Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 10:39
You guys ARE like us. Forget the accent bit..... (wink wink)
AFAIK, Vehicle registration includes insurance (compulsory third party aka CTP) and is valid throughout Australia with the exception of the Northern Territory (NT) whereby their vehicles do not include CTP that covers outside of NT.
Registration is handled by each state (or each of the 2 Territories NT & ACT). Costs vary from state to state. In Melbourne/Victoria (which may be cheaper than Sydney/NSW), country rego is a bit cheaper than
Melbourne.
Also in Victoria, the unused component of CTP can be refunded, though I'm unsure if that is subject to a minimum (ie, no less than 6 months refunded).
Rego for a passenger car in
Melbourne is about $550-$600 per year (CTP is the same, but the "registration fee" itself varies with the vehicle type, size etc).
In Victoria, transferring a vehicle (eg - after a sale) required a roadworthy certificate (RWC). Only buy a vehicle with current RWC (valid for ~30 days).
Unregistered vehicles must be re-registered and that involves and RWC and usually an inspection by the RTA (the Authority).
Other states may not require that - especially those that have yearly RWC inspections.
Things may have changed to the above AFAIK's.
And I suspect Tasmania may be a cheaper place to register a vehicle.
Sydney's vehicles use to be more expensive than
Melbourne and have more rust due to saltier air. (Or was that from acid rain coming up from the acrid venting of Melburnians?)
Being Kanaks I don't have to explain our distances.
Sydney is just up the road from
Melbourne - 1 hour by air, 8-10 hours by road (~780km).
Tassie is just across the ditch or channel (Bass Straight) - a few hundred km of water that can be worse than Cape Hope & the North Sea. (Not to be confused with the Australian - New Zealand "ditch" - aka the Tasman sea.)
Phew! (Just in case like Europeans, you thought you'd walk or catch a taxi from
Sydney to Melb or Tassie etc.)
FYI - often the cheapest interstate travel is by extension of your international ticket. IE - save a day and hop straight to
Melbourne from
Sydney.
There is a ferry service that operates from Melb to Tassie (
Launceston) daily that is quite popular. (I think 1 morning and 1 overnight service; big ferries that take trucks etc, and do not sink. We no longer use the catamaran - I think James Bond blew that up thinking it belonged to expatriate Rupert Murdoch.)
BTW - carry ID on you in case Aussies think you are septics (Yanks) trying to get away as Canadians. Many Aussie's can't pick the accent, and those yanks are getting smarter (hard to believe eh?).
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Follow Up By: DavidDice - Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 12:06
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 12:06
I'm not sure I'd know what a Canadian accent is ;-)
Take Cape Breton for example -- I once inquired for directions at a service station, and after asking four times for clarification, finally politely said "Thank you" and walked away -- no wiser. Although he was speaking English, I found it a lot easier to understand with my very poor French in Quebec!! Certainly find most of my Australian aquaintances a lot easier to understand than that.
As for distances, yes, no problem understanding them. I guess in some ways Canada and Australia aren't too different, in that 90% of our
population lives within 100 km of the US border, and I think I read somewhere that Australia has a similar portion in approximately the same relation to the ocean. And we travel very long distances all the time without thinking much about it (my wife drives 200 km (return) to work every day).
The biggest difference is probably our weather. We really do have 4 seasons, and here in the central plains area it can go from +40 C in summer to -40 C in winter (and in winter it's not unheard of for it to go from +20C to -20C in one day).
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Follow Up By: ChipPunk - Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 12:37
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 12:37
LOL!! My mate and family took me from Quebec to Thunderbay. Yep - very similar. Except the landscape....
And I don't think many Aussies understand windscreen washer heating nor auto-start vehicles. Nor why you do NOT wash windscreens at -15C @100kph (unless you have good side window vision and some reference markers)!
And our kangaroos are smaller. Even our few wild buffalo are safer to hit.
But we do get black ice.
And Europeans seem amazed that we have more snow (area) than Switzerland (that's a foreign country about two hours by three LOL!).
But I think I prefer our coastline (politically speaking), though it does mean we have to plan & fund out own defense (lol & wink).
But in anticipation - Welcome. And Enjoy!
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