I go into the office 3 days a week. I put my kids into before school care at 6:30 am, to drive 1 hour into the CBD, pay for exorbitant child care and parking, not to mention petrol. I have zoom meetings with my colleagues in each other state. Then I drive another 1-1.5 hours home, if full stress mode hoping I get to after school care in time. My kids are in before and after school care. Then home to warm up dinner made the night before. Kids are exhausted, I’m exhausted. Outlaid roughly $160 for the day without petrol, and 2.5 hours of commute, hardly saw my kids, all so I can sit in a room in the cbd on video call with people interstate. Make it make sense
Jesus. I live 5 mins from the office / school / child care. Have 3 kids under 8. Still WFH some days. And I’m still stressed. If I was you I wouldn’t be around anymore. I’d either have run away or be locked up somewhere…
I booked my fortnight around not having any calls on my in office day. It’s for face to face collab only. If I’m going to spend the whole day on zooms interstate I’ll do it from home.
They didn’t like it but what’s to argue?
Same here. I'm currently on the verge of being "performance managed" (after being in the "above and beyond" category for the past 5 years) because I won't bow down to the hybrid solution.
My commute is 4-5hrs round trip but the worst part is that I regularly work with team members in Indian time zone. So if I have to go into the office I get 1-2hrs to catch up with them before I'm on low contact commute (either driving or limited reception on the train). And then when I get home and settled they are moving into lunch break.
Makes no sense
Yep I’ve done the math. But 24k isn’t much to Senior Leaders who are on 300-400k + though, especially when it’s not their hip pocket. No I can’t fake it, they use building swipe records to prove youve been in the office.
It’s completely absurd, but could you go to the office, swipe in then immediately turn around and go home?
I always thought policing attendance via swipe records was a bridge too far for corporate Australia. I’m so sorry to see I’m wrong.
The reason is because their manager wants to micromanage people or the business has a set lease period on the building so if people go in they at least feel like they're getting some return on outlay.
We have one manager, who hated her home life, marriage fell apart, ended up with parents and split/co-parenting child arrangements - so her "workaholic" practice became even worse.. instead of micromanaging her husband and marriage, she moved toward micromanaging the staff. She bullied multiple staff members to the point one went out on stress leave..
And they promoted her based on her work ethic! Ignoring the manipulation and lies, and mental anguish she causes.
So now she gets to run away to the office for 10+hours per day, and she drags new staff through it with her.
Its all a boot licking/power tripping thing.
I hope you find a position that's more conducive to your life, humanities, mate. X
This triggered me because this is exactly my routine and today I've had to take the bus so the wife can do her drs appointments. I hate everything right now
I was always a firm hater on the “just move regional” gang until I did it during covid and… every aspect of my life is better lol
I still have to go to Sydney once every ~2 weeks probably for a day trip but a 2 hour each way commute once a fortnite is a small price to pay for every aspect of my life being cheaper and also better.
There’s a few downsides like not being able to just duck into the city for a show etc, but I also regularly use it as an excuse to meet up with friends and I find my trips to the city are now filled with more activities than ever because they’re not my every day life.
Obviously not possible for everyone but I feel like I went from a decade of treading water and cursing that I wasn’t born a decade earlier so I could afford what they had, to just being able to have it + learning that rural living is actually so much better. Having nature and being able to have a backyard and a garage and a home office all for under half the price of any of my Sydney options that were way way smaller is just like a cheat code
It's a great line but the problem is employers are not supporting it. So unless you are very lucky with a position that is only a once a week visit, it's not really feasible.
I don’t disagree obviously, but also people do choose their careers. I’m just saying I basically turned my life upside down, something I NEVER would have considered before COVID.
The forced stoppage made me stop and consider my long term happiness and what really mattered and it turns out going to the city every day actually sucks and even if I earned half what I did I’d still choose to live out here and not be miserable tbh
OP is getting dunked on in the replies, but I actually agree that employees having the right to WFH full time unless there is a genuine occupational requirement for the job to be done in person (like nurses, surgeons etc) would help encourage and facilitate regional living (such as people being able to live in Toowoomba while working for a company/team in based Brisbane, or in Ballarat or Bendigo while working for a Melbourne based company/team).
Many people would be OK with driving 2 hours each way 2-3 times a year for a big meeting/team catch up day if they are saving a lot of money living regionally and feel like they have a better work/life balance and lifestyle overall. But that kind of commute is simply not feasible to do 2-3 times a week, which keeps many people who would otherwise be happy to live somewhere like Toowoomba, Bendigo, Newcastle or Ballarat "stuck" in capital cities.
People would also be a lot less upset that the only houses they can afford to buy are a 60+ minute commute each way if they only go into the city for special occasions like concerts, a footy match, a birthday dinner or the occasional appointment rather than it being something they have to do 2-3 times a week in peak hour.
A lot of jobs really don't require employees to be in office, and doing away with the requirement that they must be in the office at least twice a week could have solid benefits.
(And controversial hot take time, but the "culture" companies talk about about really is rarely so amazing that it's worth giving up your sleep and free time to commute into the city to be immersed into it. I said what I said. I would much rather an extra 90 minutes of sleep over soulless cubicles we can't even decorate and liven up a little with a few photos or a personal mouse pad because of hot-desking and alternating in office days with other teams, ugly company branded mugs and home-brand coffee, and awkward small talk with co-workers I'd never voluntarily choose to speak to in any other setting).
Amen
It feels like a lot of companies have said 'come back to the office 2 days a week' as a kind of hand-wavey solution to 'foster collaboration' and 'ensure company culture', without actually pinpointing what it is they're hoping to achieve or exploring alternatives. Who is it I'm meant to be collaborating with that I'm not already? Would much rather put a few hours work into doing that from home than spend a few hours commuting and hoping that existing in the same physical space will magically improve things.
I've been told to be in the office 2 days a week, but all meetings have to be hybrid anyway because the teams I work with are onsite a different 2 days (and we're saving office space by alternating days, obvs)
Those saying those things likely got into the property market 10 to 20 years ago. They now likely have teenage kids so are looking for an excuse to get out the house anyway!
Culture? I mean the one thing I really miss about working in the office is having a board member or MD descend from the heavens and tell us how amazing the business is doing, thank you for your efforts, and here, have a pizza lunch* on us.
\* 0.67 slices per person, basic toppings only
It would help if we built some decent infrastructure too. Newcastle-Sydney in 45 minutes by high-speed rail would make commuting from there a couple of times a week totally viable.
Living there is not for me, but I know quite a few people who would very happily live in Toowoomba rather than Brisbane if there was a high speed rail connection between the cities.
If the train goes through the mountain, that'll make a station in Toowoomba itself really impractical..... The underground elevator and station would be impressive tho. Toowoomba has an elevation of 691m.
Inland Rail is planned to go through the mountain. It was a hectic tunnel when I worked on the concept design way back, not sure how much of the alignment has stayed the same. Portal was near Helidon from memory.
Yes trains can go through tunnels, nobody is debating that.
If the discussion is about benefits of a fast train from Toowoomba (on top of a mountain) to Brisbane (which is down from the mountain), running a tunnel through the mountain doesn't help achieve that goal. A station at Helidon would add about half an hour to the journey
>high speed rail
You need a proper economic case for any such line, though. Trouble is the cost per trip has to be a lot higher than normal rail, and it has to have pretty high patronage. If you can state with confidence that sufficient numbers of people will travel on it every day (and will pay that higher fare) then you have a winner.
I think we have a distorted perspective here. I can get from Sydney to Newcastle for less than $6.88 on the train (full adult fare). In Japan, on the Shinkansen, a trip of that distance would cost around $82AUD.
Public infrastructure projects don't need to make money for themselves. The idea is that they create a net economic benefit. The Pacific Highway is completely free to use.
I said this same thing on another thread weeks ago and got down voted to smithereens because "nobody wants to live outside the cities". I mean, I'm a somebody and I would love to live somewhere more community and country.
Reads like a few people here would.
A Shinkansen ticket from Nagoya to Osaka (roughly the same as Sydney to Newcastle) is $60 one way. Would you pay $120 each day? Probably would be lots more here in Australia.....
Not sure about Japan, but in Europe it's not unheard off to commute 100-200 km if your house and office are both near bullet train stations.
While single tickets tend to be pricy, monthly or annual passes are actually quite affordable
They do in the UK which has similarly expensive (but considerably faster than Australia) trains. Loads of people work 2 days a week in London and live 200km outside because the trains are fast.
Newcastle is already full mate, send them further inland.
Start new commuter suburbs with a High Speed Rail, similar to commuter car parks, high rises and local shops below.
This is the answer. Regional areas within 2 hours of Sydney have already suffered greatly (both in culture and in cost) with the mass exodus out of Sydney during covid. What is needed is the development of new towns/suburbs with well-planned infrastructure outside of the existing areas instead of just haphazardly tacking on more developments with no capacity for these to be adequately serviced.
I live in a once undesirable suburb outside of Newy and houses dont even get advertised there is such a demand, the agents just have a list of buyers and do a "preview" inspection on a Saturday and the house is sold to someone from Sydney on the Monday - locals have no hope and like Byron, are being forced out.
The thing is, you’re giving examples of places that locals have already been priced out of by migration from capital cities. There is an absolute rental and homelessness crisis in Newcastle, the absolute last thing that would benefit the city is anyone moving from Sydney so they can work at home.
At one point recently Port Stephens LGA had the lowest rental vacancy rate in the state, at the same time most local businesses are hurting for staff from doctors to cleaners. It's no surprise 'laptop hermits'* from Sydney aren't too popular locally.
