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Great price for an amazing lighting system.
The Philips Hue Bridge allows you to connect to your smart lighting system using your smartphone. Each bridge can be used to control up to 50 lights so you'll be able to add and remove lights from your system as necessary. The Philips Hue system is also compatible with Apple HomeKit products and devices to help you create a connected smart home lighting system.
Just FYI, the hub is semi-essential for getting the $90 Hue "White and Color" / $30 Hue White lights to sync up to your hue account/phone app. This is an upgrade, but it will also work standalone if you don't have a kit already.
Most people will get the hub in a starter kit. Regular price from Apple, others, for the Hub upgrade is $89, but this also comes with the starter kits, so there's no reason to buy this. Adding in a Gen 2 kit to a Gen 1 system, you can upgrade over to the new hub. So this becomes redundant. Having 2 hubs in a system won't work, but you can remove bulbs from a hub, to work on another hub.
The Bulbs talk to each other over zigbee, so if one bulb is more than 15-20m from the hub, bulbs can talk to each other to mesh the network and improve speed/coverage/performance.
The kits save you ~ $30/$60 off retail.
The Gen 2 hub also comes with the hue white kit (has 2 dimmable yellow/white bulbs, $60) for $145, or the 3 colour "hue white and color" bulbs for $290. At $90/$30 for the bulbs separately, the standard kit is the way to go, as you can also upgrade your hub with the new starter kit, and donate/sell the older Gen 1 to family/friends/ebay.
As for hue products and extras,
Apple Stores are your best bet for these, or order from simply-LEDs/officeworks , as they have both B22 bayonet/ and A19/E27 screw fitting versions, as does Apple.
You can buy bulbs from amazon UK that will work here, as well as buying accessories like the Motion sensor, Tap or the dimmable switches from Amazon US, that will work in australia on zigbee and on 240v. Get the 240v bulbs, the US 120v will work, but they can burn out.
The hub can also work with some 3rd party zigbee bulbs, i.e. GE bulbs from the US/EU, but they are unlikely to ever be sold in Australia.
For current/older Hue users,
Gen 2, adds HomeKit compatibility for Siri to turn on/off lights. that's about it from a practical standpoint. Gen 2 also has more memory for storage of timers, sequences and responds faster to switching commands or colour syncing between lights. the internals work faster.
3rd party home automation, like Apple Homekit, Swannone smart hub, Samsung Smartthings or Logitech / Amazon Echo/Dot, will generally use WiFi or LAN communications directly, which is faster than IFTTT (around 15-250ms to change colour or switch off lights). For use as ambilight, i.e. with Kodi and movies, Gen3's are preferable as they actually have green and blue light (shock horror) rather than yellow-green and purple-blue.
As far as mixing Gen 1 (600 lumen -45w equivalent,2013), Gen 2 (800 lumen,60w equivalent, 2015) and Gen 3 ("Richer Color" 800 lumens, are US/UK only at the moment) bulbs, there's no compatibility issues with Gen 1 or Gen 2 hubs.
Gen3 bulbs are faster to switch between states, but are offset by having "more" colour depth, and not as strong in pure white light. There are also some compatibility issues with the bulbs turning themselves on, so might be best to wait for Gen 3 if that's a problem for you.