Transcript of AE 1313 - Why Brits are Migrating to Australia in Record Numbers

It still seems so weird that she would be saying she's moved to Australia from London and is living in Sydney, and thinks that the cost of living crisis here is not as bad. And there it is. That's how a lot of Brits end up living in Australia, to be honest. This is something that as Australians, we take for granted. I have heard this from Brits so frequently. $80 for a train trip. Coffees are between 7 and $10 Australian, $40 for a vegan sandwich. It is going to lead to significant changes if this keeps going on. People are getting angry.

G'day you mob, how's it going? Pete here. Welcome to this episode of Aussie English. Today I'm going to be reacting to a video called Why Everyone You Know is Moving to Australia by Lottie Clarke. I thought we could react to this. Check out what her points are, because Australia is anything but an affordable place to live right now, and I would have thought it would be the opposite where no one is moving to Australia right now, especially not from the UK. Anyway, let's get into it.

Hello, hello or should I say g'day? Is it me? Or recently has every British person either moved from the UK to Australia? Is planning on moving to Australia this year or next year. Or it's at least talking and saying they're thinking about moving to Australia. Brits currently make up Australia's largest migrant population, with 1.1 million of us currently living there, which is around 4.4% of the total population. Migration in general has been increasing, so much so that it rose by one third last year to lift Australia's population by a record 659,000 people.

Yes, this is the current flavour of the month. This is what we are talking about a lot in Australia at the moment. Mass immigration. We have had something like over a million people migrate to Australia after Covid, so whatever that is 500 to 600,000 a year and it has put huge strain on our society. Whether it is policing the hospital system, the educational system, the transport system, housing, all aspects of Australia are under strain at the moment as a result of the mass migration that has taken place.

And it seems to be by design. It seems like the government has intentionally allowed this to happen because on paper, when you look at the books, it makes us look like we are increasing our GDP as a country, which we are. If you look at it just by that number. But then if you look at per person GDP, we've actually gone down. So it seems to be like they're doing this to hide a recession that would otherwise be taking place. It also keeps wages low. It also puts the property prices through the roof at the same time. There's lots of reasons you would do this, but it seems to be unsustainable numbers.

Half a million people a year. In a country of 27 million people now, it is going to lead to significant changes if this keeps going on. People are getting angry. Governments are going to keep getting voted out. The next one will come in. It'll do exactly the same thing. So yeah, that's the current issue that we've got.

In fact, I'm fresh off the boat myself, as they say. Having moved from the UK to Australia three weeks ago.

She's part of the problem, guys.

I'm actually half Australian myself.

And there it is. That's how a lot of Brits end up living in Australia, to be honest. I've got a lot of Brits who are friends where one of the parents is Australian or has an Australian citizenship and passport, and their kids, as a result, end up with Australian citizenship or a passport or whatever, and can move over here relatively easily. So this may not apply to every single person watching this video. But she has probably gotten in here because she has an Australian passport and doesn't have to worry about visas or anything like that.

So my mum's side is all Australian, hence why I was so easily able to come here, as I do have an Australian passport. But I'm not the only one I know who...

There it is.

And with migration on the rise, year on year to Australia, it's a trend that I suspect will continue. I will continue to see lots of Brits giving up their UK life and coming to Australia with the idea of having better prospects.

It's interesting, obviously, why everyone you know, she must be talking mainly, obviously about Brits and not just everyone in the world. I would love to see the data on Brits migrating to Australia and whether that's increasing or not, because I know that the UK at the moment has a huge cost of living crisis going on as well. Wages are lower than they are in Australia. The price of property is probably comparable depending on where you live. You know, if you're in London it's probably on par with Sydney.

I've got lots of friends living there that are saying the same sort of thing. One set of friends moved to London a year or two ago. They're wanting to have kids and now they're like, screw this, we need to live somewhere outside the city where we can afford to have a better life. Another friend moved there probably about a decade or so ago and has lived sort of all over the shop, but is now thinking about moving to France because life in England just seems unliveable. He's like, it's expensive. Everyone is getting really sort of snarky. The culture's changing. The weather's awful. It is interesting to see a lot of people wanting to get out of the UK.

