So you’re a Malaysian degree holder, graduating from overseas. You have worked really hard in Malaysia for 8 years and you are getting tired of living in your family home. You look at your friends enjoying themselves in Australia on Facebook, you reminisce those times in university overseas – all the great memories and freedom you had. The infinite what if’s come to mind and you start to feel restless. You start getting serious about things when you have gotten married and you start thinking about your future children. Well let’s examine some of the similarities and differences in living and you can then decide if it’s right for you. I will mainly be comparing the Klang valley with Melbourne.
Similarities
Buying a house
You’ve worked like crazy to build your savings while living off your kind parents, trying to avoid eating out whenever you can. You decide it’s time to buy a house and your parents happily chip in to your down deposit. Then you look at the prices and start thinking – this will take forever to repay. Well, there is no difference in Australia. A typical house in Melbourne costs $700,000 – $900,000 in places which have decent access and lifestyle. That’s similar dollar for dollar in the Klang Valley. For sure there are places 2 hours from the city at affordable prices and not to mention the 5 square apartments aplenty in the city centre which you can get much cheaper. The reality is that you will be spending a similar amount of time repaying your house as you were back home. You also get really worried about how Sydney clearance rates have dropped to 50% and that half of the apartments in the city are actually vacant. Also the fact that you realize real estate is actually one of the biggest economic growth factors in Australia and lending has gone through the roof for the past few years with record low unsustainable interest rates.
Traffic congestion
You probably laughed when you read that. Surely nothing in Australia can beat the Federal Highway carpark? It’s nowhere nearly as bad as somewhere like Indonesia or the Phillipines, but travel times are similar to that in Kuala Lumpur (KL). The reason is that everyone goes to work and leaves at the exact same time. For a minute you might think that is the same in KL but you would be forgetting that a lot of people do end up working much later there. In Australia, the 8.5 hour dream generally holds true and everybody will want to go to work and back home at the exact same time. You would be mostly silly and even considered inefficient if you had to work longer than that. Coupled with the fact that even if there was no cars in front of you and you are desperate to get home, you cannot speed. The road rules are extremely strict (no open bribery in Australia) and a speeding ticket is at least $200. Also, people tend to live in bigger pieces of land, so the density of the population is lower and travel distance is generally much higher. It is very common to be spending about an hour to commute each way.
She’ll be right mate
If you haven’t heard this statement before – it means don’t worry about things. The same carefree attitude can be found in Australia everywhere. People have a quick chat about the doom and gloom the world then quickly go back to talking about their dog, their kids, their favourite TV shows and everything fun and non-productive. Don’t even think about working after hours – there’s always tomorrow. The sun is shining and you feel like taking the day off? Call in a sickie (sick day off). This happy go lucky mentality helps keep people friendly. Look, Malaysians work a lot longer but you’ve got to agree there is a certain laid-backness in life there.
Great food
Every Malaysian is proud of their favourite food. They know where to get the best chicken rice, best “pork noodle” and the best “bah kut teh”. When you go overseas for long periods you start to miss the food. Don’t worry, Australia has got a huge range of options. They have a wide Asian variety of Korean, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Hong Kong, mainland Chinese and of course Malaysian restaurants as well. If you are feeling more to the western appetite, there is plenty of Australian bars and restaurants, French, Italian and German food. Also there are the more exotic foods like African, Mongolian and Mediterranean. The best part of it is that you don’t necessarily (sometimes you do) have to pay that much more for choosing between the types. By far though, Asian foods are generally the cheapest and so you can still satisfy your cravings – even though it’s not quite the same.
Differences
Safety
Thanks to great institutions and a good reliable welfare system, the safety in Australia is generally really good. You don’t have to look over your shoulder every 20 seconds when you are walking in the city. You can leave your expensive iPhone on the table in most restaurants. If you are lost and end up taking a taxi, you can feel assured that you will get home in one piece. And if you ever get in trouble the police will be there to help you. There are incidences of robbery, rape and murder but they are generally few and far in between. Perhaps if unemployment continues to rise, there may be more problems, but it is still leaps and bounds better than in Malaysia
Environment
Clean city beaches! How many do you know are like that in Klang Valley? Perhaps none. It is no secret Australia is home to clean air, beautiful starry skies and great sandy beaches. The only trouble is? The changing seasons. It does make you appreciate the warmer seasons more but when you are sick and miserable and it is freezing outside, it can get really depressing really quickly. Also, Malaysia has it’s beautiful nature reserves and some well preserved beaches too. And you generally only have to check whether its going to rain in the next 2 hours to fully enjoy it any time of the year.
Career
One of the biggest letdown most Malaysian migrants to Australia have to face is a downgrade of their career. Are you a supply chain manager having 20 people work under you? Be prepared to be an in-house procurement officer. Are you an experienced financial accountant with heaps of qualifications under your belt? Be prepared to be doing general bookkeeping. The sad truth is that the cultural difference in attitude, language and skin colour poses a big barrier most cannot overcome. This is often called the “bamboo ceiling” which although sounds more for Chinese, it applies to any Malaysian. The more likely way to climb the ladder is through heavy technical bias. This means you can forget about being a CEO or a big administrative manager, you will be cracking your head doing things that no normal Australian wants to engage in – hard technical knowledge. Also, you would be more likely to secure a job if your boss is also a foreigner. Compare this to being a local Malaysian, where an overseas graduate is welcomed with open arms to a huge range of employment opportunities.
