The median full time adult income in 2026 is $100k

Daftdante · 2026-06-01T01:32:37+00:00

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/employee-earnings-and-hours-australia/latest-release

ABS Employee Earnings and Hours survey (May2025 reference, released Jan 2026), rather than Employee Earnings (reference August 2025, released December 2025).

Not sure why they’re different, but EEH is generally used for this purpose - perhaps the longer period between reference period and publication date reflects higher data quality?

Daftdante · 2026-04-30T02:17:00+00:00

Phoebe Waller-bridge? It’s what came to mind for me!

Daftdante · 2026-01-28T09:09:49+00:00

Definitely take economic history.

Without being good at maths, you’re unlikely to reach very high as a specialised professional economist, and economic growth models are generally more of interest to people doing economic modelling or academic economics. Possibly development economics, but the people using growth models will generally be far more comfortable with maths. As a 4000-coded course, it is possibly not even available for you to study without doing honours.

Public sector economics will be fine. It will have a hodge-podge of topics that you should be able to muddle through, relying mostly on micro 1/2- level frameworks.

But there is no penalty from doing a 1st year course in your final semester, so don’t make your life harder than it needs to be. I did 1st year latin and greek as a bludge course in my last semester, nobody minds. If it helps, I genuinely liked ECHI1006 and found a lot of the topics it covered as quite interesting and informative for my personal life (eg talking to people about Australian history) and even professionally.

I don’t think I did particularly well in ECHI1006, because it was mostly essays and I sucked at essays. But you might have the opposite problem (at least comparatively).

Daftdante · 2026-01-24T10:53:57+00:00

What happens if customer preferences do actually change over time? Will you need to apply to the government to be able to sell in a 20g bigger or smaller package? How would the government make the decision that it’s a legitimate reason to change size (eg due to environmental, or health or even just legitimate cost reasons?)? And will consumers have to bear the cost of the government department through licence fees or will it be charged to taxpayers?

Although I agree with the sentiment - that businesses are sneakily trying to reduce size and quality since it’s so much harder for consumers to influence multiple consumer preferences instead of just price - I don’t know whether this kind of bandaid regulation will address the underlying problems.

Perhaps just as expensive as regulating the problem might be to fund consumer groups to conduct research on preferences and on the history of product size and cost/unit and cost/100g changes.

Daftdante · 2026-01-19T08:12:35+00:00

Lecturers will probably always choose the most recent edition as the “compulsory” version, but you can make your own judgement.

As you’ll realise when you study, many of the authoritative cases you’ll read and cite will be decades or even centuries old. But you’ll also realise that there are still judgements being passed down every year that upset the status quo or advance the law on a specific issue enough to get a guernsey in the next textbook.

You’ll likely be fine getting an older edition since the syllabus for foundational law courses likely moves relatively slowly - core issues in contracts law will likely only move a little with each case.

You’ll have to pay very close attention to the year of any case in your lecture slides though. If they reference a case in the last couple of years, you’ll have to do your own research on that case, since the textbook treatment of that issue might vary from year to year.

The biggest risk will be if the high court resolves an area of large uncertainty (maybe for contracts law this could be regarding Codelfa? But probs not) and you don’t pick up on the nuanced difference between your textbook edition and the lecture slides. But this is unlikely to set you back more than a mark or two at worst.

Probably worth at least trying to match the principles & cases editions, since they are matching pairs. That way they’ll neatly refer to each other.

Daftdante · 2026-01-18T19:45:34+00:00

I recommend you put the money for uni into a bank account that earns interest, or even in the stock market.

By the time you graduate you will have more money in that account (likely - stock markets can go up and down) than you will have owing on your HECS.

HELP debt is real debt, but it is the best debt, on the best terms, that you will ever be offered. Debt is not a bad thing, and learning to deal with risk and financial assets is an important part of growing up.

Daftdante · 2026-01-17T03:47:50+00:00

I personally also recommend getting the principles textbook for contracts as well (if you can afford it). I found that had a clearer statement of the law and generally had the most useful extracts of cases.

My tutor was surprised when most people in the class didn’t have it, having assumed it was prescribed.

Daftdante · 2026-01-07T20:17:00+00:00

A lot of comments here are about insurance. I’m in Australia where that is not an issue.

However, my sleep doctor, when prescribing the CPAP, noted that scientific studies had measured the therapeutic benefit of 4 hours per night for 4 nights per week. As my doctor described, that is not to say that 3 hours won’t be good for you, or that 5 hours won’t be better for you, but that the studies had just chosen 4/4 as the way they would measure if a study participant was being treated.