*Not my term, but a coworker had me snorting tea lol
These employers preach in person work and office culture but as soon as they can find cheaper low quality remote labour in India they’ll take it in a heartbeat.
Really need to tax companies that do that hard as it is an import costing Australia a lot in taxes
> OP is getting dunked on in the replies, but I actually agree that employees having the right to WFH full time unless there is a genuine occupational requirement for the job to be done in person (like nurses, surgeons etc) would help encourage and facilitate regional living (such as people being able to live in Toowoomba while working for a company/team in based Brisbane, or in Ballarat or Bendigo while working for a Melbourne based company/team).
Devils advocate: All this does is encourage people on city salaries to move to larger regional centres close-by, displacing people who live *and* work in those regional towns and who don't have the same high salaries.
Remember, city salaries are generally set higher than regional ones because they reflect the higher cost of living.
We already saw this phenomenon during the pandemic with people fleeing to regional towns to get away from the lockdowns, displacing locals.
I get that, but until "move somewhere more affordable" stops getting thrown around as the solution for city people who are being bled dry to the point of having no quality of life there, it won't change.
The *real* solution for me is major housing affordability reforms and increased working flexibility across the board so people can live where they *want* to live, but that will never happen as long as we have a parliament full of landlords getting paid off by big business.
I will also say that as someone who grew up regional (and hated it), there are a lot of people who would like to have stayed, but felt like they have no choice but to move to the city for career reasons, and allowing them to work these jobs from home could be a positive thing. Many people feel pushed out of their communities because of a lack of opportunities. I wanted out of my conservative regional hometown for many reasons, but I recognise that regional living has appeal for many.
On the other hand, maybe that's the push needed to start building up regional towns and spreading out the population more evenly. If people could have permanency and stability in working from home, the demand would be there for better health services, schools, cafes, etc. IMO this would be sad for "country charm" amd for toursits like me, but it could be a good thing for the problem of rural areas not being adequately serviced.
You are a tourist having a conversation about this?
If so:
Thank you for showing concern for us city folk. Enjoy your time here or there or wherever. You seem like a good person
As a nurse in a regional area but close enough to a major city that they're are people who will commute a few days a week: I totally agree. People have also left the professions where people need to be face to face in droves.It shifts the housing issue down the line to people who now cannot afford anything. Childcare is a massive issue, with people waiting 2+ years to get a spot. Even OOSH is looking to be problematic into the future. We actually don't want to be encouraging people to the regions under current circumstances unless they are contributing to essential services (including things like childcare), it has already happened too quickly and shown up a lot of cracks.
Wouldn't a positive side-effect be that city prices also come down? Then where people live won't be as stratified by income. Also, I would think the downward impact on city prices would be more substantial than the upward impact on regional prices, since you're dispersing people from a very concentrated area to a very spread out area.
Density in areas in the city is how people live close to amenity (cities don't just have jobs, they have more efficiently utilised infrastructure and stuff people want to do). We need to build up, which is what the NSW gov is trying to do. Cost of infrastructure with all this spreading isn't sustainable. Regional areas have other issues than jobs. A lot of people who made that move are going back to the city despite the cost issues. So regional towns can't rely on this anyways, it was just a pandemic blip.
City prices won't go down, because demand is still outstripping supply especially since a very large percentage of international migration, which is the vast majority of Australia's population growth, lands in either Sydney or Melbourne (about two thirds).
And let's face it here, people who are planning a regional move are going to be looking for the well located regional centres which are still within reach of Sydney/Melbourne.
As an example, folks from Sydney are going to be looking at the Central Coast, Newcastle and Wollongong (and places as far south as Kiama). They're not going to move to Wagga Wagga or Parkes.
> And let's face it here, people who are planning a regional move are going to be looking for the well located regional centres which are still within reach of Sydney/Melbourne.
Yeah, to put it into Queensland.....a lot of people could happily move to Toowoomba which is 2.5 hours away from Brisbane in terrible traffic conditions, and while much smaller than Brisbane, is big enough to have decent sized shopping centres, some things to do, a handful of decent places to eat, a variety of parks/activities/schools for your kids, and is well resourced enough that you really only need to go to Brisbane for medical care if you need to see a high level specialist, but would not be happy moving somewhere like Charleville or Longreach which is country country and several hours away from Brisbane.
>employees having the right to WFH full time unless there is a genuine occupational requirement for the job to be done in person (like nurses, surgeons etc) would help encourage and facilitate regional living
100% agree, and anyone who doesn't is a dog quite frankly.
There's no reason all admin and office jobs or support jobs need to be physically within eg. Sydney or have a few days in person, and giving a government-enforceable mandate embedded into the NES that these roles can work remote, and if they need to travel for eg. A specific reason the employer needs to pay - then people can lock in to mortgages in regional areas and know that there are thousands of remote jobs.
Obviously I think it needs to be within reason: must be located in Australia physically (don't want people running off to Bali), must be within x km of a main office (let's say idk, 400km should be more than enough), and some rules that prevent employers saying "oh yes this accounts payable clerk role definitely needs to be in person this job can't be done remote" yes it can bitch.
1. If we want Australia to be even slightly livable with these ridiculous immigration numbers then we need to accept that people have to move regional
2. If we want people to move regional they need jobs
3. Enforcing remote work as a workers right in the NES could solve this - not for all jobs, but for a great many
4. At the same time we should convert unused office space into residential, industrial or other non-office commercial to make better use of our cities now that half the work force can be remote
I'm permanently WFH, my husband works in a rural(or classed as rural) location about 30 mins from where we decided to live. Is the CBD like 45+ mins away depending on traffic? Yes. Do I go "into the city" maaaybe once a month? Yep. Do I love being in an outskirt township rather than the main suburban sprawl? God damn it I do!
They really need to be more accommodating with WFH for jobs that really do only require maybe a once a fortnight or less amount of face to face time - I'd be fine going in once every other week if it gave the freedom that I currently have if I was changing jobs.
A two-hour commute 2-3 times a week is feasible, but barely.
I did it for about a year before eventually buying a place close to work. I moved because I could make it work financially, and didn't really have strong reasons for staying regional.
Going regional and commuting for purely financial reasons isn't enough. You need a strong lifestyle reason for doing it. It could be being in a beautiful place (e.g. bushland, the beach), being close to family, or having your kids firmly established in their schooling. You need something more motivating to get you through the commute than the relatively affordable housing.
Itll happen. Im a managing director. The owner is a boomer and he likes to come in and see people at the office. He basically wants people to talk to. So I have it set up as hybrid so there are always some people for him to see here.
As soon as he is gone Ill move all staff to WFH and rent out the office we own.
Ill probably organise a monthly meeting. Go over OHS have the important meetings. Just rent some place then have lunch as a team and everyone goes home.
Difference? Im a millenial owner is a boomer. All the employees are gen X or younger.
just move has never been realistic advice. What about the people there? Does everyone keep moving down until you're leaving the country altogether? Where does it end?
it's just a lazy cop out to avoid dealing with the underlying issue.
Damn lazy millennials complaining about housing when they could just give up their avocado toasts and move somewhere like here https://www.myproperty.so/property/land-for-sale-13/
Yep pretty much this. Let's have city folk move out to the regional towns on their city salaries and buy up the real estate or rent all of the available properties.
Suddenly you have cafes and local hospitality venues closing down because their staff can't find anywhere affordable to stay, and the other locals get priced out of everything too.
Decentralisation of Australia’s population is at the very least one of a range of things Australia should be doing to deal with its housing crisis.
Having over 70% of our population living in a few scattered major cities is ridiculous. The standard of living in these big cities declines as infrastructure fails to keep up with demand, and urban sprawl throws people further and further out into poorly serviced suburbs. Meanwhile country towns experience rural blight, as young people leave them for the big cities in search of opportunities for decent education, work and careers, and the ones who remain are far more likely than their city counterparts to get caught up in meth and other shit for want of any hope in life. Which of course only adds to the problems in both cities and country.
Decentralising and not just cramming more and more people into overloaded cities is a good thing, and one of a number of things Australia should be pursuing to fix its housing and employment problems.
This.
Have a look at Germany for an example. 85 million people in an area that's 2x Victoria.
Yet, the biggest city is smaller than Melbourne or Sydney and only 4 cities are more than 1 million.
They do however have hundreds of medium sized cities (think Canberra/Hobart/Darwin sized).
It's very possible to live in a small country town and have a 20-30 minute drive or train trip to the closest city centre.
The trick is to build infrastructure and people will just move. I'm pretty convinced that electrified fast rail from Melbourne to Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Shepparton and Traralgon will make those towns grow into busy cities and take a lot of pressure off Melbourne.
Especially when they don't realise that regional towns are having massive housing shortages. It may be "cheaper" but you have to be able to find somewhere to live. Don't forget you'll have to spend hours travelling for any medical appointments!
I mean, [politicians literally tell young people to go do just that](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-24/barnarby-joyce-urges-aspiring-home-owners-to-look-beyond-sydney/8209496) instead of working to find solutions to the housing affordability issue, so we can't be too shocked when people want to take that advice because it's clear the situation in Sydney and Melbourne won't change any time soon.
I remember the days of full-time office work and managers seem to have forgotten the interpersonal dramas and bullshit that goes on during stressful times. Also in my work, there’s a lot of managers whose job is talking and meetings. They just talk a lot. They’re the ones who want you back in the office so they can talk more. When I hear people say “collaboration and culture” I read it as “so I can talk more”
And try to get a dentist appointment etc. Had to drive 5h to Sydney twice because of a root canal infection and waiting times were just too long in the smaller towns. Here I can see a dentist Sat and Sun without too much hassle.
