AUSTRALIA
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G'day mates! We flew to Sydney for a long weekend, a spontaneous trip given a fantastic deal on plane tickets. Sydney is nice, a clean and modern city with a scenic harbour and abundant leisure.
Australia is New Zealand's rich uncle. New Zealand citizens have the automatic right to live and work there, and many do, to make more money. The economic boom is largely based on the mining sector, with massive and growing exports to India and China. The powerful Aussie dollar makes visiting as a tourist expensive, however.
So far, we have only seen "mainstream" Australia. We would love to tour the fabled outback in a camper van some day. Meanwhile, we did the best we could; we went to the zoo and an indigenous film festival.
I grew up hearing about Australia's aborigines as pre-historic people who lived in the desert, and I wondered why they chose to live in the desert. Now I know. They used to live in the nice places, too, until the Europeans arrived. Indeed, it was only in 1972 that the government stopped stealing aboriginal children from their parents in an effort to assimilate them into white society. The stolen children lost their culture, language, spirituality, and self-esteem. As a measure of how much mainstream society cares, the free film festival at the iconic Sydney Opera House was not crowded. We saw zero young people. A panel discussion with a director and a producer offered frank commentary regarding the current state of the aborigine culture: poverty and alcoholism are rampant, but some old ways are still alive with old people in remote locales.
Meanwhile, newspapers tell the mainstream city dwellers that their top concern should be whether people who make more than AU$150,000 should be considered rich when it comes to tax policy. Sigh.
We went to the beach.
I recently flew to Brisbane for business, but I only saw the airport, the office building, and a hotel near the airport. I might have thought I was in the USA if it weren't for the left-side drivers and the funny accent :-) It's true what many people say: the USA and Australia have much in common.
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Update: One of my mates in New Zealand is married to a Member of Parliament with the Labour Party. His comment to the preceding post bears repeating:
"Great to hear that you and Lily had a great weekend in Sydney. Yes it is fantastic city and an even better country. All those NZ'rs who vote with their feet can't be wrong, with wages currently 30% ahead of NZ and predicted to grow to 44% by 2025.
It is a myth that Australia is more prosperous than NZ due primarily to mineral extraction and export to China. The relatively better position of Australia vis-a-vis NZ is underpinned by three fundamental policy decisions taken by Australian Labour governments in comparison to NZ National governments.
1) Employment Legislation. With Labour governments in power in the 1980s, both Australia and NZ resisted World Bank and IMF pressure to reform labour-relations laws, thereby protecting wages and working conditions, keeping unions in their role.
But a right-wing National Government was elected in NZ in 1990 that quickly produced the Employment Contracts Act. This legislation stripped unions and workers of basic rights and created the myth of equality in bargaining power (workers were at last free of union domination and capable of negotiating with their employers on equal terms). This law saw NZ wages gutted over a six-year period. It saw NZ wages go from equal with Australia to the present 30% below Australia. Worker's wages and conditions in NZ have never recovered, with the gap between the well paid and the low paid getting worse every year. We are slowly degrading into the mess we see in developing nations where social exclusion and poverty are the normal way of existence for the majority.
Meanwhile in Australia, workers, employers, and the government all resisted the IMF's demands and continued to negotiate through union-based bargaining. There was the odd conservative government at a federal level through those years, but they never managed to push through game-changing legislation as they did in NZ [and the USA].
There is also a different immigration history: Australia was originally populated by convicts, not so much serious criminals, although they were present, but by industrial workers with a strong sense of fairness and equality, still in Australian culture to the present day, allowing unions to maintain their crucial role in politics as champions of the middle class.
2) Superannuation. In 1972, the Labour Government of NZ introduced a compulsory, employer-subsidized savings scheme. The National Party campaigned against it, claiming that Labour intended to use the fund to turn NZ into a communist country by stealth; they showed a map of NZ turning red with Russian music playing and cassocks dancing. The National Party succeeded in abolishing the plan, leaving NZ without savings to fund its own investments, contributing to the takeover of NZ's assets by foreign capitalists.
In contrast, the 1984 Australian Labour government established a superannuation scheme fully funded by Australian employers who now contribute a minimum of 12% to each of their employee's retirement accounts. This has produced a fund worth about $AU 3 trillion that has been invested in Australia's manufacturing and export businesses.
3) Manufacturing and Banking policy. Australia has always encouraged the manufacturing sector, never prepared to surrender it to the Chinese. [This is also true of Brazil.] Labour governments, through legislation, have also prevented the banking system from becoming infected by speculative greed, as occurred in the USA and Europe, leading to the financial collapse of 2008. This is a crucial difference.
All the genius capitalists and political leaders could do in NZ during the past 30 years is sell assets (state and private) to foreigners, and borrow cheap money off shore to invest in real estate, low-value commodity production, and low-return tourism, with the consequences of low returns built on low wages.
This is why Australia is so much stronger economically than NZ and why we have failed ourselves as a nation by voting in conservative, short-sighted National governments, and why as long as we do, we will continue to fall behind Australian living standards with an increasingly socially divided and impoverished country. It has little to do with mineral wealth."
We never expected our first visit to Australia to be so removed from cowboys and crocodiles. We saw kangaroos only on the dollar coin, and zero aborigines. But we did see U2 (Lili's favourite band) in Melbourne with Brazilian friends, and we learned that Brazilians at a rock-and-roll show define modern Australia as much as koalas and sheep shearers. We also learned that Melbourne is a marvelous multi-cultural metropolis that consistently ranks as one of the world's top cities for livability.
From reading local newspapers it is clear that many white Australians believe that somehow they are not immigrants like everybody else, so therefore every child should celebrate Christmas in school. We think children should instead celebrate history and humanity. As world travellers, we observe good and bad people, smart and dumb people, everywhere. What varies are superficial aspects of form, but our brains work the same. What varies is culture, that which is passed down from generation to generation and broadcast over television. Religion and language are the quintessential elements of culture, and these create the barriers that divide us, not skin colour. There is far more that unites us.
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