u/PattonSmithWood — reddlx

G'day r/malaysia. Australian with a genuine love for Malaysia here, and I keep seeing this infographic going around showing household debt per capita by country.

Australia: $83.1K per capita.

Malaysia: $9.7K.

Mate. MATE.

Friends who "made it", good jobs, nice suburb, decent car, are absolutely drowning. A median house in Sydney is pushing AUD $1.6 million. You sign a 30 year mortgage before you're 35 and that becomes your life long liability.

In Malaysia I watch people living genuinely well, good food (God, the food), family nearby, reasonable housing costs and they're not lying awake at 2am wondering if a rate hike is going to blow up their mortgage repayments.

Yes, wages are lower. Yes, there are real frustrations that locals know better than me. I'm not here to tell Malaysians their country is perfect.

But I see so many posts here about wanting to migrate to Australia for a "better life" and I just want to say, please understand what you're signing up for. The number on your payslip goes up, but so does everything else. The financial anxiety is real and it never really goes away.

Low household debt isn't a small thing. It means options. It means breathing room. It means you're not one job loss away from losing everything.

Treasure it. Seriously.

u/PattonSmithWood — 7 days ago

▲ 49 r/perth

Spent the last week working in our Perth office and thought St Georges Terrace has the ideal set up for the city council to introduce fruit/food carts like you see in Sydney CBD. It’s a fairly wide road and the paving on each side is also relatively wide. Is there much resistance to this idea amongst city workers?

reddit.com

u/PattonSmithWood — 19 days ago

▲ 18 r/OpenAussie

https://michaelwest.com.au/the-enforcement-the-lobby-that-bought-australian-democracy/

"Ben Zygier, an Australian citizen known as Prisoner X, worked for Mossad, spied on fellow students at Monash University, and used his Australian passport to conduct espionage operations across Arab and Muslim countries. He died in an Israeli prison.

A New Zealand Mossad cell was separately caught attempting to fraudulently obtain New Zealand passports. The Australian official who summarised the government’s operative posture did so anonymously, because to say it on the record would have been politically unsurvivable."

u/PattonSmithWood — 22 days ago