Mining Jobs in Australia – A Big Money Attraction

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Jobs Abroad

Earlier this year we reported that salaries in Australia were outstripping salaries in most other countries.

We found the average Australian wage was 14% higher than the average German wage, 50% higher than the average American wage, and 67% higher than the average British wage.

Anyone from these countries – or almost any other – seeking to take advantage of Australia’s higher salaries needs to apply for a visa or residence in Australia before they can get a job.

There is one country in the world, however, whose citizens enjoy the right to live and work in Australia without a visa: that country is New Zealand. Australians and New Zealanders enjoy the right to live and work in either country, much as citizens of one EU country have the right to live and work in other EU countries.

In recent years, as Australian wages have reached new heights, and in the wake of Christchurch’s earthquake, an increasing number of New Zealanders have crossed the Tasman Sea. In 2011, 50,000 New Zealanders have moved to Australia (and about 14,000 people have moved in the other direction).

Tim Shadbolt, mayor of Invercargill, New Zealand, describes how an engineer left his $60,000 a year job with Invercargill City Council for Australia. Unlike many New Zealanders this engineer chose not to move his family to Australia. Instead his employers, a Western Australia mining company, flew him home every month and paid him $260,000 a year.

Last month, thanks to its continuing mining boom, 11,600 new jobs were created in Western Australia taking its unemployment rate to a little over four per cent. Looking at all of Australia, the unemployment rate is a little over five percent.

Australia’s ANZ bank, which monitors advertised jobs, reports that an average of 180,000 jobs a week were advertised in Australia last month. The bank commented that Australia’s mining states of Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory continued to have more job opportunities than New South Wales and Victoria, where Australia’s biggest cities – Sydney and Melbourne – are located.

While New Zealand loses people to Australia, its immigration program ensures it continues to make net gains from other countries. New Zealand’s Statistics Office reports that in 2011, the top ten countries which New Zealand made net population gains from were: 5800 from Britain, 5100 from India, 4600 from China, 1800 from the Philippines, 1600 from Germany, 1500 from Ireland, 1000 from the USA, and 900 from each of France, Samoa and Japan.

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