Moving to Australia was the best decision I ever made. Our healthcare system really works and we are happy to stop working to go surfing. No wonder we live longer…

When my daughters were six and three years old, we made the long journey of 16,000 kilometres from our home in Australia to visit their grandmother in Weston-super-Mare.

They had been promised donkey rides on the beach, a pier full of thrilling rides and fish and chips at Papas, a restaurant their English father had assured them would be a highlight of our visit.

It was 2007, the middle of summer, but it rained non-stop for a week. The donkeys were nowhere to be seen, the pier was charmless and the fish and chips were as soggy as the sand. But they didn’t care.

What made them so anxious and desperate to leave was the prevalence of mobility scooters. Propelled by the corpulent and irascible, they were both a threat and a symbol of a city that had clearly become God’s waiting room.

Angela Mollard says moving to Australia with her daughters 24 years ago was the best decision she ever made

After a decade in Britain marked by grey days and long commutes, Amanda and her family headed Down Under for a life of sunshine, mangoes and year-round salads

Their grandmother, my ex-mother-in-law, is long gone, but every now and then, mostly for my own amusement, I still check the weather app on my phone to compare the forecast for Weston-super-Mare with that for Manly in Sydney, where we live.

Next Wednesday WSM is forecasting a cloudy day with a high of 18C. Manly looks set to have hours of uninterrupted sunshine with a high of 22C. The difference? You are in the middle of summer while we are in the middle of winter.

When I moved to Australia 24 years ago, pregnant with my eldest daughter Eliza, who is now 23, it was the best decision I ever made.

My ex-husband and I moved in 2000 because we felt there was a better quality of life for the children there.

When I was pregnant in London I visited a friend with young children and the whole time we were there they watched DVDs. I had grown up barefoot and on beaches in New Zealand; I wanted that for my own children.

I wake up at 6am to do Sunrise HIIT or a Pilates class on the beach

As research shows this week, not only am I enjoying a healthier life, I’m also likely to live longer. Australians live two years longer than their peers in the UK, and almost five years longer than those in America, according to a study published in the journal BMJ Open – which found we also beat Canada, Ireland and my birthplace New Zealand in life expectancy.

It’s not hard to understand why.

I first moved to the UK in 1992, like many young New Zealanders looking for a working adventure abroad.

But my decade there was marked by grey days, long commutes, constant coat management and a diet of under-chilled wine, crisps and ready meals. By contrast, life here is sunshine, mangoes, year-round salads and the smell of frangipani.

I wake up at 6am to do Sunrise HIIT or a Pilates class on the beach, followed by a quick swim and an AU$4.85 coffee – just £2.50 – ordered via an app on my phone. If I have to go into the city for work, I take the ferry. Dolphins are our constant travelling companions.

If I’m honest, it was British men who first lured me to your country. They made me laugh. But as you get older and health becomes your new benchmark, you don’t want a guy who looks like he’s been carved out of pork pie and salad dressing.

By the way, you’ll struggle to find those foods here. You’ll need steak, lentils, vegetables and kombucha if you want a body like Australian stars Chris Hemsworth, Hugh Jackman or Margot Robbie. And many of us want that because public health campaigns starting in schools have outlined the benefits.

In my Saturday morning swim team, half of which are enthusiastic British expats who like to race each other outdoors in the middle of winter, the talk is not so much about hangovers as about glucose meters, intermittent fasting and the route for the next day’s three-hour bike ride.

Even our politicians are setting a good example of health. Former Prime Minister John Howard walked around the parliamentary triangle every morning (he covered more than 20,000km in his 11 years in power), our current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese lost 15kg by giving up alcohol and installing a treadmill in his Canberra office, while Finance Minister Jim Chalmers went for a run at 4am before presenting the national budget in May.

Mobility scooters in Weston-super-Mare were both a threat and a symbol of a town that had clearly become God’s waiting room

Mamils, also known as ‘Middle-Aged Men In Lycra’, are our fastest growing breed. Craftsmen who leave work at 3pm to go surfing are our heroes. Honestly, you can keep your puny and pale Joe Alwyns and Tom Hiddlestons.

The recent longevity study has shown that most of the gains in life expectancy in Australia occur after the age of 45, largely due to better diagnosis and treatment of disease. This is where scientists and physicians are revered. We are currently fascinated by the health journey of Professor Richard Scolyer, who remains cancer-free after using experimental therapy based on his own groundbreaking research into melanoma.

Compared to the UK, where it is almost impossible to get a same-day appointment with your GP and a friend had to wait over two weeks for the results of a worrying breast cancer call-back appointment, our healthcare system is easily accessible and efficient.

Skin cancer doctors – Australians have the highest risk in the world – are booked up, but if I see something concerning they’ll squeeze me in the next day. Here the expertise and communication are excellent, unlike in the UK, where I was left in constant fear after being mistakenly prescribed menopause medication instead of the contraceptive pill in my 20s. (I took it for a week without realising it, before finally reading the instructions.)

Tax breaks also mean that more than half of Australians have private healthcare, significantly higher than the UK’s top ten per cent. My family pays AU$291 (£150) a month, which may seem like a lot but it means I can see a specialist of my choice, have immediate non-urgent surgery and be admitted to hospital in a private setting. Opticians, physiotherapy and gym memberships are subsidised extras.

In Australia, traders who stop work at 3pm to go surfing are the local heroes

Ultimately, I suspect it’s the compelling combination of sunshine, convenience, lack of crowds and hope that are the real game-changers for Australian longevity. Last year, when I visited the UK, I was shocked by the long commutes and sedentary lifestyles of former colleagues.

Going to the Mediterranean for two weeks a year to escape the misery of England is not a cheerful existence. I will always maintain that there are few qualities that can match British humour, but the cynicism seems to spoil it all.

As everyone tells me, Britain is broken. It took just two days to realise this on a visit last year. Driving on the A12 from London to Colchester we were held up for over two hours by a breakdown. The road was too narrow for a recovery vehicle to get through and, as I pointed out, ‘it’s a country lane masquerading as a main road’.

Elsewhere, friends complained about crime, filth, poor care for the elderly, questionable house-buying practices, expensive trains and the relentless, soul-destroying certainty of rotten weather. When I explained the current British temperament to a friend here, I found myself using the same descriptions you would use for mushy peas: soggy, pale, tasteless and disappointed.

A friend here says he would never live in the UK again because of the fishing. ‘You sit on a deckchair in the drizzle using maggots to catch carp that no one can eat, or you pay a fortune to fish for salmon in a posh river. Here you can cast a line and feed yourself on free gourmet fish for a week.’

A friend, recently returned to the UK, had forgotten about the poor state of the plumbing. ‘You’d think that a country that invented the flush toilet would have created a decent shower four centuries later.’

A stylish woman, she was also incensed by the overuse of Farrow & Ball’s muted pink paint. Sulking Room Pink No.295 made her feel trapped in the birth canal. ‘Luckily our light is too bright for that,’ she remarked.

Australians, on the whole, stress less. Stretched out under a broad blue sky and raised with a ‘no worries’ ethos, we may worry about the cost of living, but a walk through the bush or a dip in the ocean will usually restore our optimism. We work to live, not to live, and start and finish early, with 6pm being the most popular time for restaurant bookings.

I still come back to the UK regularly to visit family and friends – once every two or three years – and my daughters love it (although they do complain that it always rains there and that the Marks & Spencer prawn sandwich isn’t as good as we remembered, but now we have huge, sweet, local prawns on tap).

Honestly, the only problem with living in Australia is that we take it for granted. We forget how lucky we are – but a trip back to Blighty is a guaranteed reminder of why we left your bleak shores behind.