Standard of living
It sure helps greatly that AUD is 3 times of MYR. Big purchase items like cars and travel become much more palatable at the converted rate. While most things are cheaper, it is not exactly a 3 to 1 conversion for day to day living in Australia. A basic Asian meal is $10 and a decent western meal is about $25. Petrol is about $1.30 per litre. Taking a taxi costs $100 for a 25km trip. Electricity and gas bills are typically $150 per month without use of heating / airconditioning and up to $300 per month in winter (semi conservative use of heating) for a 3 bedroom house. Also, the highest tax bracket is about 40% of your salary. The minimum (and common) superannuation or retirement fund contribution is only 9.5%. There is generally little to no chance of getting a bonus unless you are a CEO or director which is rare unless you are a self made entrepreneur. When you consider how growth in your career will be somewhat stagnated, the short term result is appealing but the long term result may not be so great. The current downward spiralling economic trend due the resources pricing falls also doesn’t look promising for Australia.
Education
With the state of local universities in Malaysia, it is no wonder that most Malaysians plan ahead to send their kids overseas to further their education. The status and quality of Australian universities are mostly better than that in Malaysia. Also, there is still the sense of white supremacy in Malaysia, generally meaning that a foreign educated person is viewed much better than a local, despite how difficult or challenging the local universities are. However, the attitudes and non-technical bias of the society in Australia does become a problem. It is very easy for students to opt not to take any STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) type subjects. This is a very common pathway and therefore students who have grown up in Australia choosing their further education tend not to go for these streams. Coupled with a lack of competitiveness in scoring, knowledge and competence in STEM will generally be much lower than the average Malaysian. This leads to a general culture of having degrees which have much more challenging career pathways, ie. the arts, sports, history, general business degrees. This is one of the big reasons why Australia had to open up their immigration systems to welcome foreign technical skills. All Australians are generally experts at conversation, but fall short when comparing technical knowledge. The funding of research in Australia is also generally very poor, because most businesses recognize the small local market and the large geographical distance of Australia from the rest of the world.
Your Children
Saving for your kids to get into a good established overseas university is made much easier when your salary is much bigger in terms of the exchange rate. Even easier still, that the country you are living in has decent universities. The problem comes when you actually have young kids and you need to also try and save. Unless you have your retired parents and inlaws flying in for months at a time or you are lucky to have them already here, you would most likely resort to a single income family. This is because the cost of childcare can be quite prohibitive – averaging about $2000 per month. Most mums start comparing their paycheck to the cost of childcare and opt not to work. Alternatively they take up very casual type employment of about 4-5 hours a days. Not having the support also means potentially losing some well passed down knowledge and good parenting, although the internet has helped a lot in bridging this gap. With the difficulty of saving on a single income and coupled with the poorer career choices, it is most likely you will be bound to only take up the Australian university and getting your kids to take up a freely available government student loan isn’t that looked down upon. Your children will also likely have difficulty fitting in to Malaysian society as they grow up, which is a tradeoff moving to any country.
Emotional makeup
With family an 8 hour flight away, feeling bored and alone is common here. Most Malaysians end up building their own foster families through friendships, but sooner or later age and priorities still do not hold as good as blood ties. It is very often seen that Malaysians have negative annual leave, because most cannot bear to decide between connecting with family and taking their own holidays and continue to chase after both. The work culture in Australia is also very different. It is extremely rare to have work lunches together outside in teams. A lot of people bring food from home and tend to mingle around in the office during lunch. After hours, everyone also tends to be rushing home and no one really sticks around to build relationships with colleagues through dinners. Only the Friday beer o’clocks may be true to some workplaces, even then not exactly all the time. This will further reduce the type of socializing you will have compared to the happy hangouts and friendships you will much more easily build naturally just from working in KL.
Politics
While Malaysia is in the spotlight for scandalous abuse of money and power, Australian politics are in a state of general incompetence. The voice of the people is strong and the voting power is not corrupt, but the swinging sides of the Labour and Liberal parties mean that promises are made only to serve their immediate cause, and not for the betterment of the country. Australia has had 5 prime ministers in 6 years. Policies are also very weak, and more often than not opposition’s taglines and focus is only about how bad the other party is, never coming up with truly different ideas which marks the benefit of healthy competitive politics. The strong voice of the people means investment in things like infrastructure and business is always downplayed in favour of more social issues like healthcare and focus of income taxation. It is not surprising that the economy of Australia is falling with non-sustainable and reactive plans. Much needed roads and transports take many years to transpire and is easily canned when the opposing party takes over. Plans for innovation and business to salvage the Australian economy seems too little too late.
The future
As a developed nation, the growth in Australia will generally be more limited in potential compared to Malaysia. While Malaysia can eventually deal with its political issues and grow its economy through a good geographical location, improving levels of their institutions and the better opportunities of globalization with the lower currency, Australia has already established most of these. The over reliance on China with mining and real estate means Australia has already lost its battle with manufacturing and is now struggling to keep on par with the technology and efficiencies available in this world. This has wide implications on employment available and the declining wealth that will be experienced over time with a lowering currency.
Conclusion
In summary there is some obvious benefits of going to Australia, but a lot of it can easily be argued about. For instance, healthcare is similar but arguably the medical profession here can be considered more properly regulated. Should safety be the most important thing above everything else, then it is a no brainer to move. Desiring to live a life that doesn’t revolve around a career or if living to a more hermit lifestyle sounds appealing then these are good reasons too. All other reasons should be properly looked at when making this big decision.