Victoria and her husband were very satisfied with their payment. Honestly, Franz had not known Victoria liked diamonds so much. If she had been willing, he would have preferred to pay entirely in diamonds; after all, the Austrian Empire was not lacking in diamonds at the moment.
As for why they had not paid in gold.
That brought the matter back to the beginning: the Austrian Empire needed to issue paper currency and carry out Gold Standard reforms, so it needed a great quantity of gold as an anchor of value.
(The relationship involved need not be elaborated upon here.)
Victoria and her husband were also quite supportive of the Australian Company expanding its business. After all, only if the Australian Company made money would it have money to continue paying them dividends.
Besides, Australia was, after all, one of Britain's most distant colonies. As long as the Australian Company did not provoke the wrath of heaven and resentment of man, they did not particularly care.
The effects brought by rising gold prices were all-encompassing. Everything was becoming more expensive, from primary agricultural and industrial goods to strategic materials, then to arms and finished industrial products.
In Britain, the only two things that had probably not risen were wages and stocks.
The sharpest increase among them was in global sugar prices. Due to the earlier Cuban Crisis, world sugar production was expected to fall by 15%, yet global sugar prices had risen by 50% because of it.
And that was only the price in bulk trade. In individual countries, sugar prices had risen by nearly 100%. All of Europe had fallen into a sugar shortage, but the Austrian Empire had prepared its countermeasures long ago.
Rationing and price controls were utterly unacceptable to the citizens of many countries, but to