, especially if it felt like a relief.

Your position would've been very similar to my parents when they decided to go. I was a kid at the time, so most of it went over my head and I was pretty fine there, but they had a lot of difficulties. My dad struggled to find work and found the work life much more stressful there when he did find it and we had to move around a lot. They also found it difficult to come back to the UK without a home or backup plan. If you had a backup plan and job in place already it might be different, but it sounds like you're making the wise choice.

Plus, checking your shoes and garden furniture for deadly spiders everytime you want to go out or sit down isn't fun.

Minoru wrote:It sounds like you made the right decision, especially if it felt like a relief.

Your position would've been very similar to my parents when they decided to go. I was a kid at the time, so most of it went over my head and I was pretty fine there, but they had a lot of difficulties. My dad struggled to find work and found the work life much more stressful there when he did find it and we had to move around a lot. They also found it difficult to come back to the UK without a home or backup plan. If you had a backup plan and job in place already it might be different, but it sounds like you're making the wise choice.

Plus, checking your shoes and garden furniture for deadly spiders everytime you want to go out or sit down isn't fun.

Massive relief, something we thought would be easy had a massive mental strain on us.

I remember when of our tour guides in Queensland last year saying when he went to Sweden with his wife that he couldn't get over the face that when they went out into the wilderness that he didn't have to watch out for long grass, tree's etc hiding deadly stuff as he is so used to being on his guard every day

An accurate representation of what it's like living in Australia. I still check the toilet for spiders every time.

I lived in Australia for 6months. It wasn’t my cup of tea is all I’m going to say.

Living in Australia must be a bit like living in America. Perfectly fine, but there's always a nagging fear that bubbles just below the surface that you could be killed at any moment. No thanks.

Preezy wrote:Living in Australia must be a bit like living in America. Perfectly fine, but there's always a nagging fear that bubbles just below the surface that you could be killed at any moment. No thanks.

It’s very likely that i’ll Retire in Minnesota or at least have a Home over there. I don’t mind it but if we lived there now I’d probably have a fear that my child could be shot in school, something that simply isn’t a worry here.