Rad wrote on Feb 8^th, 2009 at 10:52pm:

Smell no, but New Zealand (primarily in the south) has been having orange sunsets due to the pall of smoke being blown across the Tasman (as also happened quite memorably when the peat fires were raging in Indonesia not that long ago).

Rad wrote on Feb 8^th, 2009 at 10:52pm:

This isn't the first major firestorm to have devastated Australian urban areas (the most recent being the fires of 2003 which swept through a large part of Canberra), although this is probably the worst. The unbelievable part is the fact many fires appear to have been deliberately lit, including (according to some reports) behind firebreaks.

There's a lot more from Australian news outlets like The Age and Channel 9.

I read/saw this article this morning: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7878412.stm

Were you born-n-raised down under? Or did you move there?

I heard it's not easy to migrate there without possessing some special/needed professional skill (brain-surgery, etc). Never heard anybody say they didn't love Australia.

Rad wrote on Feb 9^th, 2009 at 10:03am:

That's more recent; historically, Australia was always pretty open to immigration. Current policies are set in large measure to deal with flows of refugees ("boat people", originally in the 1970's refugees from Vietnam, continue to come from various places) and economic migrants from over south-east asia, most of whom transit through Indonesia.

And actually, the range of skills considered urgently needed (at least down to last year) included pretty much anything. Plumbers, builders, you name it. Australia generally doesn't train enough skilled workers of any kind, and in some industries the shortfall is immense, although it's made up for somewhat by a large flow of - mostly younger, freshly trained - skilled migrants from New Zealand, which itself has been suffering a severe shortage of skilled workers and a critically tight labour market.

This is the government's list of major skills shortages and there's a larger list for employer-nominated immigration.

So, it's actually not that hard to emigrate to Australia, especially if you come from an English-speaking country and especially an OECD one (so your qualifications will be recognised without any fuss). The points-based assessment is similar to that in New Zealand and that by itself means that (I'd say, anyway) it's easier to enter Australia as a skilled worker than the United States.