Why is Australia so expensive?

Australians have long been ripped off from retailers. The distance factor is the big excuse. Well, until the internet came along and we started buying stuff overseas and getting it shipped here, all at a much lower price than what you could get in the local retail store.

But still even with internet competition things here are still very expensive in comparison to other countries. Ruth Williams in the SMH has another take apart from the distance factor:

But the higher wages mean that, in many cases, Australians can actually afford to pay the higher prices, Koukoulas says. 

Wages in Australia are about 50 per cent higher than in the US or New Zealand, and average weekly earnings have risen roughly 3.5 per cent a year for the past five years. Australian wages have outstripped inflation for more than a decade. 

''[It costs more here] to pay a person to sit in a retail shop or to operate a website or to distribute an item. It is not necessarily a bad thing but a high income, high cost country shows up in the prices that we pay,'' Koukoulas says. 

''If you want to pay the same as what Americans are paying, then accept American wages. You can't have the low prices without the low incomes.'' 

Saul Eslake, chief economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch Australia, says the Deutsche report would have been more useful had it compared prices of items as a proportion of earnings in each country. This would show how affordable or expensive each item was for a person earning the local currency. more

That's very interesting. So in reality we may be very expensive to someone who's worked in another country for less wages, but when considering our own wages we're not. It's also showing a reason why things bought online are cheaper, namely that where they're made has lower wages than here. Like someone in the US might work for whatever they do there (what about $10 an hour?) but here they work for much higher wages. I mean I was getting $26 an hour before the job ended.

Work for US wages? No fuckin way man.