Hi Gareth, just stumbled across your post, im a geordie
tiler living in sydney now been here 4 years, there is tons of work here. The aussies do things abit different here, 1st of all you will need to be able to screed floors with sand & cement as all the bathroom, toilet floors have floor wastes in so you can hose out or if there is a flood.Also buy law every bathroom has to be waterproofed and tanked out, which by the way is a canny earner alone. Also there is alot more tiling outside here so all the outside areas need to be screeded aswell ( sand cement) so that the water can run away, bcause when it rains here its like a tropical downpour, and the last thing the customer wants is puddles sitting on there tile.
If you want to go self employed you will need to get a tiling licence from the department of fair trading. At the moment my rates are 60bucks m2, 80m2 porcelin, 500 slashback, 30 m2 for screeding floors, 500 waterproof bathroom, and generally about 500 aday for my day rate. Hope this has been some help for you, if need to any thing else dont hesitate to ask. cheers mate.
carl