WHETHER it’s paying $4.30 for a flat white or $15 for 30 minutes’ parking, Australians are used to being ripped off from the minute they leave the house.

Sometimes even before. News.com.au reader Julian was visited by an Electrolux technician before work recently, who spent all of 10 minutes fixing his busted washing machine.

The total bill came to $250.20.

Of that, $143 was for the busted part itself, and $134 was for ‘labour’ — the dreaded ‘call-out fee’. In other words, between 8:04am and 8:14am, the technician earned $13.40 a minute, or just over 22 cents a second.

Continuing that theme, here are news.com.au’s picks for the biggest Aussie rip-offs:

STREET PARKING

According to a 2014 study by NRMA, Sydney motorists are slugged with some of the highest short-term parking fees in the world despite fewer people fighting for a spot than in most major US cities.

The report, which compared Sydney to similar-sized cities, found Sydney parking was 97 per cent more expensive that the second-closest city, Boston, and 179 per cent more expensive than Seattle.

The report found there were 52,515 car park spaces in Sydney but 251,453 employees. The median daily parking rate for Sydney is $74 compared to $28.74 in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, Brisbane residents actually have it even worse. According to a study conducted by RACQ, for 30 minutes’ off-road parking, motorists in the Queensland capital pay $15.03, compared with $13.56 in Sydney and $10.71 in Melbourne. That goes up to $27.63 for one hour in Brisbane, $27.60 in Sydney and $19.47 in Melbourne.

Let’s be honest: your best bet as with most of these things is just to not bother. Leave the car at home and take public transport. Or move to the US.

BREAKFAST ‘EXTRAS’

You know how it is. Breakfast at a trendy cafe may start off as a reasonable $12 for eggs on toast, but of course you’ll want to add a few extras. Bacon? That’ll be $5. Avocado? $4. Baked beans? Another $4. Before you know it you’re paying more for the extras the meal itself.

Given an individual avocado at the supermarket costs around $2, and the average side of avocado on a breakfast plate amounts to roughly one quarter of an avocado, by our calculations that works out to about a 700 per cent mark-up.

FOREIGN CURRENCY TRANSFER

For ordinary people, transferring money abroad is effectively a giant scam from beginning to end. You’ll get charged a ‘sending’ fee on one end, a ‘receiving’ fee on the other — usually between $30-$50 a pop — and generally terrible exchange rates.

Banks have long had a captive audience so have been able to effectively charge whatever they want. With non-bank players like OzForex, CurrencyFair and WorldFirst, consumers can send money for a fraction of the cost, and CurrencyFair’s peer-to-peer marketplace model means you can sometimes get better exchange rates than the banks themselves.

EFTPOS SURCHARGES

Unlike credit cards surcharges, which the Reserve Bank has limited to the “reasonable cost of acceptance”, many stores continue to enforce minimum purchase limits for Eftpos transactions, while others charge a surcharge on all Eftpos transactions.

Generally it’s small businesses who are the culprits here, who claim they’re simply passing on the cost of processing the transaction through the merchant terminal. Rules for minimum purchases and surcharges vary as they are set by the financial institution. As always, though, if you don’t like it, either pay cash or shop somewhere else.

AIRPORT PARKING

Arguably even worse than street parking in Australia is its sinister uncle, airport parking. Again, Aussie travellers are stung with some of the most expensive parking fees in the world at our airports.

Sydney Airport, for example, made just shy of $140 million in revenue from its parking operations in 2014, up from $132.3 million in 2013 and $119 million in 2012.

That’s thanks to glorious scams like domestic pick-up. Sydney Airport no longer allows curb-side domestic pick-up, instead funnelling drivers into the ‘Express Pick-up’ parking area, where you’re hit with $10+ in fees if you stay longer than 10 minutes.

Why? Because they can, that’s why. Long-term parking is also a joke. In 2011, news.com.au crunched the numbers to discover weekend parking fees at major Australian airports can end up being nearly double the cost of a return domestic airfare.

If you’re planning a trip and absolutely have to drive, you’re often better off investigating some of the third-party parking operators near the airport, most of which will offer better rates and shuttle services. Need a lift home? Tell your loved one to arrive well after your flight landing time, or bite the bullet and catch the train.

THE MOVIES

Movie tickets in Australia have been flirting with the $20 mark for some time now. Depending on how much you feel like splashing out, you can find yourself paying nearly $40. Last year, Village Roadshow co-executive chairman Graham Burke defended Australia’s high ticket prices, blaming our high wages and the rise of illegal downloading.

Data from Screen Australia shows the average ticket price rose by 12 per cent over the five years to 2014 to reach $13.68, with the top price for a ‘standard ticket’ at $27.

There’s clearly something skewing those statistics, because a single ticket to see the latest Hunger Games film in muddy, migraine-inducing 3D will set you back $23.50 at Event Cinemas and $16 at Hoyts. Bizarrely, both chains make you purchase the 3D glasses separately for $1 a pop, which would seem to imply that they are optional when viewing 3D films.

Once you’ve mortgaged your house on the tickets, of course you’ll need to buy the mandatory popcorn, Maltesers and Frozen Coke. How much of a rip-off is cinema food? This gem on the Hoyts website says it all: “As our prices regularly change to make way for new promotional combos, we rely on our crew members to readily share this information with our guests when requested.”

STAMP DUTY

This is the big one. Stamp duty on property purchases is widely regarded as one of Australia’s worst taxes. According to the Property Council of Australia, stamp duty costs have increased by nearly 800 per cent over the past 20 years, well out of line with CPI.

On a $501,110 home, Australians will pay an average of $18,565 in stamp duty, Northern Territory residents paying the highest at $24,018. There is wide community support for abolishing the “runaway cash grab”, as the Property Council describes it, with either a higher GST or a uniform land tax.

“Treasury’s own modelling shows that for every extra dollar of stamp duty raised it has a 73 per cent impact on the Australian economy,” Property Council of Australia chief executive Ken Morrison told the ABC earlier this year.

“So this is the worst of taxes. It’s a tax which is spiralling out of control; it’s a tax which harms affordability; and a tax which is also very bad for the economy.”

frank.chung@news.com.au