The Problem with Australia

I originally, just seconds ago, entitled this post 'the problem with Oz' and then rescinded, because Oz was an exciting magical place.
I think the book to read on the problems of Australia is 'Affluenza' by Clive Hamilton, for my part I feal obliged to look at Australia because of spending so much time Japan bashing in recent posts.
One could be inclined to look at the problem's australia has as 'lack of water' and 'low commodity prices', but I think the problem of any body so arrogant as to presume itself a nation will generally have its weaknesses focused not around geological or meteological causes but the human condition and how it manifests itself.
I believe for one thing that Nationality overall is a concept that will be abandoned over the next hundred years. At the moment my nationalism is a reality that Australia is one of the few places in the world I am legally allowed to live, have a say in local affairs, earn a wage and wander the streets at night for an extended period of time. Also by convenience of my birth Australia is what I'm used to, so all things being even it would also probably be the country I would choose to live in, barring a romantic or career motivated posting as an expat.
Now my patriotism has been abandoned as an emotional issue, on to the shitcanning.
Terry Pratchett I believe once may have said something to the effect of 'I love Australia, it has all the advantages of America, without the Americans' which I used to recite with some pride, even if it isn't accurate. The matter rests that I did. But now I am more inclined to say that, thanks to the stunted economic management and near sighted vision of the Howard years, if anything Australia evenly combines the worst aspects of both big cultural influences America and England.
We are overweight, arrogant, ignorant of world geography, militaristic, petrol addicted, nature plundering, royalist, prudes, conservative, class obsessed, social climbing conquerers of 'the savage'.
All these is an essay in itself, but fundamentally I think Australia really is deficient in two areas, that probably go far in explaining the shortfalls of Australian psyche. That is imagination and leadership.
Australian public figures show a dearth of inspirational visionaries, probably the closest is Gough Whitlam, and the ABC biopic on the dismissal was more prolongued legal debate than engrossing drama. Bob Hawke was the archetypal cultural cringe we are obsessed with promoting, Paul Keating had vision, but singularly poor at articulating it, John Howard said things to the world about our country that should cause us to sit down faces tinged red in embarrassment and that's just based on Stature and appearance, then there's the latest milksop Kevin Rudd, a man that whilst I craved for change's sake to take office, I find uninspiring but possibly quite representative of Australia at large.
And that brief summary should be added as preface to the book called 'Great Quotes of Australian Leaders' whose pages contain almost nothing.
Admittedly Australia has had a short history, which in turn has had some advantages. But as a colony, the overwhelming feeling I get, is that it is deeply ingrained in our genes now (after only a matter of generations, not dynasties) that Australia is really the originator of nothing, Australia is somewhere where something of history, of precedent comes to settle down.
That's what I mean about Imagination, entrepreneurship is rare, even in the makeup of our businesses, most entreprenuers as they are described are simply small business owners in tried and true professions, not really people who are taking any new or sufficient gamble to try and discover some new market competitive edge.
Furthermore are quests for importance on a global scale lack imagination, the vision of the future 'stable middle sized economy with consistent macroeconomic growth due to resources and commodities' we are no real cultural or strategic centre. There is no Australian school of thought.
If it isn't something with a starting gun and a gold medal at the end, we can't comprehend how to compete.
Our television industry for the most part merely coopts foreign original concepts and rebrands them as Australian. One can count the amount of original Aussie concepts that have gone over seas in the past 10 years on one hand, and even then you are stretching the definition of 'original'
Our talent in film is about par sadly with New Zealand, a Nation the size of one of our cities, and we haven't produced films that compete for critical acclaim to compare with 'whale rider' 'the piano' or 'once were warriors'.
A lot of problems arise like most countries from the usual suspects, an aging population bringing about consistently conservative democracy and shortsighted economic policy, an obsession with GDP, an education system with holes in it, an embarrassingly ugly track record on the treatment of our indeginous people and our collective failure to acknowledge and take responsibility for it.
But perhaps most insidious of all, is our approach to industry, Australia in lacking imagination, has settled down on the path of least resistence, a resource economy. As such most of the mysterious and expansive old growth bushland has been cleared to make way for cows, environmentally disasterous crops in the form of rice and sugar cane have been loosed upon our shores. And they stay, they persist. In a lack of imagination, laziness arizes, problems are left to dwell because for Australia 'problems as opportunities' is empty rhetoric. How is not the creative question on Australian's lips, no what the 'new inventors' tries to tell you, the show itself not a 'new' concept. For example, take manufacturing, an industry where you and I the regular tax payer, buys a job in the form of government subsidies to car companies that operate huge manufacturing plants at a loss, so they can pay to keep people employed.
But little do we realise that A) this is just welfare. B) that in keeping these people employed we are depriving people, who would spend the money on their childs education (possibly in australia) unemployed and C) we still reduce the Australian companies profits, by forcing them to manufacture their own goods instead of importing them.