But exactly why are so many Brits ditching the UK at the moment and moving to Australia? Aside from the obvious, the shared language and culture and a close relationship with Australia, despite being so far apart geographically, I think there's a few newer and more significant reasons as to why so many Brits are migrating.

One of the biggest ones absolutely has to be the cost of living crisis in the UK at the moment, which is definitely a large influence on my reasons to move from the UK to Australia. Put simply, everything in the UK just keeps getting more and more and more expensive year on year. And.

So what have we got here? We've got change in real gross disposable income per capita of households between October December 2019, 2023. So down 0.7%. Let's see if it was worse in Australia than in the UK, because I have a feeling they're going to be pretty similar, to be honest. Okay, so wait, so she's whinging about a decrease in 0.7% real gross disposable income per capita of households between 2019 and 2023.

Between the fourth quarter of 2019 and the fourth quarter of 2023, the real gross disposable income per capita of households in Australia experienced a decrease. Specifically, it fell from 129.59 in December of 2019 to 124% in December of 2023, which represents a decrease of approximately 4.3% in a four year period. Based on that, again, I don't think it was exactly the same time period, but it was something like 5 or 6 times as bad as the UK. So I'm not sure why you would think moving to Australia would mean that you're going to be better off in terms of income.

And there wouldn't be an issue if wages were also getting more and more and more, but travelling around the UK is just crazy expensive at the moment. A return journey commuting in from Cambridge to London for work would cost me about £25. Cambridge to Liverpool Street with advance single tickets and this was with a railcard added on without this railcard. A return journey Cambridge to London would be about £40, which is a lot.

£40 for a return journey? That's $80. My God, $80 for a train trip? What is the average average hourly rate? Uk in pounds. Jesus. So the average payment, it's like four hours work to just pay for transport? My god.

And if you're a commuter coming into London not just from a large commuting city like Cambridge, but any of the others, it's even now cheaper if you're driving with a few other people just to drive instead.

100% it would be cheaper!

At a time where we're supposed to be very environmentally focussed, and the UK should be promoting more environmentally friendly policies, such as getting public transport instead of driving and encouraging people to do this. Making public transport so much more ridiculously expensive to the point where it's cheaper to drive! It just doesn't make sense. And it's, it almost feels like we're going backwards.

That's true. You would think the whole point of public transport is to make it more affordable to use, that incentivise using public transport to come into the cities and move around the cities so that you have fewer cars and less congestion on all of the roads around the city. So it seems weird that the UK would allow it to get to a point where you're actually now incentivised to use your car because it's too expensive to use public transport. But is public transport subsidised in the UK? Public transport. Uk private or public? Is it privatised?

In some cities, including London and Reading, for instance, the bus network operates as a non-for-profit by the local government. This helps keep fares low and services of good quality in other areas. Routes are run by private companies is the case with trains. Passenger services are operated by mostly public train operating companies, TOCs, with private franchises awarded by the Department of Transport in England, Transport Scotland. So I would say that is probably why you are going to have really expensive train tickets in certain areas. I would imagine it is going to be that it is privatised, somewhat similar to the tolls that are paid around Sydney. I think again, you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but I have a friend living in Sydney and he was saying that if he has to use the tolls, it's like $100 a day for him to take all of the different roads to get in and out of Sydney.

I'm aware that travel can differ a lot when it comes to pricing in the UK for buses and we've even got trams and bits. But for a London to Sydney comparison, it is just so much cheaper to travel around within a city here and actually go out and do things.

It still seems so weird that she would be saying she's moved to Australia from London and is living in Sydney, and thinks that the cost of living crisis here is not as bad. We'll see. I would love to see an update on this in a few months, because Sydney seems like one of the most expensive places in the world to currently live, and I think the real estate is now on par with Hong Kong. Like it's it's 1 or 2, isn't it?

