I'm not sure what it's like in Melbourne, but a 1 hr call in Sydney can take half a day. If a tech knows what they're doing and can diagnose and replace a switch or solenoid or fet in half an hour, $140 is reasonable. I'm sure redesigning a multi-million dollar piece of machinery's electronics would take well more than half an hour.
I also understand that most probably just fix the most major problem... the problem there being that telling a client that it'll be a hundred to fix this, another hundred to strip that mech down... the client won't see the value.
Debugging and fixing a lamp matrix I would imagine could take hours, not to mention equipment in the form of scopes etc that your average hobbyist doesn't have.
