So, how has it worked out over the last year? Well, the number of telemarketing calls we get has dropped from over 1 a week to maybe 2 a month, so that’s a definite improvement. I had one very persistent debt collection agency calling me repeatedly every 2 days after I was on the register, but after making a complaint on the Do Not Call Register website, they stopped. (Turned out they thought I was somebody else. Nice bit of research there.) We also had a call from a mortgage company last month, but again, a quick complaint seems to have sorted that one out. (Apparently many people had complained about the same company. I hope they get hit with a nice big fine.)

It’s for a good cause – honest

The biggest problem, though, has been with charities. For some inexplicable reason, charities were made exempt when the Do Not Call Register Act was introduced. Charities are all to eager to exploit this loophole, too – we get more charities calling us now than ever before.

I don’t understand the logic here. I’m no Scrooge when it comes to charitable giving, but what gives a charity the right to call me, when I have explicitly stated that I do not want to receive telemarketing calls? When a telemarketer calls me at 6PM and wakes my sick baby who’s just got off to sleep, I don’t care whether they’re selling me mortgages or donations to one-armed homeless Martians, they will get an earful from me. (Apparently though they’re providing a service to the community by waking my sick baby.) Telling them not to call me again rarely works either.

Some people just won’t take ‘no’ for an answer

The other problem is with every Aussie’s favourite: Telstra. Because we’re unlucky enough to be a Telstra customer (we have a phone with them), this apparently means they’re allowed to badger us day and night, trying to get us to buy their mobile and broadband services. (The exact wording from the ACMA site is: “(consent) may be inferred by the person making the telemarketing call if there is an existing business relationship with the company making the call”.)

So even though I will never, ever, buy anything that Telstra tries to sell me over the phone – which means they are wasting both their time and mine by calling me – they are still allowed to harass me whenever they feel like it, because there is an “existing business relationship”. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told Telstra to stop calling me.

Other problems

There’s also been a bit of a problem with scammers charging unsuspecting folks to add their numbers to the register (despite it being free and easy to do it yourself). We haven’t had any scammers contacting us, thankfully.

Another issue was with the fact that I run a business from home. Again, for some bizarre reason, businesses aren’t allowed on the register – obviously the government considers it a good thing that telemarketers can waste business people’s valuable time to sell them life insurance. I got a letter to this end from the ACMA, saying that they wanted to remove my number from the register because they found it listed on my business website. However, after pointing out to them that the phone is pretty much exclusively used for personal calls, they were happy and our number got reinstated.

Despite the downsides and loopholes, though, I’d call the Do Not Call Register a definite success – but with lots of room for improvement. Telemarketing seems to be much more rife here in Australia than it was back in the UK, so anything that can be done to curb it is a good thing.

By the way, if you’re sick of charities calling you even though you’re on the register, the Choice website has mounted a campaign to get the charity exemption removed. The even have a handy letter that you can print out and send off the appropriate government official. Nice.

So what gives? According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), petrol prices are subject to all sorts of factors, including international wholesale prices and movements in the exchange rate. But do petrol stations really have to change their prices every single day? Just think of the wasted time and effort changing all those signs each morning! (Well it keeps the petrol station owners fit, I guess.) In fact, sometimes they change prices several times a day! Talk about a lottery.

Anyway, for the record it appears the best time to buy fuel in Sydney is on a Tuesday, and the worst day of the week is Thursday. So now you know.

She’s not vegetarian for any moral “think of the furry-wurry animals” reason – she just hates the taste (and texture) of meat. The thought of eating meat or its various products makes her sick. So it’s not like she can have chicken “just this once”. It’s no meat, or no food at all.

Trouble is, the Aussie definition of “vegetarian” seems to be “pretends not to like meat, but likes it really”. Cat’s had this conversation in more than one restaurant:

“Here’s our menu, madam.”

“I’m vegetarian. What dishes can you offer for me?”

“You’re vegetarian? Do you eat chicken and fish?”

“Er, no. I’m vegetarian.”

You wouldn’t have thought it a hard concept to grasp.

Quite often we’ll go out for a meal on holiday, to find that only one restaurant in town has anything veggie on the menu. And that will be “stir-fried vegetables” (which Cat is understandably sick of by now). Often restaurants will have a veggie entrée, then the mains will all be meat. (As if vegetarians somehow have smaller stomachs or something.)

It’s pretty short-sighted really. If a group of five people go out for a meal, and one of them’s vegetarian, then these restaurants are going to lose not one customer, but five.