Sydney is the least affordable market in Australia, with a median price to income ratio of 13.8. So yeah, 14 times your wage. The multiple also makes it the world's second least affordable city behind Hong Kong. So there you go. It is number two.

Food, and kind of eating out, is another one that's become really expensive in the UK. I can't be the only one who's noticed the increase in coffee prices.

Man, I think I paid 7 or $8 the other day for a large coffee, which is unheard of here in Australia.

Prices are really going up. And then I was reading, I think I was reading something on Reddit recently about how much you actually have to make on a coffee in order to cover the the costs per hour of the barista, and it was something like most of these coffee places are actually only making about a dollar per coffee. So if a coffee costs 7 or 8 bucks, again, you're assuming that they're adjusting these prices based on the costs of all the products that they're using and not just inflating them artificially to make a profit. But it would be crazy to me that you're getting a coffee, and that once added everything up. It's like five, six, $7 before they even get a slice of profit on top of that. So yeah.

Though I think I did also see that at Woollies and Coles, our supermarkets here in Australia, coffee prices have gone up by like 40% in the last few years. May have even been the last few months because of really bad crops overseas. So perhaps that's part of it too. There's probably also transport costs, fuel costs, labour costs, but it's going to be crazy. I've had to just totally wind back how many coffees I got prior to having a mortgage, prior to my kids, you know, ending up in day-care. I was buying 1 or 2 coffees a day, lashing out, you know, ten bucks a day. Which 300 and something dollars a month.

Now, if I were to do the same, it would probably be 400 bucks a month. And so I have just had to completely wind back that kind of unnecessary spending and instead make a lot of coffee at home and get maybe, you know, 2 or 3 coffees a week out from cafes. So yeah, sorry, cafe owners.

You're not really going to be paying even less than kind of 3 to £3.50, sometimes 4 or £5 for a coffee in London and other major cities.

So three and a half pounds would be, I guess it's about a 2 to 1 ratio. So she's saying that in London coffees are between 7 and $10 Australian, which just seems insane. Insane. You know, it's a cup of milk with a shot of espresso in it. How is it so expensive?

I'm paying about $4, $5 maybe max, which is about two £2.50. And the same with brunch meals and getting lunch outs. It's just so much more affordable to go out and get casual coffees and treats and kind of feel like you're getting a better quality of life and actually able to do more things on a daily basis without having to have a high salary to enable you to have these kind of small luxuries like you do. More so in the UK. And this would all be okay in the UK if wages were also increasing to be able to-.

Ah? Aussies? Aussies? Beulah. Leave a comment below. How do you find eating out at the moment in Australia? Are you going to restaurants on the regular and getting your smashed avocados? Like all us Millennials and Gen Zers used to do? Or are you winding it back because shit's getting out of hand? I saw this on Instagram. I had to show you guys, so.

I got a vegan eggplant sandwich.

It's like they forgot to flip the the bread with the avocado into the sandwich. Like, why is the avocado on the top? Is that, is that so you can do it? Is that how you're meant to eat it? I paid $40, guys, $40.

$40. For a vegetarian or vegan sandwich. So it looks like there's eggplant, a bit of tomato, some avocado, two slices of sourdough and some other sauces in there. 40 AUD. So this is what, this is what I mean, right? The cost of all these things. And it's understandable. A lot of these places aren't necessarily trying to rip you off, but their costs have gone through the roof. And so the only way for them to stay open is for them to pass them on to the customer, obviously. And then you end up in this cycle Two of the fewer customers they get, the less revenue they earn, and so they have to push up prices even more in order to try and get enough revenue to cover all of their costs and pay their bills, too.

I think there's loads of cafes and restaurants in Australia currently shutting or putting their prices up to the point where loads of people are just tapping out and being like, I can't afford this, I can't justify a $40 vegan sandwich.

And this would all be okay in the UK if wages were also increasing to be able to match these prices, but in reality they're just not. Minimum wage in the UK, for example, in the highest age bracket is currently £11.40, whereas here in Sydney it's $24.10.

