This is how well Australian pensioners are treated.

MrsDistinctlyMintyMonetarism - I did say 670 over 2 weeks is close to £250 per week - Unfortunately I know how strong the dollars is - DP is Australian and we visit frequently - it gets more expensive every time we go. I have noticed in the last few weeks the dollar has dropped slightly, I think at one piont it was 1.3 to the pound (when dd was born 6 years ago we got almost 3 dollars to the pound!)

I would love to visit Aus but the creatures put me off

is your dog ok?

MrsDMM, £10 a kilo for bananas?

how much do things like milk, bread, salad, potatoes cost?

Yup, much younger population - lots of immigration. Lots of jobs that are empty.

There are only 20 million people over here.

OTOH lots of venomous creatures. My poor dog has just had to have antivenom as he picked up a paralysis tick (potentially deadly).

Sadly Nancy the AU dollar is massively strong at the moment. So 670 dollars equates to about 400 pounds (roughly 1.5 dollars to the pound).

On the other hand you need to remember that stuff like food is correspondingly expensive. Bananas are $14 a kilo (over 10 pounds a kilo). Grapes are $15 a kilo.

We are in a nice but not extraordinary house and our rent is $900 a week.

Plus the strength of the dollar makes me worried for the Aussie economy anyway. When you have a whole system based on exporting natural resources which then require refining elsewhere there will come a point where it is uneconomic to extract it. Remember that there is still coal in Wales, it just costs too much to get it out of the ground.

Isn't the average age in Aus much lower than here anyway? Fewer pensioners relative to the rest of the population?

670au dollars a fortnight is about £250 per week, not much different to here is it? also agree with MrsDistinctlyMintyMonetarism - you have to factor in the lack of NHS/need for private health care, which is obviously greater need as you get older.

Erm, I'm in Australia right now. In fact it's 6.40am here in QLD.

The information from your friend is not the situation in this state.

There are frequent articles in the newspapers about how badly pensioners are managing over here in such a high inflation economy (well over 5% at the moment).

There is very little welfare state, a lot of the slack is picked up by charities. There is no NHS. It costs over $100 to visit the doctor (that's about 65pounds).

I'm looking forward to coming back to the UK. Of course it has problems, but there is no country in the world that is perfect - and that is the sad truth.

I love your insults Ivanhoe. I just wish you backed your assertions up with real facts, not wishy washy claptrap.

We spend what, £62billion a year on pensions. Another £7.5billion on pension credits and about £2 billion on winter fuel allowance. That's just over £70 billion per year.

We spend about £5billion on "international development", £2b on the FCO. The war in Libya has cost about £250m (but some estimates say up to £1b). Afghanistan is apparently about £4b a year. A rough total of let's round it up to £12 billion.

So even if we completely do away with all those items above, it still doesn't plug the budget deficit gap, so we've still no real extra money to give to our pensioners.

Let's for a moment assume though that there is political will to do away with the above, take the £12 billion and give the entire lot to the pensioners. And let's assume that no-one minds not a penny goes on education, NHS and other worthy public expenditure. And we're happy to keep borrowing cos we love our pensioners so much. Great, you can up pensions by roughly 17%.

Would that sort of increase be enough for you?

As for your comments on our economy versus EU & Australia, i think there are areas we could agree upon like I agree the UK tends to look very short term and that's a bad thing. But it doesn't change the fundamentals. And that is we cannot just magic money out of thin air to give to whatever cause you think is worthy enough this week. The government does not have a magic money tree under No10.

That's great. But like I said on my other thread. It's ok saying we should pay our pensioners more but what would you like to get that money from?

In Australia's case, I doubt they have such a dependency culture where we have stupid benefits like Tax Credits.

They also have a MUCH stronger economy than we have based mainly on their vast natural resources. Something we don't have.

So they have a tiny budget deficit and will be back in surplus come 2012/2013. Whereas the UK will be lucky to have a balanced budget by 2016.

Comparing Australian pensioners to UK is only fair if our economies/population was similar. They are nothing alike.