Everything’s way more expensive in Aus, and not always with a good explanation why.
It’s gotten better the past few years but Aus as always gotten reamed with a surcharge on anything tech related. Adobe was most famous, charging about 2x for the full Creative Suite. Apple too. At one point I emailed the CEO of the company I worked for at the time asking why Australia was charged 60% more for the same OS dvd, not even specialized for the market in any way (since all locales are built-in), and got a reply from an assistant about “taxes, supply chain, local markets” blah blah and wasn’t super convinced by the response. 10% for GST is fair but there’s no way shipping a container load of DVDs there, divided by the number of DVDs in the container, could possibly account for that difference.
If not on price, then availability was also inconsistent. Netflix and the local broadcasters had to learn this themselves when people setup US based proxy accounts, or just plain said ‘fuck it’ and went to the Pirate Bay.
It’s gotten better the past few years but Aus as always gotten reamed with a surcharge on anything tech related. Adobe was most famous, charging about 2x for the full Creative Suite. Apple too. At one point I emailed the CEO of the company I worked for at the time asking why Australia was charged 60% more for the same OS dvd, not even specialized for the market in any way (since all locales are built-in), and got a reply from an assistant about “taxes, supply chain, local markets” blah blah and wasn’t super convinced by the response. 10% for GST is fair but there’s no way shipping a container load of DVDs there, divided by the number of DVDs in the container, could possibly account for that difference.
If not on price, then availability was also inconsistent. Netflix and the local broadcasters had to learn this themselves when people setup US based proxy accounts, or just plain said ‘fuck it’ and went to the Pirate Bay.