Dunno if 20-30 years is accurate. I presume he lives a Western lifestyle there and he does have a wife and kids to look after. But, yep he'll be set financially for a while.
Just some numbers for people who want to move to vietnam - its $12k AUD/year to live a well catered life with everything included. Thailand is probably similar. So it is roughly 7 times the median salary in Australia.
Devils advocate opinion: we’re the not building apartments for families and it’s a big issue.
A large portion of the rest of the world considers raising a family in an apartment normal if you want to live in a metropolitan area. There’s also cultural differences in lifestyle and how kids should be raised obviously that contribute to this as well. More relaxed style of parenting.
Another issue is how do we change the cultural expectation of considering 4 beds, 2 baths, a medium room, butlers pantry, seperate laundry room, double garage and two living spaces as must haves while house hunting.
Yep it goes both ways. Need bigger (but affordable) apartments, and people need to learn to live in smaller spaces. The reason the bigger apartments is so expensive is because you might only have a handful of them in a whole building. The average apartment building is mostly comprised of 2 bedders.
Australians tend to think they need a lot of space, but actually if they gave it a go they'd find that living in a smaller property is actually perfectly fine. I grew up in a relatively big house (in a very cheap area) and after living in 15 square metre 'one room' studio in Korea I realised that I don't need much space at all. Obviously that's an extreme end of the scale, but why have an extra dining room that gets used 4 times a year if it's gonna add another $100k to the purchase price?
Agreed. I was trapped in Melbourne for years because that's where my industry is. It was only when I became self-employed in a job not location based that I could leave.
The Government should lead the way and make masses of jobs wfh only.
I know someone who works for the VIC state government and heard that their union fought to get office-based staff a fixed WFH arrangement. So at least they're setting a good example I suppose
If WFH people could move to regional areas it would free up infrastructure like roads and PT. There are so many beautiful regional areas that are stifled by lack of employment. It's sad.
I live " regional " and the internet is far, far too shit here to work from home.
EDIT: Contrary to what seems to be popular opinion, not all properties can access Starlink. Mine in particular has no line of sight access because we are in a valley, which is a common problem in my area
I live 4 hours from the nearest capital in a < 1000 person town and have FTTH. Not all regional internet is bad these days and if it matters, it's easy to check.
Regional Australia could have had a chance to have fast NBN if the country, including most of regional Australia, did not select a party completely opposed to it. It really should be a new national priority though as FTTH was a sound measure.
On top of that, regional life might not be for everyone.
For people of colour, I hate to say it, the lack of diversity in regional areas can be a massive deal breaker.
At least for me it definitely is. I don't want my son to have to deal with the racism I had to deal with growing up in 90s Australia which unfortunately, when you go regional, it's like going back in time in that aspect in certain areas.
And as an Asian, the lack of proper Asian food is a massive deal breaker for me.
That and do people not have family? I have all of my family here in Sydney. I kind of want my son to be close to his grandparents and cousins and extended family.
It's not really that simple to just move.
There’s definitely more racism in some areas but most places its not at all like “back in the day.”
In fact i lived in a regional town that had businesses actively trying to recruit african refugees to work in primary industry because they integrated so well and were willing to get stuck in. Turns out if you were a cattle herder in sudan you fit in really well in, you guessed it, a dairy in regional victoria.
A lot of refugees prefer living rurally as that's what they're used to back home. Wagga has loads of Iraqis nowadays who've settled in well from all accounts.
Yeah, you get decent concentrations across the board, asians and islanders up towards mildura for fruit growing, i think sugarcane is the same up north.
Funnily enough when you take someone from a rural, generally subsistence lifestyle and plonk them into a gentrified city, they dont do as well
When I went to high school in a multicultural area of Melbourne people we’re obsessed with race and there would often be fights between different ethnic groups.
When I moved to regional Victoria for a while nobody cared what your background was. It was a lot more accepting and peaceful.
Racism will always exist but today is nothing like the 90s, I graduated year 12 in 2017 in Kalgoorlie and the only racism is some beef between maori and aboriginal but even that is just stupid teenager shit.
Growing up my friend group had mongols, maoris, fillipinos, aboriginals, white fullas and everyone in between.
Not to try take away from your own lived experience but the racism in Australia really isn't as bad as they say. Maybe it used to be. But Australia is like 25% immigrants so as generations pass we all just get along better
Casual racism exists and that is likely what people will experience today. Eg. My Mongolian friends nickname was "Ching" in our friend circle from the 3rd grade up until we finished school. Yes its definitely racist but at the same time it wasn't. We called him Ching but that doesnt change the fact he is our best friend and we love him.
I'm depressed about the fact that in the next few years, my friendship circle will probably disintegrate as we all "move regional" for more affordable housing and barely get to see each other.
The social aspect of moving away is often overlooked. It must be pretty brutal for couples who move regionally to afford starting a family and lose that vital support network during the infancy/early childhood years.
You don't get it. People who say that don't care. They kind of want you to have to suffer a little bit. Three hour commute to work just so you can maybe own a home? Be grateful about it, you commie shit.
2 days office is doable from the blue mountains, Wollongong or the southern highlands! It's just not thaaaaaatttt much cheaper than Sydney for the nice areas (Dapto is affordable so is the meth tho)
lmao 2 days in Sydney CBD from Mittagong?
8 hours in the office, 4 hours on the train, 8 hours of sleep -- you've got all 4 hours at best to live with on for 2 days a week. The willingness to die at the altar of corporate is hilarious.
I knew people in 2003-2007 doing it every day from Wollongong and Central Coast 5 days a week into Martin Place. Most train.
I lived in Bondi and that commute was too much for me 🤣
It's OK if you are right on a good train stop. Places like Thirroul and Woy Woy are probably doable for 2 or 3 days a week but I wouldn't want to do more. Plus they've rocketed in price so much since covid I'm not sure it's a great deal anymore
Also schools and proximity to friends/family are deal breakers for many people
It's more like 2.5- 3 hours on the train. Add in some flex where you do some make up time on my WFH days or some work done on the train and it's a more reasonable work life balance.
>The willingness to die at the altar of corporate is hilarious.
I would say it's more "The willingness to die at the altar of home ownership" not everyone was born with a family home they own, I'm pretty stoked to have security despite the long commute and bootlicking.
This is pretty much what I do and it works for me. Twice a week commute of 2ish hours, I get work done on the train up and listen to audiobooks on the train down. Those 2 office days are my meetings and social catch up days and my wfh days are work and chores.
In Sydney I was living in a cramped old 2br on the back of a train line but now I have a huge house and garden, chickens, fish, good relations with my neighbours, bushwalks on my doorstep, all amenities and the space and light I was craving. Yes the lack of Chinese food kills me. I go to Hurstville to load up on frozen dumplings once a month.
There is good and bad in both but as I’m just an ordinary working class person I have to prioritise and make some sacrifices. I’m pretty happy with the choice I’ve made. Yours may be different but it is absolutely possible to move regionally and commute.
As someone who watched their family have to sell their farm to one of these very large companies, it’s very sad. And it’s heart breaking hearing how busy towns in places like the Murray Mallee used to be thriving and now are just ghost towns.
This is by design.
Existing landowners will never let workers escape Sydney en masse if they can extract more rents and these people are politically influential.
They also have signficiant investments in CBD commercial buildings.
If professionals could all move away there’d be less users of toll roads and less profits to be made from child care and private schools etc. The list is long.
The excuse to keep you in place will be all about ‘team building’ and ‘culture’ and “helping small businesses who are doing it tough”.
On a related but different matter, for similar reasons, I’m skeptical of fast rail projects and true decentralisation ever happening. Why would the powerful enable people to move away from Sydney and pay less for housing?
This is the one area Americans get right even in the past. Companies would often move to where the middle class was moving to for cheaper housing.
Like how many companies moved from New York to White Plains, Los Angeles to Pasedena, DC to the Virginia and Maryland suburbs. It is something Australia, the UK and Canada should adopt as well. It is not unusual to hear certain American companies having their headquarters in a place that you would not immediately find in a map.
So many tech companies have moved to Provo, Utah for example.
I absolutely feel that.
I worked all the way through COVID because apparently electrical projects were essential. I guess the etu has big strong hands or something.
I would love to move to some town an hour away and never travel to work but unfortunately that's just not in my cards.
I don't know why if a job doesn't need to be done in the office it isn't fully WFH.
Do companies have ways to monitor the activity of their employees in other ways than making them come into work?
The people that live in the regions don’t want people with disproportionately high incomes moving into the regions, purchasing real estate and driving up prices for blue collar working families. You also wouldn’t get any sympathy about your WFH situation from people that work minimum wage retail jobs where they are on their feet for 8 hours a day with only a half hour break.
Translation: I want to move regional but I'm not prepared to leave my comfort zone in order to make it happen.
If your job doesn't work, change careers. There's heaps of work available in regional areas.
Moving regionally is a band-aid solution to the housing crisis. When I hear people recommend this, I hear "the country is doomed, there are no appropriate policy solutions that will fix the housing crisis, your best bet is to uproot your life, leave your friends and family, and go regional". While regional Australia is wonderful and a great place to live, the consequence of all these city-refugees is that then regional Australia gets to join in on the housing crisis as locals too become outpriced and outhoused in their own towns. On this topic, you'll also hear gaslighters say that "your parents in the past had to make a sacrifice and move too" which is a blatant lie. Moving 3 and a half suburbs west in Sydney is not the same as moving to Orange. Nice try, Chad.
