If you adjust for COL, it's not close. The U.S. dominates. AUS has very high minimum wages which drives up costs. Look at Steam games in AUD vs. USD.

AUS is interesting. Everyone lives in VERY large cities, they're very far from many places where vegetables are grown, they have had a HUGE mining boom (which means more money chasing fewer goods, and the cities are incredibly far from one another)

Add onto that the Parallel Import Tax (which prevents people from just importing it themselves), and you have an INCREDIBLY captive market, getting gouged on all corners. Sure the high minwages dive costs up, but the high minwages are needed for the high costs too that it takes to live there.

They're quite recently dropping lots of the items off the PIT list, and prices are going down. Imagine that, drop protectionist tariffs, and prices decrease.

You might want to consider some other comparator — I like the cost of a combo meal at Mcdonalds (The Economist uses the price of a Big Nac). In my experience, consumer electronics are cheaper in the US but good produce is cheaper in Australia.

When I was in Geelong bananas were $12/kg, and in Atlanta they were around $0.50/lb. Other produce seemed quite expensive, also.

Was this sometime after the Queensland flooding? Bananas from a major supermarket are now between $3 and $6 per kg depending on the kind, but it did spike for a period due to the flooding damaging crops I believe.

Yes, it was around that time.

Yeah that destroyed a very large portion of the banana farms in .au and the banana benders up in qld have lobbied well enough to restrict imports

It has almost nothing to do with the domestic IT product market and everything to do with demand. Australia has a very high demand for talented programmers at all levels. It really surprised me when I came back just how many companies are using node.js or Ruby on Rails. The steam games, etc, has more to do with regional pricing. So many products are more expensive in Australia for almost no reason other than that people will still pay for it.

I did not find there was high demand or high salaries for a programmer knowing Node & RoR in Australia 2 years ago. There were programming jobs, but they seemed to be mostly IT department style jobs. The job boards were dominated by recruiters and staffing firms so it was hard to figure out what the positions actually entailed.

It seemed like lower level tradesmen such as tilers made as much as programmers, and higher level tradesmen, like master electricians, made significantly more. All forms of tradesman seemed to be more in demand than programmers.

Perhaps things have changed significantly in the last 2 years?

I agree with this, although I live in one of the smaller Australian cities and cannot move for various reasons. I am desperately trying to find a reasonable programming job, but having quite a hard time. Pretty much all the jobs around here are IT department style, with long winded garble on job boards, and silly requirements about - just from memory, I've seen things like "must be familiar with at least one of C, C++, Java, XML" (Apparently XML is a general purpose language) or "Knowledge of C++ or Delphi required" (What these two have in common I'll never know). I'm sure such ads exist in other places as well, but there seem to be an unnervingly high proportion around here.

I'm not sure what it's like in Sydney or Melbourne, however. Perhaps it's better there...

I don't think you mean to suggest that working families should live in poverty (America, heck yeah!) so the leisure class can spend less on video games.

Video games is a metric that is easy to verify and familiar to this audience. Sub in a loaf of bread if it is more palatable to your sensibilities.

I disagree with the suggestion that the American minimum wage is in a better place because it is lower. Keeping working people poor so wealthier people can afford more things (whether they are things the likes of me understand like bread (...) or things "this audience" understands, like video games) is gross.

I suspect that you and the original commenter think extremely impoverished American children are an acceptable price to pay for cheap video games. Like I said: America. Heck yeah!