Driving to Perth Zoo this morning, we were listening to MIX 94.5 FM Radio Station, which is pretty much as you would expect and much the same as many pop stations in the UK.  Whilst the music is patchy, the station clearly expects its listeners to take an interest in matters financial.  At the end of a news bulletin came a piece of the current state of the Australian stock market and the benefits of overseas diversification.  It is hard to imagine a similar station doing the same in the UK, I would expect the audience to be almost universally uninterested.

Now, this hardly constitutes exhaustive research allowing us to conclude that Australians are more sophisticated than their British counterparts when it comes to investing but it does form part of a consistent picture, as I have commentated before.  Australia is very different to the UK in many ways, not all of which are better, but they run a budget surplus and seem to take pension funding very seriously as a nation.

 Of course, it helps to be sitting on top of a disproportionately high amount of the world’s natural resources but they do seem determined to make the most of their good fortune.