Hello colleague! I'm not sure what is going on particularly in Australia, but throughout the world the most common cad/cae programs are made by Autodesk, It's Autocad (and uncounted utilities based on it like Revit structure) for drawing and autodesk Robot for calculations (structural analysis). These programs are "famous" hence quite expensive thus small companies use less common programs...
About payment I assume it should be about 70 thousands $ per year.
But I may be wrong =)
BTW it's great idea to work in australia, it's gorgeous country though I have never been there.