I'd assume by Sydney they mean major cities, i.e. Syd, Melb and Brissy. Melb and Bris aren't that much cheaper than Sydney these days.
For their work, maybe something like financial services. Could be media/publishing or entertainment. All very city-centric and Sydney-centric AFAIK. Possibly Big Law, or maybe tech on the corporate side?
Anyone who things the solution to the housing crisis is to ship young people off to rural areas so our cities can be retirement villages for boomers is not a serious person
Careful what you wish for. Fully remote means there is absolutely no reason to hire an Aussie. Show up those 2-3 days a week. It's probably the only thing keeping you employed.
These threads appear every week, and always sadden me with just how depressing the career of the average Aussie Redditor is…
I actually want to come into the office 3 days a week, I feel so isolated and alone at home with no socialising, sharing and collaborating. As a manager I struggled so hard to get the most out of work and my team during lockdown, the sense of unity disappeared until we got back to being in the office.
And no, I’m not a boomer, nor do I own any property. In fact I pay ridiculously high rent for my little flat and my material wealth hasn’t increased measurably for a decade. It has no signs of doing so.
I just think people don’t want to admit they hate their career and regret their choices, but aren’t willing to do anything to change them. They’d rather blame their employer who knows the reality of the situation, which is that the vast majority of people who purely WFH bludge and aren’t interested in buying into the business…
"She who must be obeyed" does WFH Gold Coast 5 days, 2 people above her work from Cairns, an office is in Brisbane, others in the team have flexibility across Australia. The work is for the UAE, so some trips for in country. I work 10 feet away in the workshop.
I'm not an expert at all, but I live in a regional city not a main city. I feel like it enables me to have work options, though not as many as I would have if I lived in a main city .. but I do only have like a 10 minute commute and the life balance is much more family friendly.
Regional areas are a sure way to get locked out of life. Services drop off, house price in the cities keeps you forever falling behind, your children will leave to find jobs, go to a Uni, etc. I would only move regional part time, if I had a place in the city first.
I hear you - it would be good for politicians to support this more as well from an economic perspective. What gets me is that I go into the office 2 days a week as told, do little work as I’m talking to randoms in the kitchen to make the commute worthwhile that I don’t even work directly with, and then I do all my calls via Teams anyway. No one even goes to meeting rooms anymore even if they are all in the office as they all dial in! And I can’t hear properly as I’m distracted by other people being on Teams calls so my outputs are at least 30% less. I don’t think it’s culture building at all, it feels very forced to me
Why would the masters give the peasants what they want? When have they in history? Think about what would happen to the masters commercial real estate if they allowed you peasants to work from home! Why it would be worth way less and that would make the rich people sad :( Only poor people deserve to be sad.
We worked out we could earn 50k less and keep the same lifestyle moving Sydney to cairns. 8 years later im on more than i was on in Sydney.
You might find if push comes to shove you can probably WFH FT if its too hard for them to replace you.
Regional is a guaranteed half a mil out the door thesedays anyway, 10 years ago you could get a great house and land for 200-380000 anywhere regionally, now it's 500-2mil
Pl-ease. Anyone can move and change career if they really want to. You don't want to move out of Sydney? Don't. But saying you just can't is just an excuse.
You didn’t move out of Sydney when you had WFH, though.
Sounds like you’d “love to move out of Sydney” in that you’d love to live in a place exactly like Sydney except cheaper.
I'm curious how much people are expecting houses to be in regional areas? I'm struggling to buy in my town, because my regional living salary only gives me about $400k in buying power, and most places cost more than that here. Many nice houses for sale are $800k-$1M+ now as well - places that used to be more like 500-600k.
It is probably cheap compared to Sydney, but if you have a median salary, it's still expensive to buy here on your own.
If your job is able to be completely done from home then it will get exported overseas for a fraction of the price. Even more advanced jobs are starting to have this problem.
Before COVID WFH barely existed. Now we all feel entitled to it ? Comon man. Stop being a snow flake or get a different job where you want to live. These organisations don’t owe you anything.
Would you be willing to trade off some salary to go full WFH??
Maybe work out what you'd be willing to do and make an offer to your boss / head of HR or CFO.
Businesses pay Sydney salaries for Sydney jobs due to the cost of living. If you want to pocket the saving - then what's in it for the business?? Offering to split those savings with them might make them reconsider.
If they were hiring someone new from a regional area into a 100% WFH role they wouldn't be starting the negotiation at what they pay someone to turn up into the Sydney office 5 days a week.
In 90’s I had to move from Tas to Toowoomba for work, then from Toowoomba to Bendigo, then 2000’s to Brisbane, then WA…I’ve been chasing the work for years. No such thing as work from home - home is where the income is the greatest…
In many areas 90% of the jobs are concentrated in Sydney and they force you to be hybrid. Good luck finding a decent job outside of Sydney in Product, Development, Design, as an Analyst, or PM. They DO exist, but there are so few that literally hundreds of applicants saturate them within the first couple of hours.
My husband applied for a job that was full time in an office in Sydney and in the second interview they were like "we noticed you don't live in Sydney, are you planning to move or?" And he was like, "I can do this job remotely." So they hired him and now he works full time remote for a Sydney based company while living in regional NSW. Now, obviously not every company is that understanding or flexible, but it's worth asking. Also, if you want to move out of Sydney, apply for jobs that aren't in Sydney, but expect a pay cut because regional jobs pay regional wages (but housing is cheaper so that's nice)
Upper management want everyone in the office because for the most part their identities are their jobs - they have no life outside of work. They get validation from being in the office so they want us all there to justify their importance.
I moved interstate and regional from Sydney, I really enjoy it but I’m facing a similar issue: the jobs I find are based in capital cities despite not needing to be in the office to do the work (global teams etc). I would get so much more out of quarterly visits for intensive team bonding days or whatever they want than 2-3 days a week to sit at work in near silence with deadlines. Almost all of the time in my last roles, the people in other teams I could have spoken to in person weren’t there that day!
There’s plenty of regional work.
The problem is many city goers expect city wages in regional areas.
You don’t need to earn as much when shelter costs are so much lower.
I suppose your super will suffer though
Everthing else is more expensive in regional areas, though. And also, just how regional do we mean? In Victoria, regional can mean you can get a V/Line to Melbourne in a couple of hours. In WA that can mean a 3 hour unsealed road trek in a 4WD to visit an IGA that has to get supplies helicoptered in during the wet season.
I go into the office 3 days a week. I put my kids into before school care at 6:30 am, to drive 1 hour into the CBD, pay for exorbitant child care and parking, not to mention petrol. I have zoom meetings with my colleagues in each other state. Then I drive another 1-1.5 hours home, if full stress mode hoping I get to after school care in time. My kids are in before and after school care. Then home to warm up dinner made the night before. Kids are exhausted, I’m exhausted. Outlaid roughly $160 for the day without petrol, and 2.5 hours of commute, hardly saw my kids, all so I can sit in a room in the cbd on video call with people interstate. Make it make sense
Jesus. I live 5 mins from the office / school / child care. Have 3 kids under 8. Still WFH some days. And I’m still stressed. If I was you I wouldn’t be around anymore. I’d either have run away or be locked up somewhere…
I booked my fortnight around not having any calls on my in office day. It’s for face to face collab only. If I’m going to spend the whole day on zooms interstate I’ll do it from home. They didn’t like it but what’s to argue?
Same here. I'm currently on the verge of being "performance managed" (after being in the "above and beyond" category for the past 5 years) because I won't bow down to the hybrid solution. My commute is 4-5hrs round trip but the worst part is that I regularly work with team members in Indian time zone. So if I have to go into the office I get 1-2hrs to catch up with them before I'm on low contact commute (either driving or limited reception on the train). And then when I get home and settled they are moving into lunch break. Makes no sense
I wonder if enough employees shared these chilling stories with their bosses whether it would help shift the culture.
They will probably say, you took the job knowing these terms. All on you.
Lmao I had a colleague have to fly in from Brisbane every Thursday cause that was our office day. Lucky she soon left.
This is no way to live. Sending immense empathy.
Can you just zoom call from home with a blured background and just tell them your in the office? $160 a day x 3 days a week is $24,000 a year.
Yep I’ve done the math. But 24k isn’t much to Senior Leaders who are on 300-400k + though, especially when it’s not their hip pocket. No I can’t fake it, they use building swipe records to prove youve been in the office.
You need a new job.
It’s completely absurd, but could you go to the office, swipe in then immediately turn around and go home? I always thought policing attendance via swipe records was a bridge too far for corporate Australia. I’m so sorry to see I’m wrong.
[удалено]
What court case?
yeah what court case
Which court case?
Don’t leave us hanging - which court case?
Idk it kinda sounds like you're commuting ages for no reason.
The reason is because their manager wants to micromanage people or the business has a set lease period on the building so if people go in they at least feel like they're getting some return on outlay.
I think a lot of middle managers also have very little workloads once the pointless corridor chats are eliminated from their days
Even worse would be finding out people in your office who live close to work are given partial WFH..
This is no way to live. Sending immense empathy.
This is no way to live. Sending immense empathy.
This is no way to live. Sending immense empathy.
This is no way to live. Sending immense empathy.
