Let’s face it — Australia is a beautiful country. There’s so much untouched land, and it’s full of happy little animals, running about, doing their thing. Sure, some of these would be happy to poison and kill you, but hey — leave them alone, and they’ll leave you alone. But there are some problems with living in Australia (and it’s not because it’s full of Australians, thank you very much)… At least, from the perspective of technology. Let’s investigating! Cue list!

The cost of living

Leaving economy woes to the side, the Aussie dollar doesn’t stack up terribly well against the US dollar, or the yen, or the Euro, or the pound. As a result, pricing in Australia isn’t really comparable to these countries – but the cost of living here isn’t as good as we think it is. In fact, I would say it’s HARDER to live here than it was to live in Tokyo. But that’s not what this post is about.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is — due to the exchange rate and the effect of our crappy population on supply and demand, buying things is often somewhat more expensive than other countries. The cost of living is kind of high – the pricing for games, CDs, DVDs, and electronics, for example, is generally quite high… To be honest, I think pricing of such goods is based on exchange rate forecasting that is not taking any risks, which is fair enough, but it doesn’t really help the Australian consumer… All things considered equal, I earned a very similar wage in Tokyo to what I’m earning now, but it went so much further. Sure, I was single and carefree for most of the time, but even considering that, prices were much more reasonable in Tokyo.

Region issues
There are two aspects of this issue – hardware region coding, and the division of the Internet by region. Hardware region coding refers to the fact that a DVD or videogame purchased in America is unlikely to work on an Australian machine, and vice versa.There are various reasons (read: excuses) why a company would do this — classification in different countries may differ, and there may be an issue with the distribution licence or what-not across countries, and so on and so forth. However, I find both of these at least to be fairly weak excuses. They can’t be that difficult to sort out, and if this isn’t the case, why are all DS and PSP games region-free? Things are starting to change, as PS3 games are no longer region coded, but these issues continue to plague the DVD and BluRay business… Perhaps they see a need to prevent people from purchasing something cheaper online than through the regional channel? Well… work on the pricing — how’s that for a quick fix?

While region coding is a small thorn in the side, it’s going to become a major pain as digital downloads become more prevalent — and that’s what I’m referring to when I mention the division of the Internet by region. The Internet is somewhat abstract, and as a result, our compartmentalising of the world by country does not apply so well. So why is it that I have access to all sorts of the same things as everyone else across the world, but I have to pay for Last.fm, while Americans don’t? I can access the Netflix website, but I can’t join. I can view a Hulu player on my screen, but the content will not play. I can connect to the Official South Park episodes website, but again, I can’t click play. I can’t start myself a Pandora account. I can see that many games are available to purchase on Steam, but I can’t purchase them all — and the list goes on. The Internet is available to everyone across the world — it shouldn’t be locked to all but the US and UK.

Proposed internet filter
This one is a doozy. The Australian Government, in all it’s desire to control the population, is proposing an Internet filter that will filter ALL Internet traffic in Australia. This filter will block sites listed on a blacklist. While on one hand there are some sites that are inherently immoral, on the other hand, the simple act of blocking certain sites from view is in itself inherently immoral. It’s easy for us to make little jokes at the expense of China, but this kind of thing is frighteningly similar — at least, it could become that way. It’s very disappointing that the Government doesn’t trust the great majority, based on the actions of a very small minority… Enough said, I think.

Video game classification
We are full of prudes in Australia, we are. Not only does the Government think we are all dribbling idiots that can’t help but end up on bestial p0rnography websites, they also think we are too small-minded to handle adult-oriented video games. By adult-oriented, I’m not referring to tentacle p0rn, but rather video games that contain some degree of violence. The rest of the world trusts the ability of parents to decide what’s best for their kids and respects the choices available to free and mentally stable adults. Australia, on the other hand, does not. "Won’t somebody think of the children?" indeed.

Video games are not allowed to be classified any higher than M15 (mature), and anything that sits outside of this is denied classification, and therefore banned in Australia. The fun thing here is that, considering this – and taking into account the Internet filter described above – certain websites may be banned simply because they sell these games internationally. This could get well out of hand very quickly. The government needs to work on the legislation, rather than these "iron fisted" attempts at what they likely call "prevention".

Infrastructure and Internet take-up
Our internet is slow, and our telephone systems are old. As a result, my Internet at home is PAINFULLY slow compared to what I had in Japan. The Government (running theme?) has recently announced a "fibre to the home" scheme that would be WCKED AWESOME! If only the rollout wasn’t over 8 years… Hope it gets to metro areas much sooner than that…

Telephone companies have terrible coverage. This is likely due to the size of the country, and the spread of the population — it costs a lot to allow coverage to so few users, so the coverage for the majority loses out as a result of cost cutting. The reception in my home is terrible. And it shouldn’t be.

I could be overreacting. I could be complaining (OK — I’m definitely complaining today), but damn — our infrastructure is very poo.

Then there’s the use of the Internet by Australian companies — very few companies use it adequately, and as a result, very few people realise how useful it could be. In Tokyo, you could research virtually any restaurant before you went — check the menu, read some reviews, get a map of the area — all without leaving your home. Here? You might be able to find mention of the restaurant before you go out, but you aren’t likely to find too much else. It’ll probably be on Google Maps… But you can’t be sure of that either… And look at Bic Camera — a very large electronics store in Japan. Jump onto their site online, and you can purchase any of their products. Jump onto a similar site here, and you get a scanned catalogue. Yay… (Disclaimer: JB Hifi has definitely been the forerunner in Oz though — their site improves every time I go there).

And there you have it. Five very good reasons why it sucks to live in Oz. Now… as a defender of the flag, perhaps I should write up a post covering five reasons why it RULES to live in Oz? That may take some time…