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MiscellaneousStraight TalkVideo

Pendragon Straight Talk: Episode Thirty-Eight

 
TRANSCRIPT
 
JOHN GLOVER: Hello and welcome to another Pendragon Straight Talk. I’ve been asked this question a couple of times, so I thought I would answer it on this occasion. What is the work life balance like in Australia? It’s an interesting question because obviously different people have different views, but the majority of people basically think it’s very good.
 
Most Australian’s have a good balance and weekends are quite sacred, so we are really quite tight on having our weekends. In New South Wales we have nine public holidays a year, plus Easter Saturday and Easter Sunday. Tasmania has fourteen public holidays, so the different states have different public holidays, you can look them up on the internet. Most jobs offer a minimum twenty day holidays and ten day what they call sick or personal leave.
 
We also have an interesting situation in Australia where we have a thing called the Melbourne Cup which is a horse race which takes place on a Tuesday in November. Basically, Melbourne has a national holiday for it, the rest of the country stop working, as they say it’s the race that stops the nation, so the attitude it toward having a bit of fun.
 
The weather obviously helps with anything we do here, very few outside events are cancelled, so therefore you can gear up to what are we going to do this weekend and it tends to always happen.
 
As we live mainly around the coast, the beaches are very accessible, with golden sand and surf so that is always a pleasant place to go and sit to chill out on the weekend and get that work week out of your head.
 
Also, the mountains and national parks are absolutely beautiful. Most national parks have free barbeques, some of them are gas some are electric, but they are free and maintained and cleaned by the national parks, so you can have a great time with the family and friends with just a few pieces of meat and a salad, it’s a very cheap day out, and the children love the freedom.
 
The temperature is obviously fantastic most of the year, and if you look at Australia in the winter, which is a European summer, you can actually go skiing at one end of the country and be in the heat and on the beach and actually out scuba diving in the Barrier Reef at the other end, so you can actually choose what temperature you want and crank it up.
 
The roads outside the cities are very easy and travelling there is hardly any traffic once you get outside the cities and if you ask someone for directions and you say how far is somewhere, like how many kilometres, they don’t answer with kilometres they answer with time. So, let’s say, how long is it from here to Newcastle, they will say an hour, it takes an hour. So, as you can see the roads a quite good.
 
Most job are five days a week, the official working week is 38 hours, 7.6 hours per day, and my recommendation is for you to come on a holiday and have a look for yourself and see what you think of the work life balance that may be there for you in Australia.
 
Thanks for listening, I look forward to talking to you next week.

Pendragon Team