We have one manager, who hated her home life, marriage fell apart, ended up with parents and split/co-parenting child arrangements - so her "workaholic" practice became even worse.. instead of micromanaging her husband and marriage, she moved toward micromanaging the staff. She bullied multiple staff members to the point one went out on stress leave.. And they promoted her based on her work ethic! Ignoring the manipulation and lies, and mental anguish she causes. So now she gets to run away to the office for 10+hours per day, and she drags new staff through it with her. Its all a boot licking/power tripping thing. I hope you find a position that's more conducive to your life, humanities, mate. X
This triggered me because this is exactly my routine and today I've had to take the bus so the wife can do her drs appointments. I hate everything right now
I was always a firm hater on the “just move regional” gang until I did it during covid and… every aspect of my life is better lol I still have to go to Sydney once every ~2 weeks probably for a day trip but a 2 hour each way commute once a fortnite is a small price to pay for every aspect of my life being cheaper and also better. There’s a few downsides like not being able to just duck into the city for a show etc, but I also regularly use it as an excuse to meet up with friends and I find my trips to the city are now filled with more activities than ever because they’re not my every day life. Obviously not possible for everyone but I feel like I went from a decade of treading water and cursing that I wasn’t born a decade earlier so I could afford what they had, to just being able to have it + learning that rural living is actually so much better. Having nature and being able to have a backyard and a garage and a home office all for under half the price of any of my Sydney options that were way way smaller is just like a cheat code
It's a great line but the problem is employers are not supporting it. So unless you are very lucky with a position that is only a once a week visit, it's not really feasible.
I don’t disagree obviously, but also people do choose their careers. I’m just saying I basically turned my life upside down, something I NEVER would have considered before COVID. The forced stoppage made me stop and consider my long term happiness and what really mattered and it turns out going to the city every day actually sucks and even if I earned half what I did I’d still choose to live out here and not be miserable tbh
This should be on top.
OP is getting dunked on in the replies, but I actually agree that employees having the right to WFH full time unless there is a genuine occupational requirement for the job to be done in person (like nurses, surgeons etc) would help encourage and facilitate regional living (such as people being able to live in Toowoomba while working for a company/team in based Brisbane, or in Ballarat or Bendigo while working for a Melbourne based company/team). Many people would be OK with driving 2 hours each way 2-3 times a year for a big meeting/team catch up day if they are saving a lot of money living regionally and feel like they have a better work/life balance and lifestyle overall. But that kind of commute is simply not feasible to do 2-3 times a week, which keeps many people who would otherwise be happy to live somewhere like Toowoomba, Bendigo, Newcastle or Ballarat "stuck" in capital cities. People would also be a lot less upset that the only houses they can afford to buy are a 60+ minute commute each way if they only go into the city for special occasions like concerts, a footy match, a birthday dinner or the occasional appointment rather than it being something they have to do 2-3 times a week in peak hour. A lot of jobs really don't require employees to be in office, and doing away with the requirement that they must be in the office at least twice a week could have solid benefits. (And controversial hot take time, but the "culture" companies talk about about really is rarely so amazing that it's worth giving up your sleep and free time to commute into the city to be immersed into it. I said what I said. I would much rather an extra 90 minutes of sleep over soulless cubicles we can't even decorate and liven up a little with a few photos or a personal mouse pad because of hot-desking and alternating in office days with other teams, ugly company branded mugs and home-brand coffee, and awkward small talk with co-workers I'd never voluntarily choose to speak to in any other setting).
Amen It feels like a lot of companies have said 'come back to the office 2 days a week' as a kind of hand-wavey solution to 'foster collaboration' and 'ensure company culture', without actually pinpointing what it is they're hoping to achieve or exploring alternatives. Who is it I'm meant to be collaborating with that I'm not already? Would much rather put a few hours work into doing that from home than spend a few hours commuting and hoping that existing in the same physical space will magically improve things. I've been told to be in the office 2 days a week, but all meetings have to be hybrid anyway because the teams I work with are onsite a different 2 days (and we're saving office space by alternating days, obvs)
Those saying those things likely got into the property market 10 to 20 years ago. They now likely have teenage kids so are looking for an excuse to get out the house anyway!
Every single person in my team that comes in 4+ days a week has kids. It's quite telling.
Culture? I mean the one thing I really miss about working in the office is having a board member or MD descend from the heavens and tell us how amazing the business is doing, thank you for your efforts, and here, have a pizza lunch* on us. \* 0.67 slices per person, basic toppings only
It would help if we built some decent infrastructure too. Newcastle-Sydney in 45 minutes by high-speed rail would make commuting from there a couple of times a week totally viable.
Living there is not for me, but I know quite a few people who would very happily live in Toowoomba rather than Brisbane if there was a high speed rail connection between the cities.
Sadly, trains don't like going up mountains. The downhill bit would certainly be "high speed" though!
Then go through it. It's not cheap, but it is doable.
If the train goes through the mountain, that'll make a station in Toowoomba itself really impractical..... The underground elevator and station would be impressive tho. Toowoomba has an elevation of 691m.
Inland Rail is planned to go through the mountain. It was a hectic tunnel when I worked on the concept design way back, not sure how much of the alignment has stayed the same. Portal was near Helidon from memory.
Yes trains can go through tunnels, nobody is debating that. If the discussion is about benefits of a fast train from Toowoomba (on top of a mountain) to Brisbane (which is down from the mountain), running a tunnel through the mountain doesn't help achieve that goal. A station at Helidon would add about half an hour to the journey
>high speed rail You need a proper economic case for any such line, though. Trouble is the cost per trip has to be a lot higher than normal rail, and it has to have pretty high patronage. If you can state with confidence that sufficient numbers of people will travel on it every day (and will pay that higher fare) then you have a winner. I think we have a distorted perspective here. I can get from Sydney to Newcastle for less than $6.88 on the train (full adult fare). In Japan, on the Shinkansen, a trip of that distance would cost around $82AUD.
Public infrastructure projects don't need to make money for themselves. The idea is that they create a net economic benefit. The Pacific Highway is completely free to use.
Would cost you also the same in Europe as Japan for that distance.
I said this same thing on another thread weeks ago and got down voted to smithereens because "nobody wants to live outside the cities". I mean, I'm a somebody and I would love to live somewhere more community and country. Reads like a few people here would.
A Shinkansen ticket from Nagoya to Osaka (roughly the same as Sydney to Newcastle) is $60 one way. Would you pay $120 each day? Probably would be lots more here in Australia.....
It's cheaper to pay 100-300 p/w on train tickets than an extra 500 p/w to rent a shoe box in the city.
Not sure about Japan, but in Europe it's not unheard off to commute 100-200 km if your house and office are both near bullet train stations. While single tickets tend to be pricy, monthly or annual passes are actually quite affordable
If it was for one to two days a week, I could see some people going for it.
They do in the UK which has similarly expensive (but considerably faster than Australia) trains. Loads of people work 2 days a week in London and live 200km outside because the trains are fast.
Newcastle is already full mate, send them further inland. Start new commuter suburbs with a High Speed Rail, similar to commuter car parks, high rises and local shops below.
This is the answer. Regional areas within 2 hours of Sydney have already suffered greatly (both in culture and in cost) with the mass exodus out of Sydney during covid. What is needed is the development of new towns/suburbs with well-planned infrastructure outside of the existing areas instead of just haphazardly tacking on more developments with no capacity for these to be adequately serviced. I live in a once undesirable suburb outside of Newy and houses dont even get advertised there is such a demand, the agents just have a list of buyers and do a "preview" inspection on a Saturday and the house is sold to someone from Sydney on the Monday - locals have no hope and like Byron, are being forced out.
> send them further inland Is Wilcannia far enough?
Then when everyone from Sydney prices newcastle locals out what are the locals supposed to do?
This has already happened. All the Novocastrians have been pushed to Cessnock, Maitland and Singleton.
Don't forget Raymond Terrace and Karuah
Commute to Newy from Tamworth, obviously.
The thing is, you’re giving examples of places that locals have already been priced out of by migration from capital cities. There is an absolute rental and homelessness crisis in Newcastle, the absolute last thing that would benefit the city is anyone moving from Sydney so they can work at home.
At one point recently Port Stephens LGA had the lowest rental vacancy rate in the state, at the same time most local businesses are hurting for staff from doctors to cleaners. It's no surprise 'laptop hermits'* from Sydney aren't too popular locally. *Not my term, but a coworker had me snorting tea lol
These employers preach in person work and office culture but as soon as they can find cheaper low quality remote labour in India they’ll take it in a heartbeat. Really need to tax companies that do that hard as it is an import costing Australia a lot in taxes
> OP is getting dunked on in the replies, but I actually agree that employees having the right to WFH full time unless there is a genuine occupational requirement for the job to be done in person (like nurses, surgeons etc) would help encourage and facilitate regional living (such as people being able to live in Toowoomba while working for a company/team in based Brisbane, or in Ballarat or Bendigo while working for a Melbourne based company/team). Devils advocate: All this does is encourage people on city salaries to move to larger regional centres close-by, displacing people who live *and* work in those regional towns and who don't have the same high salaries. Remember, city salaries are generally set higher than regional ones because they reflect the higher cost of living. We already saw this phenomenon during the pandemic with people fleeing to regional towns to get away from the lockdowns, displacing locals.