It's kind of similar. It sounds like £11.40, if that's what you said is about $22. Sydney it's about 24, 25 bucks. I think that's about the same here in Victoria. We're about I think it would be national anyway. But yeah, we do have a pretty good minimum wage, but the cost of living makes it pretty low comparatively. Like you go to Woollies or Coles, you stock up on 1 or 2 bags worth of standard groceries, and that's probably like, what, 50 to 100 bucks? So 2 to 4 hours worth of work for two bags of groceries?

In the UK on minimum wage, you're annually earning £23,712, whereas in Sydney you would earn £25,542.

So that would be probably 46, $48,000 Australian to about $52,000 Australian. It is true there is something like if you go to UK, let's say median salary, right? The UK median salary is £37,000, $74,573 Australian per year.

Okay. What's the Australian median wage. 65,000. So it's even lower. There you go. People in the UK. You're kicking the shit out of us. Or at least that was 2022. So it'll be a little bit higher now. So looks like the median wage in the UK is actually higher. If their cost of living is higher overall. Like if you're spending £80 a day on a train ticket, then yeah, I can imagine that. It kind of brings your annual wage down a great deal, but Australia doesn't seem to be doing that much better than the median Brit.

I can't forget to discuss housing at the moment. Australia actually has some of the largest houses in the world, with each home having around an average of 215m² of floor space. Juicy, right? And this is more than double that the average of the UK homes. 1 in 10 Australians actually have a private swimming pool, which in the UK you have to be absolutely filthy rich to even dream of having.

Yeah, but that's because the UK is so tiny and you guys have 70 million people that live there. So I can imagine that you've had to build housing accordingly so that everyone can fit in your country that is smaller than Victoria. Yes, we have large houses in Australia, or at least we have a culture of wanting larger houses, and this is probably going to have to change in the future the way that housing prices are going.

And 80% of Australians have private gardens, which if you're living somewhere like London, it's going to be hard to get or you have to pay a lot for a house that has a garden. And a decent sized one, if that. Yes, that is one of those things culturally that we take for granted. Loads of Australians have pools, and it's not necessarily a sign of whether you're filthy rich or not. We definitely have gardens, you know, unless you're living in the city in an apartment or something like that, it's pretty uncommon.

And this is again tied back to our obsession with having a detached house on a large bit of land that has a front and a back garden. So it is definitely very common in Australia. I don't know how common it will be in the future, though. I have a feeling this is the kind of thing that will change in order to keep house prices from rising absolutely astronomically.

I'm aware of that a lot of these factors, such as housing, food and travel aren't exactly new, though. So it brings me back to the original question of why exactly are Brits moving from the UK now in particular, to come to Australia? What's triggered this kind of new wave of movement?

A large key factor is that Australia changed their rules on who from Britain they can allow in, so they actually raised the age limit from 30 to 35 for those who they would allow to have a holiday working visa, meaning that millions more people suddenly became eligible, including my partner, who is 33, and we thought we'd missed the boat, missed being able to come over at his current age, and we'd have to look into alternative means.

But that rule changing meant that suddenly he was eligible for a holiday working visa. There's also been change in the type of work that you have to do coming over here. So prior to this rule change, anyone who came over on a holiday working visa had to commit to 88 days of agricultural work, often on farms, and this would need to be carried out for every additional year that the person wanted to stay. Which isn't exactly the most appealing offer, particularly those coming from, um, less hands on jobs, such as more corporate office based jobs.

Yeah, so this was the working holiday visa scheme that I think, at least when I had a lot of friends doing this. With the age limit was you had to be under 30 years old. And I think for every year you had to do 80 days on a, not necessarily a farm, but somewhere more regional. And the idea was obviously you're getting loads of migrants, you want them to come to Australia, but you don't want them to all stick to just the cities. You want them to go out into the regions where more workers are required.

And I had some friends working on like cotton farms or cotton gins, and they were raking it in. They were making like 2500 dollars a week whilst doing that. It was something ridiculous, although they had to work all night and, you know, ridiculous hours. But there's definitely an appeal. I don't know if it is manageable long term. So obviously if they have lifted the age to 35 now to get more people to come in, you do suddenly have a larger population that you can pull from in terms of migrants.

