After returning to Melbourne, Australia after living in the States for 5 years I was astonished by the high cost of living in Australia. This was even more surprising because Melbourne has for years been considered one of the world's most liveable cities by the Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Liveability Survey. In the style of an old boxing poster, I compared the price of various lifestyle items using the minimum wage as a comparison. This is highly simplified and does not take into consideration factors such as taxes, size of population (big market versus small market etc). None the less I was very surprised by the results. The data would also look very different if I based it on middle income salaries and not the minimum wage.