I get that, but until "move somewhere more affordable" stops getting thrown around as the solution for city people who are being bled dry to the point of having no quality of life there, it won't change. The *real* solution for me is major housing affordability reforms and increased working flexibility across the board so people can live where they *want* to live, but that will never happen as long as we have a parliament full of landlords getting paid off by big business. I will also say that as someone who grew up regional (and hated it), there are a lot of people who would like to have stayed, but felt like they have no choice but to move to the city for career reasons, and allowing them to work these jobs from home could be a positive thing. Many people feel pushed out of their communities because of a lack of opportunities. I wanted out of my conservative regional hometown for many reasons, but I recognise that regional living has appeal for many.
On the other hand, maybe that's the push needed to start building up regional towns and spreading out the population more evenly. If people could have permanency and stability in working from home, the demand would be there for better health services, schools, cafes, etc. IMO this would be sad for "country charm" amd for toursits like me, but it could be a good thing for the problem of rural areas not being adequately serviced.
You are a tourist having a conversation about this? If so: Thank you for showing concern for us city folk. Enjoy your time here or there or wherever. You seem like a good person
As a nurse in a regional area but close enough to a major city that they're are people who will commute a few days a week: I totally agree. People have also left the professions where people need to be face to face in droves.It shifts the housing issue down the line to people who now cannot afford anything. Childcare is a massive issue, with people waiting 2+ years to get a spot. Even OOSH is looking to be problematic into the future. We actually don't want to be encouraging people to the regions under current circumstances unless they are contributing to essential services (including things like childcare), it has already happened too quickly and shown up a lot of cracks.
Air BnB is already makingbdesireable regional areas unaffordable
Orange NSW springs to mind. Nice town but can't get a new build house there for less than $800k nowadays, yet there's little local industry.
Wouldn't a positive side-effect be that city prices also come down? Then where people live won't be as stratified by income. Also, I would think the downward impact on city prices would be more substantial than the upward impact on regional prices, since you're dispersing people from a very concentrated area to a very spread out area.
Density in areas in the city is how people live close to amenity (cities don't just have jobs, they have more efficiently utilised infrastructure and stuff people want to do). We need to build up, which is what the NSW gov is trying to do. Cost of infrastructure with all this spreading isn't sustainable. Regional areas have other issues than jobs. A lot of people who made that move are going back to the city despite the cost issues. So regional towns can't rely on this anyways, it was just a pandemic blip.
City prices won't go down, because demand is still outstripping supply especially since a very large percentage of international migration, which is the vast majority of Australia's population growth, lands in either Sydney or Melbourne (about two thirds). And let's face it here, people who are planning a regional move are going to be looking for the well located regional centres which are still within reach of Sydney/Melbourne. As an example, folks from Sydney are going to be looking at the Central Coast, Newcastle and Wollongong (and places as far south as Kiama). They're not going to move to Wagga Wagga or Parkes.
> And let's face it here, people who are planning a regional move are going to be looking for the well located regional centres which are still within reach of Sydney/Melbourne. Yeah, to put it into Queensland.....a lot of people could happily move to Toowoomba which is 2.5 hours away from Brisbane in terrible traffic conditions, and while much smaller than Brisbane, is big enough to have decent sized shopping centres, some things to do, a handful of decent places to eat, a variety of parks/activities/schools for your kids, and is well resourced enough that you really only need to go to Brisbane for medical care if you need to see a high level specialist, but would not be happy moving somewhere like Charleville or Longreach which is country country and several hours away from Brisbane.
>employees having the right to WFH full time unless there is a genuine occupational requirement for the job to be done in person (like nurses, surgeons etc) would help encourage and facilitate regional living 100% agree, and anyone who doesn't is a dog quite frankly. There's no reason all admin and office jobs or support jobs need to be physically within eg. Sydney or have a few days in person, and giving a government-enforceable mandate embedded into the NES that these roles can work remote, and if they need to travel for eg. A specific reason the employer needs to pay - then people can lock in to mortgages in regional areas and know that there are thousands of remote jobs. Obviously I think it needs to be within reason: must be located in Australia physically (don't want people running off to Bali), must be within x km of a main office (let's say idk, 400km should be more than enough), and some rules that prevent employers saying "oh yes this accounts payable clerk role definitely needs to be in person this job can't be done remote" yes it can bitch. 1. If we want Australia to be even slightly livable with these ridiculous immigration numbers then we need to accept that people have to move regional 2. If we want people to move regional they need jobs 3. Enforcing remote work as a workers right in the NES could solve this - not for all jobs, but for a great many 4. At the same time we should convert unused office space into residential, industrial or other non-office commercial to make better use of our cities now that half the work force can be remote
If a job can be done fully remotely without extenuating circumstances, then it should be up to the employee if they want to work remotely
I'm permanently WFH, my husband works in a rural(or classed as rural) location about 30 mins from where we decided to live. Is the CBD like 45+ mins away depending on traffic? Yes. Do I go "into the city" maaaybe once a month? Yep. Do I love being in an outskirt township rather than the main suburban sprawl? God damn it I do! They really need to be more accommodating with WFH for jobs that really do only require maybe a once a fortnight or less amount of face to face time - I'd be fine going in once every other week if it gave the freedom that I currently have if I was changing jobs.
A two-hour commute 2-3 times a week is feasible, but barely. I did it for about a year before eventually buying a place close to work. I moved because I could make it work financially, and didn't really have strong reasons for staying regional. Going regional and commuting for purely financial reasons isn't enough. You need a strong lifestyle reason for doing it. It could be being in a beautiful place (e.g. bushland, the beach), being close to family, or having your kids firmly established in their schooling. You need something more motivating to get you through the commute than the relatively affordable housing.
I would even be happy flying to a bigger city a few times a year at my own expense if I could work from home full time.
Itll happen. Im a managing director. The owner is a boomer and he likes to come in and see people at the office. He basically wants people to talk to. So I have it set up as hybrid so there are always some people for him to see here. As soon as he is gone Ill move all staff to WFH and rent out the office we own. Ill probably organise a monthly meeting. Go over OHS have the important meetings. Just rent some place then have lunch as a team and everyone goes home. Difference? Im a millenial owner is a boomer. All the employees are gen X or younger.
just move has never been realistic advice. What about the people there? Does everyone keep moving down until you're leaving the country altogether? Where does it end?
it's just a lazy cop out to avoid dealing with the underlying issue.
Having trouble finding housing in Toorak? Just move to Mount Isa, millennials are so entitled /s
Damn lazy millennials complaining about housing when they could just give up their avocado toasts and move somewhere like here https://www.myproperty.so/property/land-for-sale-13/
On an unrelated note; this is fascinating to browse through, where and why did you even find that lol
Yep pretty much this. Let's have city folk move out to the regional towns on their city salaries and buy up the real estate or rent all of the available properties. Suddenly you have cafes and local hospitality venues closing down because their staff can't find anywhere affordable to stay, and the other locals get priced out of everything too.
Decentralisation of Australia’s population is at the very least one of a range of things Australia should be doing to deal with its housing crisis. Having over 70% of our population living in a few scattered major cities is ridiculous. The standard of living in these big cities declines as infrastructure fails to keep up with demand, and urban sprawl throws people further and further out into poorly serviced suburbs. Meanwhile country towns experience rural blight, as young people leave them for the big cities in search of opportunities for decent education, work and careers, and the ones who remain are far more likely than their city counterparts to get caught up in meth and other shit for want of any hope in life. Which of course only adds to the problems in both cities and country. Decentralising and not just cramming more and more people into overloaded cities is a good thing, and one of a number of things Australia should be pursuing to fix its housing and employment problems.
This. Have a look at Germany for an example. 85 million people in an area that's 2x Victoria. Yet, the biggest city is smaller than Melbourne or Sydney and only 4 cities are more than 1 million. They do however have hundreds of medium sized cities (think Canberra/Hobart/Darwin sized). It's very possible to live in a small country town and have a 20-30 minute drive or train trip to the closest city centre. The trick is to build infrastructure and people will just move. I'm pretty convinced that electrified fast rail from Melbourne to Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Shepparton and Traralgon will make those towns grow into busy cities and take a lot of pressure off Melbourne.
Especially when they don't realise that regional towns are having massive housing shortages. It may be "cheaper" but you have to be able to find somewhere to live. Don't forget you'll have to spend hours travelling for any medical appointments!
OP is suggesting that he be allowed to work remotely, so he can move to a cheap town, and out price the locals in that town
I mean, [politicians literally tell young people to go do just that](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-24/barnarby-joyce-urges-aspiring-home-owners-to-look-beyond-sydney/8209496) instead of working to find solutions to the housing affordability issue, so we can't be too shocked when people want to take that advice because it's clear the situation in Sydney and Melbourne won't change any time soon.
I remember the days of full-time office work and managers seem to have forgotten the interpersonal dramas and bullshit that goes on during stressful times. Also in my work, there’s a lot of managers whose job is talking and meetings. They just talk a lot. They’re the ones who want you back in the office so they can talk more. When I hear people say “collaboration and culture” I read it as “so I can talk more”
Poor sods get lonely. Scared upper management will collaborate them into another culture (broke and unemployed).
Bang on. With nobody to talk at, it might become more obvious just how little middle-management actually does on the day to day.
I've got news for the just move regional crowd... it may be cheap comparatively, but it's still not cheap, and salaries tend to be lower, too.
And try to get a dentist appointment etc. Had to drive 5h to Sydney twice because of a root canal infection and waiting times were just too long in the smaller towns. Here I can see a dentist Sat and Sun without too much hassle.
100%, not to mention there aren't many bulk billing medical practices left in the regions.
Neither are there any in the cities.
The money I've saved on rent is equal to the money I'd earn. Plus I get to live in a 3 bedroom house instead of a 1 bedroom apartment.