Admittedly a smart company like Nucor would spot the 'cars are heavy, what luck that our competitors have to ship them when we build them right here' revelation and then use their imagination and leadership to realise the value advantage. But Australian workers from my experience have extreme trouble engaging in concepts such as total quality management or new initiatives to find efficiencies.
Infact talk to a Sudanese refugee and you'll be amazed at their concept of what an 'opportunity' is, they will tell you how pleased they are to be an Australian because: they can get a job as a taxi driver or cleaner, their children can then complete highschool and work in a shop. This will allow their childrens, children to work hard and go to university.
Such a far reaching scope of opportunity I find truly moving. Such new Australians lets hope will arrive in abundance, because they may be the answer to the 'skills shortage' because there is another trap in the old lack of imagination, and that is an inability to see forward very far into the future. It's not so much a deer in the headlights, its more like some animal that can't even see that far.
Take forrestry in Tasmania, if you 'confront the brutal facts' forrestry has no future, we need trees, people are wanting to move away from paper. It costs us more to clean up the externalities that you make out of the paper mills, and more money is realisable through tourism and forrestry.
Yet we persist and are likely to, because thinking of a 'clean up' economy is simple to great a stretch for the national imagination. Furthermore the more difficult question of how to placate unemployed chippies? is beyond our cognative prowess.
Yet that is the leadership we are lacking. One that will definitively say 'old growth forrestry has no future, no new people are to be hired into this industry' this is neither job creation, nor job destruction. Should a skills shortage arise in a market where the logging is still profitable (without distortion from givernment wholesaling on the cheap for the benifit of employment) then this would logically result in pay rises, which don't often result in mass industrial disputes, and also serve as a barrier to new entrants.
Which isn't to suppose that I have solved the problem of structural employment, nor accounted for the many costs of shutting down an industry, but at least I got to conceavable which is more than most people seem to want to manage in Australia.
Management is poor in Australia, managerial standards seem to exhibit no structured learning of how to actually manage, judging by my own and a lot of my peers experiences in the work force, that's at least 30 companies, far from statistically significant, but not encouraging all together.
It seems to be pure pot luck that someone comes across good management. More disconcerting is that it seems to be pure luck if you come across good consultancy, that being said, corporate Australia is caught up in one elaborate game of 'the emperors new clothes', you seldom here of a bold decision by an Australian business leader, publicity seems to revolve more around weather balloon adventures and takeovers of failed Aussie Icons, such as Ansett.
There's none of this, 'Zero Emission by 2020' sort of shit comming from many Australian business leaders, and that may be that the best talent in Australia works either overseas or in a subsidiary for an overseas company and thus is just a manequinns mouth of whatever the head office line is.
But it is so close, so tantalisingly close to having the chutzpah to be a world leader, despite its size. England, fucking england I am now putting my money on, being the emerging world superpower, quite a comeback really, why? Because they actually have a vision for the future, not conservative national concepts mired in the muddy past. Who cares about fucking GDP? that's the crux of the issue and the crux of Growth Fetish and Affluenza Clive Hamilton's insightful books,
if someone in Australia was willing to make a call that may actually hurt business in the short term, but pave an actual sustainable future for Australia it may be.
Cases in point (and sorry if these sound a little green, but that is the first thing to do if you want a future):
Shopping Bags, Clive surmises that supermarkets are reluctanct to go zero tolerance on disposable plastic shopping bags because a shopper that brings their own bags from home has already consciously set a limit on how much they wish to buy (spend). Despite these things hurting maritime life and taking 1,000 years to decay, that means one you buy tomorrow is somebodies problem in 3008 this is seen as the real problem. Ireland introduced a 20c tax on all plastic bags a few years back, and within 6 months eliminated 95%, so whoever tells you green bags are the smart solution should try ingesting one.
Kyoto protocol, I heard Kevin Rudd is going to sign it, and admittedly it isn't KRudds fault he left it so late, but whilst we are signing a document that is over 10 years old, EU having failed carbon trading v1.0 are already back to the drawing board. Given that we will have numerous hands pushing compromise in every direction, it will probably take us longer to succeed, and both parties carbon targets were infact death sentances according to the scientific reports. Putting us at least 20 years behind were the leaders are.
Furthermore, if you read this weeks time magazine article on the impact of Rudd in Australia (a double page spread, mostly pictures as opposed to two double page spreads dedicated to malaysia) you get an impression of just how uninspiring Australia is as a nation viewed from the outside.
The whole take is 'moderacy' perhaps leading back to imagination and what I see as Australia's hurdle of mediocracy.