Occasionally we’ll encounter the odd enlightened food establishment that not only has – shock horror – a choice of veggie mains, but even deigns to label them as such with a V symbol. Such places understandably get repeat visits from us. And of course, vegetarian restaurants like Emilia’s – which I’ve banged on about before – are gold dust to Cat. Shame they’re as rare as rocking horse shit in this country.

Takeaway trauma

Takeaway food presents its own challenges. Chips, while hardly exciting, are at least nearly always available, but the chances are they’ve been fried in lard. And the Aussies have another surprise up their sleeve for vegetarians. We noticed that often the chips we bought had a funny yellow tinge to them, and tasted kind of sweet. We asked one chip shop why this was:

“Oh, that’s chicken salt.”

“Excuse me?”

“Chicken salt. It’s salt, with bits of chicken in.”

“You’ve got to be kidding us!”

“No really, it’s pretty common here. Aussies love it!”

Say no more.

Supermarket sheep

Food shopping is hard work too. Whereas in the UK practically everything that doesn’t contain dead animal bits – and that’s most things – has a big green V symbol on the packet, here such a thing is a rarity. A lot of stuff is dead-animal-product free, but the manufacturers don’t see the need to label it as such. (”Not worth the effort for the three vegetarians in Australia,” you can almost hear them saying.)

So shopping trips frequently involve tedious scanning of lengthy ingredient lists, trying to work out if they’ve used gelatin or vegetable gum, or what type of rennet has been used in a cheese component. It’s like stepping back in time to the UK in the seventies.

To make matters worse, food manufacturers shoehorn dead things into practically any foodstuff they can get away with. Pumpkin soup? Contains chicken stock. Cheese? Often uses calf rennet. Biscuits? The cheaper ones contain lard. Yogurt? Ice-cream? Double cream, even? Laced with gelatin. Once we bought some bread and noticed a fishy smell when we toasted it. Sure enough – it contained fish oil. Fish. In bread. Sometimes it’s enough to turn even my carnivorous stomach.

And while I’m ranting about food shopping: The veggie burgers, sausages and so on that they sell in supermarkets here are a joke. Nine times out of ten they’re manufactured as “meat alternatives” – because of course all vegetarians secretly want to eat meat. So they resemble meat in texture, which means Cat hates them. Not to mention the fact that they taste foul. Where are Linda McCartney’s veggie sausages when you need them? Birds Eye veggie quarter pounders and potato waffles? Tesco’s nut cutlets and Mexican bean burgers? Note to Aussie food manufacturers: there’s more to being vegetarian than eating fake-meat burgers and sausages made from soya beans.

To be fair, things have improved a lot even in the five years we’ve lived here. More and more restaurants have a choice of veggie options, and food labelling seems to be improving. Must be due to all these invading veggie Poms. Speaking of which – if you veggie lot back in Blighty think you have it easy, it looks like things are about to take a turn for the worse over there. Enjoy your Mars, Twix and Snickers while you can, you smug buggers.

UPDATE 21 MAY: Thanks to the thousands of vegetarians complaining to Mars (my wife included), they’ve done a U-turn and made Mars, Twix and Snickers vegetarian again. Such is the strength of the vegetarian movement in the UK. If Mars started adding animal rennet to snacks over here, I’d be surprised if anyone batted an eyelid.

For example, when we first arrived in Australia back in 2002 we wandered around Bondi, and promptly got lost. So we got our map book out. Within seconds we had locals coming up to us, asking if we were lost and needed a hand. There was a connection there immediately. It seems to happen all the time; whenever you need help, a friendly local pops out of nowhere. Total strangers think nothing of coming up to you and starting a conversation. That just doesn’t seem to happen in London.

Shop assistants are generally helpful, too. They’ll often come up and ask if you need a hand – not in a pushy Dixons salesperson kind of way, but in a genuinely interested way. (Cat still hates this – she prefers to do her shopping unassisted – but I quite like it.) Even while you’re handing over your money they’ll happily chat away with you, often mentioning what a good choice you’ve made. Sure, a lot of it is probably good sales training, but they seem quite genuine about it.

In fact, we’ve had a couple of shop assistants that were so helpful they didn’t even care about losing a sale. We went to one department store to buy a washing machine. The guy was wonderfully helpful and explained everything, even getting out the manual for us. Then he said, “Don’t buy it here, though, mate – it’s 50 bucks cheaper down the road!”

Now that’s helpful.