I think people want an eastern seaboard wage on regional rents/CoL
Plus a move itself is also extremely expensive these days. The deposit, mover company or truck…
A go-get van for the day is less than half a week's rent. I guess it depends on how much stuff you have.
Yes, or you’re up against industry workers on higher or as high salaries as a capital city.
I quit Sydney for regional NSW 10 years ago. While there are some great things about Sydney, I would never go back to the rat race and chaos.
Why stop at regional? Why not move to Thailand
I have a now ex-colleague who did exactly that for 18 months before being made redundant
If he was making Sydney money living in Thailand, those 18 months should have been about 20-30 years of salary over there.
Dunno if 20-30 years is accurate. I presume he lives a Western lifestyle there and he does have a wife and kids to look after. But, yep he'll be set financially for a while.
Just some numbers for people who want to move to vietnam - its $12k AUD/year to live a well catered life with everything included. Thailand is probably similar. So it is roughly 7 times the median salary in Australia.
Even better. Just offshore the job to Thailand for a quarter of the salary.
Bold of you to assume the equivalent skilled labour will be a quarter of the salary in Thailand.
Certainly wouldn’t be 1:1
I looked at all the WFH jobs on Seek in my industry. Not one was actually WFH. Not one.
Devils advocate opinion: we’re the not building apartments for families and it’s a big issue. A large portion of the rest of the world considers raising a family in an apartment normal if you want to live in a metropolitan area. There’s also cultural differences in lifestyle and how kids should be raised obviously that contribute to this as well. More relaxed style of parenting. Another issue is how do we change the cultural expectation of considering 4 beds, 2 baths, a medium room, butlers pantry, seperate laundry room, double garage and two living spaces as must haves while house hunting.
Yep it goes both ways. Need bigger (but affordable) apartments, and people need to learn to live in smaller spaces. The reason the bigger apartments is so expensive is because you might only have a handful of them in a whole building. The average apartment building is mostly comprised of 2 bedders. Australians tend to think they need a lot of space, but actually if they gave it a go they'd find that living in a smaller property is actually perfectly fine. I grew up in a relatively big house (in a very cheap area) and after living in 15 square metre 'one room' studio in Korea I realised that I don't need much space at all. Obviously that's an extreme end of the scale, but why have an extra dining room that gets used 4 times a year if it's gonna add another $100k to the purchase price?
Agreed. I was trapped in Melbourne for years because that's where my industry is. It was only when I became self-employed in a job not location based that I could leave. The Government should lead the way and make masses of jobs wfh only.
I know someone who works for the VIC state government and heard that their union fought to get office-based staff a fixed WFH arrangement. So at least they're setting a good example I suppose
I heard VIC gov jobs are about to switch from 50% to one office day per week?
The office always has a cheap spongy keyboard and a flimsy plastic mouse. This is the "culture" we get.
If WFH people could move to regional areas it would free up infrastructure like roads and PT. There are so many beautiful regional areas that are stifled by lack of employment. It's sad.
I live " regional " and the internet is far, far too shit here to work from home. EDIT: Contrary to what seems to be popular opinion, not all properties can access Starlink. Mine in particular has no line of sight access because we are in a valley, which is a common problem in my area
I live 4 hours from the nearest capital in a < 1000 person town and have FTTH. Not all regional internet is bad these days and if it matters, it's easy to check.
Yep. I have faster internet living in a regional town 6 hours out of Brisbane than I did when I lived in Brisbane (FTTP vs FTTC).
Regional Australia could have had a chance to have fast NBN if the country, including most of regional Australia, did not select a party completely opposed to it. It really should be a new national priority though as FTTH was a sound measure.
Starlink is absolutely reliable for regional and remote working.
I live regional Unless you want to be a tradie, be a nurse, work in disability, work in real estate, or retail/hospo theres nothing to do here!
On top of that, regional life might not be for everyone. For people of colour, I hate to say it, the lack of diversity in regional areas can be a massive deal breaker. At least for me it definitely is. I don't want my son to have to deal with the racism I had to deal with growing up in 90s Australia which unfortunately, when you go regional, it's like going back in time in that aspect in certain areas. And as an Asian, the lack of proper Asian food is a massive deal breaker for me. That and do people not have family? I have all of my family here in Sydney. I kind of want my son to be close to his grandparents and cousins and extended family. It's not really that simple to just move.
There’s definitely more racism in some areas but most places its not at all like “back in the day.” In fact i lived in a regional town that had businesses actively trying to recruit african refugees to work in primary industry because they integrated so well and were willing to get stuck in. Turns out if you were a cattle herder in sudan you fit in really well in, you guessed it, a dairy in regional victoria.
That's great but it's not everyone's experience - there's still plenty of racism around.
A lot of refugees prefer living rurally as that's what they're used to back home. Wagga has loads of Iraqis nowadays who've settled in well from all accounts.
Yeah, you get decent concentrations across the board, asians and islanders up towards mildura for fruit growing, i think sugarcane is the same up north. Funnily enough when you take someone from a rural, generally subsistence lifestyle and plonk them into a gentrified city, they dont do as well
When I went to high school in a multicultural area of Melbourne people we’re obsessed with race and there would often be fights between different ethnic groups. When I moved to regional Victoria for a while nobody cared what your background was. It was a lot more accepting and peaceful.
Racism will always exist but today is nothing like the 90s, I graduated year 12 in 2017 in Kalgoorlie and the only racism is some beef between maori and aboriginal but even that is just stupid teenager shit. Growing up my friend group had mongols, maoris, fillipinos, aboriginals, white fullas and everyone in between. Not to try take away from your own lived experience but the racism in Australia really isn't as bad as they say. Maybe it used to be. But Australia is like 25% immigrants so as generations pass we all just get along better Casual racism exists and that is likely what people will experience today. Eg. My Mongolian friends nickname was "Ching" in our friend circle from the 3rd grade up until we finished school. Yes its definitely racist but at the same time it wasn't. We called him Ching but that doesnt change the fact he is our best friend and we love him.
I'm depressed about the fact that in the next few years, my friendship circle will probably disintegrate as we all "move regional" for more affordable housing and barely get to see each other. The social aspect of moving away is often overlooked. It must be pretty brutal for couples who move regionally to afford starting a family and lose that vital support network during the infancy/early childhood years.
You don't get it. People who say that don't care. They kind of want you to have to suffer a little bit. Three hour commute to work just so you can maybe own a home? Be grateful about it, you commie shit.
2 days office is doable from the blue mountains, Wollongong or the southern highlands! It's just not thaaaaaatttt much cheaper than Sydney for the nice areas (Dapto is affordable so is the meth tho)
lmao 2 days in Sydney CBD from Mittagong? 8 hours in the office, 4 hours on the train, 8 hours of sleep -- you've got all 4 hours at best to live with on for 2 days a week. The willingness to die at the altar of corporate is hilarious.
Anyone contemplating staying over for a night in the city to meet this 2 day office time? Cuts out 2x commutes at some cost though.
I knew people in 2003-2007 doing it every day from Wollongong and Central Coast 5 days a week into Martin Place. Most train. I lived in Bondi and that commute was too much for me 🤣
It's OK if you are right on a good train stop. Places like Thirroul and Woy Woy are probably doable for 2 or 3 days a week but I wouldn't want to do more. Plus they've rocketed in price so much since covid I'm not sure it's a great deal anymore Also schools and proximity to friends/family are deal breakers for many people
It's more like 2.5- 3 hours on the train. Add in some flex where you do some make up time on my WFH days or some work done on the train and it's a more reasonable work life balance. >The willingness to die at the altar of corporate is hilarious. I would say it's more "The willingness to die at the altar of home ownership" not everyone was born with a family home they own, I'm pretty stoked to have security despite the long commute and bootlicking.
This is pretty much what I do and it works for me. Twice a week commute of 2ish hours, I get work done on the train up and listen to audiobooks on the train down. Those 2 office days are my meetings and social catch up days and my wfh days are work and chores. In Sydney I was living in a cramped old 2br on the back of a train line but now I have a huge house and garden, chickens, fish, good relations with my neighbours, bushwalks on my doorstep, all amenities and the space and light I was craving. Yes the lack of Chinese food kills me. I go to Hurstville to load up on frozen dumplings once a month. There is good and bad in both but as I’m just an ordinary working class person I have to prioritise and make some sacrifices. I’m pretty happy with the choice I’ve made. Yours may be different but it is absolutely possible to move regionally and commute.
Working regionally = getting a job in the regions, not working a captial city job remotely
The jobs aren’t necessarily there though. The government needs to start incentivising companies or something. Small towns in Australia are dying
Small towns are dying because farming has turned into mega corporations when it used to be a small family business
As someone who watched their family have to sell their farm to one of these very large companies, it’s very sad. And it’s heart breaking hearing how busy towns in places like the Murray Mallee used to be thriving and now are just ghost towns.
Not all the regions are small towns. There are a HEAP of small regional cities (30-200k) to choose from that have jobs, and are growing.
This is by design. Existing landowners will never let workers escape Sydney en masse if they can extract more rents and these people are politically influential. They also have signficiant investments in CBD commercial buildings. If professionals could all move away there’d be less users of toll roads and less profits to be made from child care and private schools etc. The list is long. The excuse to keep you in place will be all about ‘team building’ and ‘culture’ and “helping small businesses who are doing it tough”. On a related but different matter, for similar reasons, I’m skeptical of fast rail projects and true decentralisation ever happening. Why would the powerful enable people to move away from Sydney and pay less for housing?
