An international panel of lifestyle experts has compared 100 of the world's major cities. Emerging top of the pile for live-ability is Vienna in Austria. And coming in a distant last is Perth in Western Australia, which is dubbed "The Miserable City".
Panel spokesperson Brenda Shapelybotham explained. "We examined lifestyles in all the cities using nine criteria. Perth came last in every category." Shapelybotham listed the categories:
1. Things to do - the highlight of Perth is a trip to Ratsarse Island, 20 kilometres offshore from Perth. The panel visited Ratsarse and confirmed it's full of giant rats, drunken bogan Aussies, and beaches that look the same as those in Perth, except they're crowded and littered with discarded beer bottles and condoms.
2. Friendliness - Perth recorded the only negative score of any city. Not one person returned a single panel member's smile and 5 panel members were assaulted, 2 seriously, for daring to smile at locals.
3. Vista - apart from Kings Park, a massive 100-foot-high mound of kangaroo dung in the city centre, Perth is completely flat. In fact the whole of Western Australia, is basically a bland, flat, dirty brown desert landscape with the odd scrub tree, and inhabited by drunken indigenous people and a lot of deadly animals.
4. Safety - Three panel members were hospitalised during their 5 day stay. One was bitten by a spider, another lost a foot to a shark while swimming on a metro beach, and another was clubbed and tasered by a local police officer who she asked for directions.
5. Travel opportunities - Perth scored even lower than its Friendliness score. Perth is perfectly situated at the wrong side of Australia to be anywhere near anything else in Australia. At the same time it's so far from anything else in the world nobody ever goes overseas because it's unaffordable. Its location is referred to as the "arse-end" and is also responsible for the very low variation in the Perth gene pool.
6. Culture - Perth peoples' idea of culture is watching a Big Mac rot and get fly blown on the barbecue table on a hot summer afternoon. The panel found no other evidence of culture.
7. Climate - Perth only has 2 seasons. Fucking hot, and damp, cold. Houses in Perth are built the British way (but using building codes from 1952) and so everyone freezes their butts off for the six month winter, then fries and roasts through the 50C degrees in the shade hell they call summer, when it's too hot to venture out before 2am.
8. Career opportunities - Shapelybotham could hardly contain her amusement. "If you want to be a sewage worker, Big Mac Dispenser, or work in a god-forsaken stinking hot desert minesite, Perth's the place for you. Say no more."
9. Affordability - while Perth has become more affordable to live in than the big east coast cities, you can expect to pay eight dollars for a coffee and twenty for a pint. Given the minimum wage is twelve bucks an hour, more and more people are choosing to live with their parents until they, themselves, are in their mid-fifties.
Shapelybotham summed Perth up as "The ultimate miserable city". Latest figures from the Australian government indicate people are voting with their feet. In 2017, 500,000 people left Perth for the Ukraine, Venezuela and the Republic of the Congo. Most were Poms.