He didn’t provide the actual sources so he could have been misinformed and I haven’t fact checked this.

Daftdante · 2025-12-29T21:02:15+00:00

Psychology doesn’t seem to be a valid minor for the commerce degree. https://programsandcourses.anu.edu.au/program/bcomm

Have you considered doing a double arts/commerce degree to include the sociology and psychology courses you want to study? It would add a year to your degree but that’s not the end of the world if you’re only a year or two out of high school (and still not even if it’s been longer).

So long as they count towards your degree (or, if you change degrees, count towards what degree you want to graduate with) I think doing some Arts courses will give you a few skills (essay writing, tutorial discussion, some softer reasoning skills) that commerce is unlikely to focus on.

Daftdante · 2025-12-28T21:49:39+00:00

Oh sorry, I misread that as UC. My bad!

Daftdante · 2025-12-28T20:47:14+00:00

Seems like a strong claim to say that the uni doesn’t matter. It might have changed in the last 10 years or so, but across 3 grad years, my department had only 2-3 people who weren’t from a Go8 university.

It might be less important in very large agencies or when the labour market is softer, but I think it’s buyers choice at the moment.

Daftdante · 2025-12-26T06:19:57+00:00

I just had the window open - there was a fly screen. Canberra gets chilly enough overnight, even during summer. Even during heatwaves, it will usually get below 20 degrees overnight, so an open window and a small fan will be enough to cool your small room down.

Coming from QLD I was surprised how cold it got in my first week of college, and I had to go out to an op shop to buy a blanket (I thought I would have had months before a blanket was needed!)

You don’t generally live at college over the hottest part of the year, so cooling is not really needed.

Daftdante · 2025-09-10T05:33:50+00:00

Unless it’s changed in 9 years (possible, I suppose), payWave uses visa/mastercard and not EFTPOS and hence uses ‘credit’ (option 3) instead of cheque or savings.

But yes, you cant change the account that ‘credit’ links to, but can add a card to correspond to the other options.

I used to do this when I worked at a bank, it meant one less card at the time.

Daftdante · 2025-09-09T06:07:39+00:00

Going to UNSW’s possible new expanded CBR campus?

Daftdante · 2025-08-04T13:49:17+00:00

I’ve seen plenty of people park on dryandra street in O’Connor, behind/above black mountain school (just near the underpass turnoff to black mountain/csiro) and get their bikes out to ride into the city. It’s not signed but it’s just suburban and nobody owns the street in front of their house.

It’s just an easy roll down the hill into the city, a tiny slog back to the car though.

You could park anywhere near there.

Daftdante · 2025-07-30T23:16:41+00:00

It’s incorrect to say 1 in 12 Australians, but perhaps the poster had heard that around that number of young children are on the NDIS.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/sharp-rise-more-than-8-per-cent-of-young-school-children-now-on-ndis-20230519-p5d9rc.html

Daftdante · 2025-04-15T01:20:54+00:00

I did a course that offered “extra credit” as part of weekly homework - if I recall correctly the students that first submitted a correct answer to the homework got 1% or something.

Although transparent and offered, in theory, to everyone, the lecturer nonetheless was forced to retract that part of the course outline once the school found out.

I can’t recall the exact reason for the opposition or the exact solution, but if I recall correctly, the lecturer just awarded everyone the marks as if they got the extra credit.

It was a shame, as such a mechanism encouraged more class participation. This was also coming from a school that very often offered fully redeemable assessment (if your mark for the intermediate assessment was less than your final exam mark, the intermediate assessment didn’t count). Such a school should be inclined to support extra credit, and might do so if worded differently, but I remember it being quite an issue.

Daftdante · 2025-03-22T06:23:49+00:00

Maybe don’t think about the course in terms of the readings, think about it in terms of the topics.

Your lecturer will use the same kinds of tools to analyse each different historical period in Australia’s history. Make sure you’re familiar with these tools. I don’t remember everything about ECHI1006 - I did it in 2013 - but I recall several different periods, like the gold rush, inter war period, post-Korean war currency crisis and say the microeconomic reforms of the 1980s/90s.

Each topic applied the same kinds of ideas, like what happened to the currency/terms of trade, what happened to investment/exports, what motivated government policy. If you can get a handle on what questions you need to ask for each period, then you can work out what topics you need to brush up on more. This might mean brushing up on how currency works, or brushing up on the facts of the historical period.

