Australia is a pretty good place to live,

Is it though? 84,000 plan to leave permanently every year.

''Each year, many Australians plan to leave the country permanently but most return to Australia within a year of their departure,'' the bureau reported. In 2010 of the 84,000 Australian residents who said they were departing permanently, only 17,000 (20 per cent) spent 12 months or more overseas.

0ktema wrote on Apr 9^th, 2014 at 1:51am:


Yes but if 84,000 Australians try to leave the country permenantly on an annual basis, how great a country is it?

It is not easy to set oneself up in a new country. Some succeed some don't. 84,000 Australians tried to leave for good 2010.

CUT-PRICE international air travel, an increasingly globalised job market and the lure of greener pastures are tempting more Australians to leave our shores for good.

The number of people leaving permanently increased by 18 per cent in the five years to 2010, the latest snapshot of social trends by the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows.

But the number who tick the permanent departure box on their passenger cards is higher than the number who actually stay away.

''Each year, many Australians plan to leave the country permanently but most return to Australia within a year of their departure,'' the bureau reported. In 2010 of the 84,000 Australian residents who said they were departing permanently, only 17,000 (20 per cent) spent 12 months or more overseas.

Fewer people left for good in 2005, 2008 and 2009 but more left in 2010. About 75 people in every 100,000 who left in 2010 did not return.

They were more likely to be women, aged between 20 and 39, often with young children and not born in Australia. Of the 17,000 who left permanently, 61 per cent were born overseas with the highest numbers coming from New Zealand and Britain.

Plain old homesickness or ''lack of satisfactory employment'' were possible reasons, the bureau's report said.

''Younger migrants may return to their country of birth because they are needed by their family,'' it said.

''Conversely, over the long term, migrants may return after successful employment and increased wealth, for retirement, family formation and dissolution, or when conditions have improved.''

But the number of permanent arrivals remains considerably higher than departures.

The report also highlighted the shrinking number of farmers, which was a problem given the growing food demands of countries such as China.

Despite Australians' enduring love affair with the idea of life on the land, the number of those listing farmer as occupation dropped by 40 per cent in the 30 years to 2011.

''The number of farmers in Australia has been declining for many decades as small farmers sell up to large-scale farming operations and fewer young people take over family farms,'' the bureau found. There were 19,700 fewer farmers in Australia in 2011 than in 2006.

Between 1981 and 2011 the number declined by 106,200, an average of 294 fewer farmers every month. Those who remained on the land were generally older than other workers, with an average age of 53 compared with 40 for people in other jobs, the bureau found.

In the year to February 2014, there were 774,710 permanent and long-term arrivals into Australia – down from the record 792,500 arrivals set in the year to January 2013 – partly offset by 381,370 permanent and long-term departures from Australia

Let's stick to the point. In any given year close to 100,000 Australians decide to try and leave Australia permanently. Obviously, they do not think Australia is so great.

Most of those who leave are foreign-born. How many are refugees returning to their homelands?

Do you have any reliable figures for how many refugees currently reside in Australia?

Interesting to know because Australia probably the most suitable place in the world to put refugees; lot's of land, rivers, resources, etc.

True, but Joe Hockey’s a dirty Muslim, let’s not forget that.

It is a jolly world, no?

So Joe Hockey, the youngest of four children, was born in North Sydney in the mid-’60s to an immigrant shopkeeper father and an Australian-born fashion-model mother.

His father, Richard Hockey, ran a corner delicatessen, which he opened a few years after arriving in Australia in 1948. Before that, Richard had served in the British Army at the tail end of World War II and before that he was born in Bethlehem. What? Born in Bethlehem? Yep, perhaps not in a manger, not in a stable, but definitely in the little town of Bethlehem in 1927 in what was then known as the British Mandate of/for/in Palestine.

The family name was not then Hockey, of course. What, you’re disappointed? You thought maybe the family name went back thousands of years to the ancient Hockey clan of Babylon?

Nope, back in 1927 when Richard, son of Joseph (really), was born in the little town of Bethlehem, the family was named Hokeidonian and they were Christian Armenians.

“My grandfather, Joseph Hokeidonian,” Joe Hockey said a few ago, “was sent by the Catholic Church in Jerusalem to go to Palestine as a spy.”

That would be as a spy against the Ottoman Turks during World War I, service which cost grandfather Joseph an eye but earned him the gratitude of the British, who took over Palestine from the Turks in 1918 and made Joseph the deputy town clerk of Beersheba for a while.

Anyway, Bethlehem-born Richard Hokeidonian served, in his turn, in the British Army in the last days of World War II and for a while thereafter (without losing any body parts) and then headed for his new life with a delicatessen, a fashion-model wife and four kids in Australia.

0ktema wrote on Apr 10^th, 2014 at 12:33am:


So the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, and the drones strikes in Pakistan and Yemen are not part of some CRUSADE?