80 an hour no matter what they're tutoring is an absolute ripoff....
Personally, think as a tutor you can charge whatever the market-based rate is like, provided that the tutor puts in the effort as well. I also am aware that this rate is out of the budget of alot of families but at the end of the day people have to survive in one of the worlds most expensive cities. There will be an element of jealousy there from the haters. There are alot more graduate roles, professional roles, start up businesses, jobs that pay more handsomely in comparison to tutoring. Being a maths tutor or any HSC related tutor, isn't the easiest job in the world, the amount of preparation you have to put in (especially the good ones) outside the tutoring hours does not get factored into account. I teach 3 Maths Extension 1 students and a couple of university students and there is no way I could come to a tutoring lesson unprepared, unplanned and not reviewing the content that the students have recently covered. I also don't know what I'm like relative to other tutors in NSW. (I have my own tutors which I use, to get my worked checked up on) One thing I guess I do have on my side is ' work ethic' but I will be interested to see if I do decided to have a bit more maths tutoring for myself in the future, how I could compare. (I guess for me I look at the university tutors as almost the standard benchmark.)
I think also with tutoring you can never go around satisfying everyone. There will always be a student that is not happy , you do an online assessment for the student and get them 80%, some will be pissed off, some might not be happy with the way you explain things, some will want you to provide more resources as part of that tutoring rate, some might not be happy with the way you speak (eg broken English, not fluent English. That is the common one I hear from my students when I tute them in statistics, in comparison to the uni tutors/lecturers) etc I guess my point is you can never ever think you are satisfied with the job that you are doing because its a results driven industry and you don't know how well you are doing relative to other people in the teaching/tutoring field.
I provide tutoring services , I know how cut throat it is. I've had students roll their eyes at me and give me frowns when I couldn't explain something properly. If you charge a high rate, of course you have to be able to back it up and explain it almost like a teacher. I'm not sure of the standard of teaching in NSW (for a school ranked say in the Top 50, Top 100, Bottom 100) but growing up in another state I did get my fair share of bad ones in high school who just did the bare minimum to provide for the students.(I went to a fairly low ranked school in my state, all my life I have had to work just a bit harder)
Also when doing this job, I have more a greater appreciation of what teachers have to go through, especially the ones that do this day in, day out. You have to deal with the students that ask questions every minute (I might sound like one of them on this forum especially the 2U and 3U threads), the patience they have to show to manage such situations, being able to manage the disruptive kids, the hours spent outside class in preparation for class and getting the students motivated to do well.
With tutoring there is no sympathy from the students, its like they want results, they demand results, they expect the tutor to be god-like in their responses.