The idea of having to go to a farm and pick fruit would be enough to deter a lot of people from coming over, who otherwise would have.

I should clarify, there are definitely loads of jobs, like picking fruit, where you quite often aren't paid very well and can be kind of abused in terms of how much you've got to work, the conditions under which you work, and everything like that. At least that's what it was like when I was at uni and surrounded by a lot of people doing this sort of work. They were like, don't do the the fruit picking jobs.

My partner's brother actually came to Australia about five years ago and was unlucky enough to be stuck with watermelon picking, which I think is probably one of the most heavy labours ones you can do. And yeah, he came home early and didn't want to renew his visa, and I was surprised because I think the prospect of him being in fields picking watermelons all day was enough to put him off.

But now that's been scrapped. You can fully come from the UK to Australia and no manual labour and up to 35, which means a lot of people who previously wouldn't have are now reconsidering their prospects. You know, there's nothing to lose.

So they've just completely scrapped having to actually do the regional work, the farm work. That's crazy.

And finally, to finish up, I can't not mention the weather, can I? Seasonal depression is a real thing in the UK, and with the autumn, winter and sometimes even the spring, just being rubbish all year round. Dark, gloomy. Grey. Cold, wet. The idea of coming to a tropical paradise where you have so much more daylight is really appealing. And it's common for us Brits to, you know, we have the jokes about asking about the weather and moaning about the weather, but it's because it is simply just so miserable for most of the year.

This is something that as Australians, we take for granted. I have heard this from Brits so frequently, and it's probably the same for a lot of other countries that are high in latitude in the northern hemisphere. There, it's apparently incredibly depressing. You end up in the dark a lot of the time for winter. I've got friends who live in Estonia and they say they leave for work in the dark and get home after the sun's gone down during these months, and a real depression does set in.

And they do tell me that it kind of bleeds into the way the culture works and the way people feel behave. Depression, everything like that. So I do definitely appreciate the weather that we have in Australia. And yeah, I'm surprised, though, that Brits haven't just come out here, you know, a hundred years ago, wouldn't you just up and leave, you know.

Of coming over and having so much more daylight in the morning and in the evening to actually go out and do things like you can sit in a pub, you know, outside. Or at a bar in the evening for a lot of the year, whereas in the UK we can only simply dream of doing that in the summer, because who's going to sit outside in the dark, you know, at a pub when it's cold and it's wet and it's like five degrees? Yeah. No one.

That is something again, I take for granted. We have so many beer gardens here in Australia, and you'll have places to sit in front of pubs, in gardens, behind pubs. Restaurants can be like this as well. And it does definitely get really, really appealing and enjoyable during mid spring and then summer as well. Especially when it's not too hot and it's not too cold. Those areas are so awesome at these types of venues, so it is interesting that they don't have them the same way in the UK. But I guess, you know, based on the amount of sunlight they're getting and the temperatures and everything, they probably wouldn't use them.

And there's something lovely about the cosy, you know, indoors in the autumn and the winter, but I don't know. Is that better than the summer? I don't, I don't think so. And with so much more light and weather here, it's no wonder that there is generally a much more active and healthier lifestyle culture here in Australia, with outside activity being promoted so much more. I feel more like I'm thriving and actually living better than I did in the UK. And I know you're only thinking, but Lottie, you've literally been there three weeks. How can you be saying this already? And it's true. It has only been three weeks, and I'm conscious that this might just be the honeymoon phase.

I have a feeling it will be. We'll see. We'll see what happens. You know, it'll be interesting to see when she's wanting to buy a house, how she goes. Anyway, that's enough for this video, guys. I would love to know what you think. Is everyone wanting to move to Australia at the moment? Is the cost of living in Australia actually a lot better than places like Great Britain? Youtube reckons you're going to enjoy this video next. I'll see you there. Tooroo!