For one thing, electronics goods tend to be pricier here – presumably because of the cost of shipping stuff to this remote island. (I’m really hoping an amazon.com.au will open here soon, and create some decent competition on pricing.)

Even foodstuffs are often more expensive than in the UK. For example, Tesco in the UK sells pretty decent own-brand wholemeal sliced bread for around 55p, or AUD $1.35. That’s for an 800g loaf. Try finding an 800g wholemeal loaf in an Australian supermarket for under $3. Other basics such as potatoes and tomatoes are pricey here, though they fluctuate wildly according to season. (Not much chance of Tesco influencing prices here now, either.)

Then again, it’s not surprising food is expensive, seeing as the supermarkets import half their goods from the other side of the world. You’d have thought with Australia’s climate that the shelves would be packed with Australian olives, but 90% of them are from Greece or Spain. I have a Woolworths own-brand jar of strawberry jam in the fridge that was made in Poland.

I suspect a lot of this is down to the supermarkets; there’s not really much competition amongst supermarkets here, with Woolworths and Coles pretty much sewing up the “supermarket market”. If you shop in small local shops, such as bakers and greengrocers, you often get better quality food – I guess that’s a given – but they’re often cheaper than the supermarkets, and you get a bigger range too. The opposite of the UK, basically.

It also doesn’t help that the government happily slaps 10% GST – the equivalent of VAT – on anything considered a “luxury item” in a supermarket – and this includes things like coffee, biscuits, and toilet rolls.

To be fair, some things, such as milk and tins of beans, seem to be roughly the same price in both Australian and UK supermarkets, and of course the exchange rate has a big effect on these comparisons too. So maybe there’s not a lot in it overall.

However, books are ridiculously expensive – often up to double the price of books in the UK – and to add insult to injury that 10% GST applies to books too. Doesn’t the government want its citizens to read?! On the plus side, this makes second-hand bookstores very popular here.

Electricity has traditionally been relatively inexpensive – compared to the UK – but thanks to the major drought going on here at the moment, that looks set to change.

It must be said, though – compared to the UK, Australian public transport is a bargain. And the beer’s cheap too!

• Saying “Alright” to someone doesn’t mean “hello”, it means “are you OK?”. So you’ll get some strange looks if you go up to someone and say “Alright mate!”
• A “hotel” is sometimes an actual hotel, but more often than not, it’s a pub. (Aussies also use the word “pub” for the same thing, just to add to the confusion.)
• Manchester isn’t a city over here – it means bedding and linen. So don’t be surprised when you see shops selling Manchester.
• Woolworths isn’t a cut-price department store flogging music and pick & mix – it’s a supermarket like Tesco.
• Speaking of supermarkets, you can’t buy alcohol in supermarkets here. You have to go into the bottle shop, or “bottle-o” – otherwise known as an off-licence – next door and make a separate purchase. (Crazy, but them’s the rules.)
• Most banks charge you for the privilege of banking your money with them. The concept of “free banking” is relatively novel here, despite existing in the UK for over 20 years now. HSBC’s online accounts were some of the first to abolish charges, and other Aussie banks are slowly starting to follow suit.
• And speaking of banks, Aussies call a current account a “savings” account, just to confuse the foreigners. Sometimes they call them “check” accounts too, just for fun. When you pay via a bank card in a shop, you have to press either the “cheque” or the “savings” button, depending on your account type.
• 9/532 Sydney Street is the Aussie way of writing “Flat 9, 532 Sydney Street”. Except they don’t call them flats either – they call them units. (Not quite so romantic sounding, is it?)
• Contrary to appearances, “Sydney” isn’t, strictly speaking, the whole city, but just a small suburb in the middle. (Much like Kensington isn’t London.) So if you’re addressing a letter to someone in the central-ish Sydney suburb of Newtown, you must write “Newtown, NSW” on the envelope, not “Sydney, NSW”. Assuming you want your letter to get delivered of course.
• You’ll find that locals will call you a Pom quite a lot. This is quite normal and they’re not trying to be offensive.
• Automatic transmissions are much more common here. In fact, most cars are automatics. If you hire a car, you’ll probably be given an automatic by default. (Suits me – one less pedal to worry about.)
• In the UK, a B&B (bed & breakfast) is often cheaper than a hotel, and often consists of a mouldy old room in a ramshackle terrace house with a deaf host. In Australia, a B&B tends to be more of a luxury option when compared to a standard hotel or motel. (Although we have stayed in a couple of fairly grotty B&Bs here too.)

These are just off the top of my head. If you’re British then no doubt you will encounter (or have encountered) many more!