That is an incredibly low tolerance of risk. This is what defines Australia as distinct from America and Europe. Even in WWII and Vietnam we followed the lead, neither instigating a war nor really being in the firing line. Contrast this to Englands long history of invasions from the Romans, the Vikings and the French, ontop of this you have the monumental events of the magna carta. Then you have the US with its declaration of independance, the civil war, the cold war, the mexican war etc, two contries that have had to fight tooth and nail to establish themselves.
I don't want to discount the various moral and ethical issues that arise from the above, the key comparison is that Australia's landmark legel document was argueably terra nullis the document that legally gave the indegenous Australians the official position of simply not existing.
And then it has been all resources and commodities from their.
Step into the classroom then, school for my generation is the process whereby you aspire to four things, lawyer, doctor, teacher or work in a company. That's pretty much all there is to it.
The idea is to become a cog somewhere in some struggling machine. But what about inspiring people to be more than just a cog, reliant on a foreign financial institution of government welfare mechanisms to absorb all the risk.
At no point in my education did I ever feel seriously encouraged to try and make it on my own. Even as we discussed the lack of Australian entre preneurs in VCE economics.
Schools focus with a single minded ruthlessness on getting you into the nearest most prestigious university. Our year 12 valedictory dinner was the moment my eyes reopened to the leadership dearth in the private school sector. I not wishing to appear arrogant, put down quite a modest ambition to be read out at the presentation of the dinner - 'study Bachelour of Marketing at RMIT' thinking that I had cleverly hedged my bets.
As I sat through 47 minutes of 'law at Melbourne University...blah blah...medicine at Melbourne University...blah blah...arts/law at Melbourne University' I felt jipped that I infact appeared to be the dumbest student in my year. My choice of course by the standard was a relative country bumpkins pick, the equivalent of sitting in a room full of wine connoisuers and talking about how delicious I found Passion Pop.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be a doctor of course, but the question is, how many doctors do we need. If you took my year 12 colleagues as representative of the nation (which it isn't) then we would presume to find a ratio of 1 doctor to every 3 people. (the other two being lawyers, or arts/lawyers) fortunately this didn't pan out, but in the end the question begs - who is going to make the actual money, whilst we private school kids suckle fat on the teet of security.
People who no doubt experience failure up front, realise life isn't about smooth sailing, but fighting the storm.
They end up getting my fellow graduates to stick their fingers up their arse and massage their prostate.
Hence hencely, the Australian dream is infact to be a dumb fucking investor, the Australian dream according to ACA and Today Tonight, is owning your own home. The most successful and brightest of Australians have achieved this dream before 50, what do they do? buy more homes.
The Australian real estate market is overvalued by 20%. Mostly through babyboomers cash cow superannuation payments coming through. Thanks to being risk averse and having never really explored the benifits of capitalist endeavor, the stock market is incomprehensible. How could someone make money out of an idea? its risky, no thank you, I'll put everything I have in to good old indivisible, unprofitable rental properties.
And everyone does this. Everyone can't have a good idea, everyone cant be rich, its preposterous. Yet property is looked at as free money. In the case of negative gearing, it actually is. Except it's not really free, that money comes out of your tax, which is used to pay for healthcare and such so really you are stealing from the services you enjoy, and some that you don't like education, which is really there to be enjoyed by your children.
If there was an old addage applicable to australia it is this 'the biggest risk is taking no risk at all' which Australia tries to do again and again. Our politicians promise the same shit, to avoid not pissing off anyone, and I seem to be the only one truly universally pissed off at such mediocrity.
Furthermore we have our own insidious way to deal with risk takers, its called tall poppy syndrome. The assumption of risk is inherantly profitable. risk = profits - loss. You don't lose if you don't risk anything, but nor can you profit. That's the nature of it. The reality is we are risking something every second of the day 'time' and the weakest way to play that hand is in a waiting game, hence if you take no risk the odds are you end up losing.
Theoretically this means Australians should have learnt by now, not to rest on the laurels of our grazing lands and mineral wealth (which we have done, and now the grazing lands are dissappearing down south) but to risk our youth, our people and our time on trying to become something more.
Australia is like an awkward bigman in the NBA, born 8 foot tall it has always been picked in the starting line up because of its natural height advantage. It lasts a couple of seasons until it gets injured filming a movie with Billie Crystal. Sure it looks pretty impressive and all, maybe even in the annals of history like a success story. Until you compare it with players who didn't just rest on their natural advantage and found their own path to greatness. Furthermore you can look at players that need not necessarily be some small scandanavian company that built their game around Nokia or Ikea but a great big giant that also has game. Like this, this or this.
That is overall the concern with Australia, it has all the makings, its just a thin low density polymer away from reaching true greatness, good education system (just too skewed to risk minimisation), multiculturalism (but increased nationalism always rearing its ugly head), natural resources (that are raped rather than cultivated).
And I think I've said enough.
Australia is just full of potential but too fucking lazy and scared to be a significant country.