My two cents

The Australians, I have to confess, could teach us Canadians a thing or two when it comes to money.

First of all, they have rather ingeniously made the choice to include the GST right into all prices that you see. Your BLT sandwich says $13 on the menu? Then $13 is what you'll pay.

Bananas at the grocery store going for $3/kilogram? Then $3 it is. No more, no less.

A night at the hostel comes to $26.50? Then all you have to do is hand over the cash.

It takes all that irritating guesswork out of the process that we're so familiar with in Canada. There is no need for mental calculations. No reason to stand in line and think, "$149 plus 6% GST, oh and 5% PST . . . should make it roughly . . . " and then be totally wrong when you get to the till anyway. Math was never my strongest subject in school so I greatly appreciate the help.

Taxes aren't the only area of Australian innovation. They have also done away with the penny! That's right, no jingling copper coins rolling around uselessly in your pocket or piling up in the piggy bank. This means that you'll never pay $1.99 for anything in stores. Let's just make that $2 instead. If your bill total comes to say, $16.22 for groceries, then you just round it down to an even $16.20.

It's nice and straightforward. Kind of like Australians themselves. And I like that.

On the other hand, there is one area of Australian coin-dom that I find a bit puzzling, and that's the sizes of the coins themselves.

To begin with, the 50 cent piece is gigantic. We're talking huge here. And it's got like 13 sides to it, like a crazy stop sign.

Next down the food chain is the 20 cent piece, about the size of a Canadian or American quarter. Nothing wrong with that.

The 10 cent piece is somewhere between the size of a dime and a quarter. Again, not a trouble. Lastly, the 5 cent piece is the smallest, more like the size of a penny back home.

Here's where things get confusing: the Australians also have $1 and $2 coins. For some reason, I can't quite figure out why, the $1 coin is larger than the $2 coin, which is almost exactly the same size as the 5 cent coin, except that it is gold instead of silver.

This has meant I've almost paid as much as $1.95 too much a couple of times recently when I mistook a $2 coin for a 5 center.

Well, at least they don't call their coins "loonies" and "toonies." I mean really. That's just lame.