THERE'S a solemn tradition in the Australian public calendar that requires us once a year, on the occasion of our national holiday, to measure ourselves against our own ideals and traditions, to scrutinise ourselves through the mirror of other peoples and places - and to find ourselves gravely lacking.
First, there's criticism on the grounds of social compassion. On this view the good society requires that Australians should have by now abolished, or at least whittled away to a minimal level, the inequalities that shame and beset us. And yet each year you can find measures that point in the opposite direction. The gap between the richest and the poorest grows apace; well-publicised statistics insist we have more homeless people than ever before; and despite billions of dollars expended over a half-century, indigenous Australians remain more or less as poor and unhealthy, relative to the rest of us, as they were in 1967.
Then there's the social-nostalgic line of criticism. Proponents of this view look through the rear-vision mirror and discover a country full of vibrant optimism and robustness of character. Marriages stayed together a lifetime. Men with simple practical skills were respected as worthy citizens, and chose their own retirement dates. A half-century ago we still produced our own cars and feature films, congregated at modest coastal holiday towns, and took care not to look wealthy or stuck-up. Nowadays we've become a nation of snobs and social climbers, forever distinguishing ourselves from our neighbours in minute calibrations of taste. We allow our dwindling natural resources to be plundered by others, and make fewer and fewer things while consuming more and more from elsewhere.
Finally, there's the economically hard-headed line of attack. For these critics we are forever, and incorrigibly, the same Lucky Country Donald Horne used to mock back in the 1960s: too complacent and easygoing, too dozily pleased with our fortunate successes, too ready to entrust our fortunes to second-rate politicians pandering to our worst instincts. In the 1980s and 90s we had a brief epiphany of political reason, opening our economy to the world, cutting back feather-bedding, and directing welfare payments to those in actual need. Ever since we've been back-sliding, and our productivity has nosedived. Why, it's enough to make you despair of democracy, these critics will say.
There must be something in the human brain that requires us to divide all our political values into discrete and irreconcilable camps. Yet in practice most of us are complex political individuals: romantic and hard-headed, forward-looking and nostalgic, austere and self-indulgent by turns. When asked for their priorities, Australians still declare themselves supporters of public health and education, but also of individual enterprise and initiative; willing to pay taxes to fund decent social services, but also suspicious of new ones; respectful of the public weal, but intensely jealous of their privacy and their assets. As we confound the ideologists, so we also confound our restless prophets of doom.
So it's worth taking a brief audit of some of the respects in which Australian society has not changed for the worse, and in which we have stayed faithful to our better instincts. More than a century ago the English novelist Anthony Trollope was startled by the paradoxical character of Australian society: we were rough and unpolished, but also essentially "moral and decent" in manners; while we seemed uncouth there were editions of the literary classics in every outback cottage; labour was plentiful yet the ordinary labourer was treated with respect; our women worked like slaves but were as independent as Amazons. Today we worry ourselves on each of these counts, but an observant English tourist arriving on our shores today might see a rough draft of a similar picture.
Take, for instance, our persistent fear that we are becoming more stratified and less egalitarian. President Obama's most senior economic adviser, Alan Krueger, has observed Americans now have one of the worst prospects of social mobility between generations in the developed world - little better than Argentina and Pakistan. As it has been every patriotic American's boast for two centuries that their country is the land of opportunity, this is a painful national fact with which to reckon. Yet according to the same figures Australia is still one of the world's most socially mobile countries, best compared with the fabled Scandinavia. A 2008 OECD report commented that in Australia "what your parents earned when you were a child has very little effect on your own earnings", because while we spend less on social welfare than many rivals, we spend it with more care.
It is certainly true that Australia's middle - in the sense of the number of people whose incomes cluster around the median - has been shrinking fast. But, as the Melbourne Institute has demonstrated, there is no clear evidence Australia is developing an "underclass", despite repeated efforts to introduce that intriguing idea into the Australian vernacular. Most Australian families stay in unemployment-induced poverty only for relatively short periods. Nor is it clear that we have an epidemic of homelessness, as Kevin Rudd loudly claimed just a few years ago. It is more likely we have an epidemic of transient housing caused by persistently untreated mental illness.
Neither are the complaints of our economic doomsayers as plausible as they sound, tuned as our ears are for the threnody of moral and economic decline. The benefits of the mining boom have certainly not come without cost, but there is no evidence the mining boom is "crowding out" Australian industry generally. Indeed, because the boom manifests itself in the price rather than the volume of exports, it has come, in effect, economically "free of charge". As Ben Dolman from the Productivity Commission pointed out a few years ago, a good half of our recent productivity decline may be attributed to the mining boom and previous accounting glitches, and much of the remainder may derive from the hiring frenzy in the economic good times. We may well have to "lift our game" - but only in the same fashion as every other developed country.
At the same time we still suffer from persistent, if subterranean, social and economic illnesses. Economist Bob Gregory has spent an illustrious career puncturing our illusions and calming our transient panics. He has observed that the rate of full-time female employment has more or less flatlined since the mid-1960s, regardless of the highly visible growth of female employment in the liberal professions. Indeed, full-time jobs generally have become harder to hold down. This has caused a steady drift from employment to benefits, while older workers are herded out into the back paddock long before their time. Finally, despite the small number of well-paid Aboriginal celebrities in constant demand on boards and "identified" positions, wider indigenous employment has been near-stagnant for half a century - and cannot reasonably be expected to improve unless indigenous families are encouraged to move into areas of employment growth.
And so, gentle reader, may I propose two cheers for Australian democracy on Australia Day. The first cheer because our country continues, against the odds, to provide decent life opportunities for ordinary folks from unpretentious families. The second, because we still enjoy a decent balance between personal independence and life security. But there, as E. M. Forster once put it in another context, we should stop: two cheers are enough.http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/achievements-confound-p...
Forum
Pages: 1
What obsesses the political class on Australia Day (Read 1391 times)
