Brisbane isn't quite as painful, and there's plenty of work in SEQ with excellent salaries. Though I'm biased: I love it here!
Aside from that, and this isn't Australia specific, but the acceptance of WFH over the last year across industries is quite exciting, with regards to reducing CoL.
Biggest problem with Brisbane is due to being a smaller market, there is there a fewer jobs available for less popular languages. Python & Go are finally seeing decent growth, but proportionally local roles are much more focused on JS, Java, C# & PHP.
For sure, though one perhaps small saving grace is in my experience the companies that are using those less popular languages were already accepting of remote work, which has meant I get the best of both worlds. That and I usually end up introducing Nim to whatever company I'm working at anyway ;) [I'm only partly joking]