This is the one area Americans get right even in the past. Companies would often move to where the middle class was moving to for cheaper housing. Like how many companies moved from New York to White Plains, Los Angeles to Pasedena, DC to the Virginia and Maryland suburbs. It is something Australia, the UK and Canada should adopt as well. It is not unusual to hear certain American companies having their headquarters in a place that you would not immediately find in a map. So many tech companies have moved to Provo, Utah for example.
I absolutely feel that. I worked all the way through COVID because apparently electrical projects were essential. I guess the etu has big strong hands or something. I would love to move to some town an hour away and never travel to work but unfortunately that's just not in my cards. I don't know why if a job doesn't need to be done in the office it isn't fully WFH. Do companies have ways to monitor the activity of their employees in other ways than making them come into work?
If only unemployment was low enough for skilled people to negotiate.
The people that live in the regions don’t want people with disproportionately high incomes moving into the regions, purchasing real estate and driving up prices for blue collar working families. You also wouldn’t get any sympathy about your WFH situation from people that work minimum wage retail jobs where they are on their feet for 8 hours a day with only a half hour break.
Translation: I want to move regional but I'm not prepared to leave my comfort zone in order to make it happen. If your job doesn't work, change careers. There's heaps of work available in regional areas.
I’d love to go regional and get out of Sydney but my kids are down the road and my job not afar away. Seriously not an option for many years.
Moving regionally is a band-aid solution to the housing crisis. When I hear people recommend this, I hear "the country is doomed, there are no appropriate policy solutions that will fix the housing crisis, your best bet is to uproot your life, leave your friends and family, and go regional". While regional Australia is wonderful and a great place to live, the consequence of all these city-refugees is that then regional Australia gets to join in on the housing crisis as locals too become outpriced and outhoused in their own towns. On this topic, you'll also hear gaslighters say that "your parents in the past had to make a sacrifice and move too" which is a blatant lie. Moving 3 and a half suburbs west in Sydney is not the same as moving to Orange. Nice try, Chad.
Noted. Everyone, stop telling /u/dwaekkishooky to move regional! k thx!
crazy that people actually spend time in their day to have an argument with air.
Crazy that I keep coming back to this sub for more.
What work do you do that’s restricted to Sydney?
Sydney Harbour Bridge tour guide. Can't find any other harbour bridges.
I'd assume by Sydney they mean major cities, i.e. Syd, Melb and Brissy. Melb and Bris aren't that much cheaper than Sydney these days. For their work, maybe something like financial services. Could be media/publishing or entertainment. All very city-centric and Sydney-centric AFAIK. Possibly Big Law, or maybe tech on the corporate side?
Anyone who things the solution to the housing crisis is to ship young people off to rural areas so our cities can be retirement villages for boomers is not a serious person
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Careful what you wish for. Fully remote means there is absolutely no reason to hire an Aussie. Show up those 2-3 days a week. It's probably the only thing keeping you employed.
These threads appear every week, and always sadden me with just how depressing the career of the average Aussie Redditor is… I actually want to come into the office 3 days a week, I feel so isolated and alone at home with no socialising, sharing and collaborating. As a manager I struggled so hard to get the most out of work and my team during lockdown, the sense of unity disappeared until we got back to being in the office. And no, I’m not a boomer, nor do I own any property. In fact I pay ridiculously high rent for my little flat and my material wealth hasn’t increased measurably for a decade. It has no signs of doing so. I just think people don’t want to admit they hate their career and regret their choices, but aren’t willing to do anything to change them. They’d rather blame their employer who knows the reality of the situation, which is that the vast majority of people who purely WFH bludge and aren’t interested in buying into the business…
Have you looked for jobs that aren't in Sydney? Where do you want to live? Start there.
Basically everything in my field is major city based.
Yeah work is trying to take everyone off WFH even when you purchased regional
Come to Perth. We’re basically regional, have jobs, and houses are half the price.
We’re considered “regional” for visa holders to encourage people to move here. City of 3m.
I’m alongside big four. See you at 4 days ever week in office
"She who must be obeyed" does WFH Gold Coast 5 days, 2 people above her work from Cairns, an office is in Brisbane, others in the team have flexibility across Australia. The work is for the UAE, so some trips for in country. I work 10 feet away in the workshop.
I'm not an expert at all, but I live in a regional city not a main city. I feel like it enables me to have work options, though not as many as I would have if I lived in a main city .. but I do only have like a 10 minute commute and the life balance is much more family friendly.
Regional areas are a sure way to get locked out of life. Services drop off, house price in the cities keeps you forever falling behind, your children will leave to find jobs, go to a Uni, etc. I would only move regional part time, if I had a place in the city first.
I feel this is a genuine solution to the housing crisis
I hear you - it would be good for politicians to support this more as well from an economic perspective. What gets me is that I go into the office 2 days a week as told, do little work as I’m talking to randoms in the kitchen to make the commute worthwhile that I don’t even work directly with, and then I do all my calls via Teams anyway. No one even goes to meeting rooms anymore even if they are all in the office as they all dial in! And I can’t hear properly as I’m distracted by other people being on Teams calls so my outputs are at least 30% less. I don’t think it’s culture building at all, it feels very forced to me
Why would the masters give the peasants what they want? When have they in history? Think about what would happen to the masters commercial real estate if they allowed you peasants to work from home! Why it would be worth way less and that would make the rich people sad :( Only poor people deserve to be sad.
We worked out we could earn 50k less and keep the same lifestyle moving Sydney to cairns. 8 years later im on more than i was on in Sydney. You might find if push comes to shove you can probably WFH FT if its too hard for them to replace you.
Regional is a guaranteed half a mil out the door thesedays anyway, 10 years ago you could get a great house and land for 200-380000 anywhere regionally, now it's 500-2mil
Pl-ease. Anyone can move and change career if they really want to. You don't want to move out of Sydney? Don't. But saying you just can't is just an excuse.
You didn’t move out of Sydney when you had WFH, though. Sounds like you’d “love to move out of Sydney” in that you’d love to live in a place exactly like Sydney except cheaper.
He had no guarantees he could WFH permanently Mr Sassy genius.
I'm curious how much people are expecting houses to be in regional areas? I'm struggling to buy in my town, because my regional living salary only gives me about $400k in buying power, and most places cost more than that here. Many nice houses for sale are $800k-$1M+ now as well - places that used to be more like 500-600k. It is probably cheap compared to Sydney, but if you have a median salary, it's still expensive to buy here on your own.
If your job is able to be completely done from home then it will get exported overseas for a fraction of the price. Even more advanced jobs are starting to have this problem.
Before COVID WFH barely existed. Now we all feel entitled to it ? Comon man. Stop being a snow flake or get a different job where you want to live. These organisations don’t owe you anything.
Would you be willing to trade off some salary to go full WFH?? Maybe work out what you'd be willing to do and make an offer to your boss / head of HR or CFO. Businesses pay Sydney salaries for Sydney jobs due to the cost of living. If you want to pocket the saving - then what's in it for the business?? Offering to split those savings with them might make them reconsider. If they were hiring someone new from a regional area into a 100% WFH role they wouldn't be starting the negotiation at what they pay someone to turn up into the Sydney office 5 days a week.
In 90’s I had to move from Tas to Toowoomba for work, then from Toowoomba to Bendigo, then 2000’s to Brisbane, then WA…I’ve been chasing the work for years. No such thing as work from home - home is where the income is the greatest…
you could just... work jobs that aren't based in Sydney?
In many areas 90% of the jobs are concentrated in Sydney and they force you to be hybrid. Good luck finding a decent job outside of Sydney in Product, Development, Design, as an Analyst, or PM. They DO exist, but there are so few that literally hundreds of applicants saturate them within the first couple of hours.
You do realise that major capital cities exist which aren't Sydney, right?
Is there? Where? There is only Sydney or regional.
I heard there are. I'm doubting myself right now.
You mean sub-par capital cities.... Like Melbourne
Yeah, if you want people commuting into the office you need to be paying them enough to afford to live a commutable distance away.
My husband applied for a job that was full time in an office in Sydney and in the second interview they were like "we noticed you don't live in Sydney, are you planning to move or?" And he was like, "I can do this job remotely." So they hired him and now he works full time remote for a Sydney based company while living in regional NSW. Now, obviously not every company is that understanding or flexible, but it's worth asking. Also, if you want to move out of Sydney, apply for jobs that aren't in Sydney, but expect a pay cut because regional jobs pay regional wages (but housing is cheaper so that's nice)
Leaving your home with internet to Commute to a set destination to work on the internet is the dumbest work practice of this century.
Upper management want everyone in the office because for the most part their identities are their jobs - they have no life outside of work. They get validation from being in the office so they want us all there to justify their importance. I moved interstate and regional from Sydney, I really enjoy it but I’m facing a similar issue: the jobs I find are based in capital cities despite not needing to be in the office to do the work (global teams etc). I would get so much more out of quarterly visits for intensive team bonding days or whatever they want than 2-3 days a week to sit at work in near silence with deadlines. Almost all of the time in my last roles, the people in other teams I could have spoken to in person weren’t there that day!
There’s plenty of regional work. The problem is many city goers expect city wages in regional areas. You don’t need to earn as much when shelter costs are so much lower. I suppose your super will suffer though
Everthing else is more expensive in regional areas, though. And also, just how regional do we mean? In Victoria, regional can mean you can get a V/Line to Melbourne in a couple of hours. In WA that can mean a 3 hour unsealed road trek in a 4WD to visit an IGA that has to get supplies helicoptered in during the wet season.