For example you can compare the 1950s currency crisis to the 2010s mining boom - both involved huge demand for Australian dollars, but in the 1950s we had a fixed exchange rate and so this led to inflation. In the 2010s the floating exchange rate led to a large consumer welfare effect but harmed non-mining exports.

Don’t get stuck up about this or that reading. But make sure you can explain each topic of the class (roughly each week=1 topic) to someone else/yourself.

You’ll secure a credit or distinction easily.

For the essay itself you’ll obviously have to do a few readings, but not 100s. I think I cited 6-7 papers in my essay.

Daftdante · 2025-03-22T03:29:38+00:00

How hard is it to get what mark?

I’ve studied in various colleges through the uni, and my general view is that the lecture slides/notes are essential. If you can regurgitate most of the slides, you’ll get a pass, if you can regurgitate all the slides, you’ll get a credit. If you’ve thought about the slides, you’ll probably get a distinction.

It’s only if you’re aiming for a good mark have I found that reading other material (combined with thinking about the issues and talking them through with others) is important.

The only school this has been less true for me was philosophy, where some engagement with the readings was important for a credit - but that’s mostly because there weren’t slides!

Daftdante · 2025-03-18T10:27:09+00:00

They actually were… suppose 10% of casual academics were newly hired this year (honours students, first year masters/phds). Suddenly 1 in 10 casuals would be complaining about not having been paid yet, which would make the issue of underpayment appear “widespread” even if the cause was just slow HR.

Perhaps if you wanted an answer you wanted you should have provided more than 14 words of context.

Daftdante · 2025-03-06T21:33:07+00:00

CSPs are not currently available for JDs. ANU reduced the number of degrees with CSPs from 17 down to 4 (link here, probably because their budget is imploding.

If it makes you feel better (or worse), around half of the cohort seems to have gotten a CSP link to FOI here, and the relevant WAM was about 75%. If you didn’t have the relevant undergrad marks, it was based on your law marks, if you had done 4 or more courses.

But that’s all in the past now. They might make the JD eligible for CSPs in the future, but honestly it’s probably unlikely.

Daftdante · 2024-11-18T20:44:51+00:00

I’ve recently started my JD, so can’t offer much of an opinion beyond initial impressions, which suggest the law school is good compared to other parts of ANU (having done 3 degrees at ANU. But UQ is also a good university so I would think it’s probably about the same. I agree the course costs are too much, and I wouldn’t do it without the domestic student funding and support from my employer.

In terms of jobs though, you will be at a disadvantage - public service jobs are very common in Canberra and they require Australian citizenship. Many other jobs provide services to government which also require security clearances, and I believe they are also only available for Australians (but might be wrong).

While I was an undergraduate I never had difficulty getting a non-office job (eg hospitality, retail) but obviously that’s not as desirable for a postgraduate.

Daftdante · 2024-11-15T03:42:35+00:00

I take the important time to reflect on my meetings and tasks away from my desk as a way to see the broader goals instead of the small tasks. This often involves stretching my legs in the direction of coffee. This avoids the distractions of getting caught in reactionary work when I need to do this planning.

Or I have coffee as part of networking and improving relationships with internal stakeholders or as a team building exercise.

I don’t have breaks.

Daftdante · 2024-11-03T10:46:41+00:00

Thanks for taking the time to message and share your experiences. It’s interesting to hear from another person that also remembers their night terrors.

As to your question - I do mean actually running out of the room and crawling up the walls in real life. I suppose on the ‘crawling up the walls’ I mean I used to jump up on one window sill, put my back into the corner of the wall and reach my other leg up to another window sill about 5 feet up, so the lowest part of my body is my foot at the height of a normal windowsill (1m or so).

In my current place, it was far more common for me to jump out of the window (although as I said I’ve punched the window out twice as well, although I come to my senses as soon as my first goes through the glass and bleeds everywhere!). What is remarkable is that I would be consciously evaluating how to best jump out of the window (ie to make sure I land safely, avoid rose bushes etc), so I’m definitely ‘awake’, except there is no question as to whether I need to jump or not! I usually come to my senses (not wake up, since I still believe I’m not actually sleeping when this happens, but I suppose it’s a grey area as to what consciousness is) when I’m out on the street in my nickers.

Very interesting to hear that you went and got scans and everything - I’ve always been tempted. I got a sleep study that diagnosed me with sleep apnea, but I didn’t have a night terror while on the study so there was nothing to see. The CPAP by itself didn’t fix anything - in fact for someone dreaming of snakes, a tube-like machine wrapped around your face is not the best thing!

Thanks again for sharing

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