Want to play country music on your radio station? Woah there, podner. There's already a country station in this town, and if you play country music, too, there won't be enough advertising money to go around. So the incumbent stays, and the idea of competition allowing the better station to survive can go pound sand.
It annoyed me to no end when I lived there but the locals didn't seem to worry.
It seemed like everything you might want to buy that had a brand attached to it was like 20-40% more expensive in Australia, for no particular reason. (Apple products, Intel CPUs and commodities like RAM, SSD and GPU pricing were exempt - those have pretty straight-forward global pricing.)
But.. say, random things like B&H Speakers? Or whatever else. Probably 40% more! Etc. So many things were so much more expensive in Australia for seemingly no particular reason. Freight costs didn't make up for all of that cost disparity - there was something else at play.
I almost left the day job I was sent to do in Melbourne to work on building a price search engine for the Australian market. I couldn't really find anything that was useful/structured enough back then (2012).
I'm curious, has this opportunity been filled since then?
As a Canadian living in Australia since 2011, I have to disagree. Politically Canada is much more of a protectionist nanny state than Australia.
For mobile service in particular (i.e., the topic of this dicussion), Australia is much more competitive than Canada despite also being a very large, sparsely populated country. I pay $25/month for unlimited calls and 18 GB of 4G data (https://www.aldimobile.com.au/plans/value-packs/). Unlike Canada, Australia allows strong, foreign competitors to provide mobile service (e.g., Vodafone and Optus).
Other ways in which Australia is less protectionist than Canada: - parallel private healthcare system - parallel private education system (although not at university level) - buy alcohol anywhere, not just at government owned stores - no dairy and poultry "supply management" - foreign owned supermarkets (e.g., Aldi)
Australia is far from perfect (e.g., the natural gas cartel is far too powerful) but on the whole there's far less government interference that protects cozy domestic oligopolies compared Canada.
I think where Australia suffers is in things like imported goods (often there's an extra 20-40% markup beyond the maybe 5% higher shipping cost. Or sometimes it's shipped directly from China, but still way more expensive. I think many brand owners have just decided Australia will be able to tolerate a higher cost than the rest of the world.
Oh yeah, crazy that somewhere in the middle of nowhere is more expensive than one that is not.
I tried living there and that sheen quickly fades. Especially after living in a US city. It's a joke if you think anyone in the world is even attempting to try to imitate Quebec. Montreal is nice because of what is left from the past greatness in the pre 1970s and because of its decline it's now a dirt cheap urban playground with economy-class hipster NYC lite for the unemployed artists whose parents can afford paying their $400/m shared living rent.
Otherwise the economy is incredibly behind the times and incredibly lucky for the political influence it's established over the years being the special child who gets preferential treatment despite having none of the excuses the have-not east coast provinces have, despite receiving the most aid of all of the provinces.
There's a very good reason MTL rents are 20x cheaper than NYC despite the large stock of high quality old buildings. And it has nothing to do with what they’ve achieved recently.