Note that a lot of the financial benefit described here comes from living somewhere remote—in particular the housing and food costs. That’s the reason for the strenuous warning not to live in “Sidney, Melbourne or any major Australian city.” From a larger perspective, it partly accounts for choosing Australia over America (low population density --> low housing costs, etc.).
For a full analysis, the cost differentials of living in the Australian outback vs. an American city (or whatever) have to be decomposed into price level, consumption, and other factors. For example, I pay a very high cost for living in New York. But I recover part of the cost in various benefits. Broadly: 1) New York may be the only place in the world where my employment situation is possible, 2) New York is a social coordination point where it is especially easy to meet the kind of people I would like to meet.
This is probably the case for many people who decide to live in New York.
In the wild, people use these gambits mostly for social, rather than argumentative, reasons. If you are arguing with someone and believe their arguments are pathological, and engagement is not working, you need to be able to stop the debate. Hence, one of the above—this is most clear with “Let’s agree to disagree.”
In practice, it can be almost impossible to get out of a degrading argument without being somewhat intellectually dishonest. And people generally are willing to be a little dishonest if it will get them out of an annoying and unproductive situation.
If you have frequently been on the receiving end of “conversation halters,” consider the hypothesis that you are doing something wrong. If you often provoke the reaction that people would rather not engage with you, the social part of your argumentative technique is badly broken.