If I understand your post correctly, you might be comparing apples with oranges.

You were making $26/hour and the minimum wage in Australia is $17/hour (I’m using whole numbers). You were therefore making about $9/hour over the minimum wage. In the post, you said that you worked a fair bit of overtime at time and a half and double time.

I don’t know how much 1.5x and 2x hours you worked, so I won’t include the $39/hour and $52/hour rates in the calculations (although I’ll use an estimate of 10 extra hours per week at the normal minimum wage rate).

Let’s assume that you worked 50 hours/week (since you referred to overtime taking place on a regular basis). The extra $9/hour means that you earned $450/week more than minimum wage. In 17 weeks, that $9 difference totals $7,650.

If my calculations are roughly accurate, then the money you saved isn’t due to the higher minimum wage in Australia. It’s actually due to the extra $9/hour above the minimum wage (not including the 1.5x and 2x overtime premiums).

Therefore, you wouldn’t have saved much money if you’d worked solely at the minimum wage in Australia. The higher minimum wage is off-set by higher living costs (since your savings are roughly equivalent to the money you made above minimum wage).