MONEY MATTERS

          Frequently Asked Questions

   How much money do we need to prepare?

           It depends on how much you want to spend on shopping because souvenirs and gifts are rather expensive. Apart from shopping, most of the expenditure is on transport, food and leisure trips. For transport, the fares are fairly the same as those in Hong Kong. There are some ways to save up your money during your stay. (SEE TRANSPORT) And if you are a big eater, you don’t need to worry a lot about money. You could enjoy western food at CHEAP price in Brisbane! However, the exact estimated amount of money to be exchanged varies with different people. NO WORRIES! Visa and master cards are widely accepted in Brisbane even at 7-eleven shops.

       What is Australian Currency like?

               Decimal currency is now represented by coins 5, 10, 20, 50 cents and $1 and $2 with polymer notes of $5, $10, $ 20, $50, and $100 reducing costs and preventing counterfeiting. Two funny things - for coins, except 5 cents, the smaller the size of the coin it is, the bigger the value it’s worth and you can bring along Australian notes to swim!

 Is it expensive to phone to Australia and back to Hong Kong?

                Australian telephone numbers are listed with a city code followed by a telephone number, for Brisbane, (07) is added before the number. But when someone calls from outside Australia, the caller has to drop the zero in the city code.

                  If you would like to make a phone call to Hong Kong, it would be better to buy an international calling card in Brisbane like “Chi Tel”. The minimum stored value is AU$10.00. For an international call to Hong Kong, it costs less than HK$0.50 per minute.

    How’s the living standard in Australia?

            Pretty high! Chips = about HK$8.00 and Bus service (15-minute trip) = about HK$10.00. SO you can see how high living standard is.