One thing I won't miss about Australia is the whinging the the Government isn't giving them enough. It's a true national sport... quite a bit different than the whining I'm used to in the US. Unlike Americans, who love to whine about government incompetence (or conspiracies... hush!), Australians feel Government needs to get more directly involved. The 'little Aussie battler' has mythical standing, as does the concept of 'a fair go'... and when you conflate the two, you get Aussies whining for more and more government involvement to level the playing field.
We keep on seeing obnoxious examples of this.
- The woman who's suing the Department of Main Roads in Western Australia because there aren't
enough signs on the highway warning about livestock. Sure, there are quite a few already... but she
was driving after dark and hit a cow in the remote Kimberley region, where the stations don't fence
their paddocks. Never mind that there are big signs as you leave the large town of Broome, where
she lived. She wanted one right there.
- Perth construction workers, who stopped work throughout Western Australia for a full day last
week because they claimed there weren't enough government occupational health inspectors. Yeah! Stop
work! That'll show them!
- Ansett workers. Ansett Airlines collapsed in early September 2001, but there's still a vocal group
of former employees that insist that the government must find them new jobs... as well as put
surcharges on current air fares to help them out. Can't they just get off their lazy butts instead?
It's been a year, Ansett isn't coming back.
- The North Sydney resident who ran into a pothole, dinged his precious custom rims on his Subaru
WRX, and now refuses to pay his council rates until the council pays for his damaged rim. Hey,
buddy, get a clue: there are potholes in the world, and you're going to run into one now and then.
The local council isn't going to bail you out.
But the best whiners of all come from people who live in what's termed "country Australia", i.e. anything outside the capital cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, and Canberra. (Darwin and Hobart don't usually count.) Now, this is about 15% of the population. They have a long list of demands for more government involvement.
One of their more ludicrous demand of those who live in the country is that they get the same availability of broadband internet access as city dwellers-usually the reason is that they 'need to compete globally' or somesuch. And they want this at the same price as city dwellers, too. They also want the complete mobile phone coverage, too. I have no problem with regular phone service-but subsidizing DSL to someone in outback Australia so they can download porn and horse race results faster is ridiculous.
Another whine of theirs worked--the Australian Government caved in on was something called the Fuel Sales Grant Subsidy. Country folks were very upset that petrol cost more in the country than in the city--imagine that! So now city residents pay a surcharge on every liter of petrol to subsidize their country cousins.
There are a number of other complaints, from 'the government should fund the cleanup of my saline farm' to 'the government should keep the high school open in our dusty town of 50 people' to 'the government should post more rural doctors.' OK, on the last one they have a point. But all the other whining for handouts makes it tough to find out their real pressing issues, and rural folks don't help themselves by joining alternative political parties that never make it into state government.
I won't go into the worst, though: pensioners, which is best described as anyone over the retirement age, which seems to be 55 years old here. They demand everything, and they want it for free, because dammit they've earned it and They're Going To Get Their Fair Share, even if someone else has to pay for it.
It's just one of the large differences between Australia and the United States. While many Americans and Australians like to think of the two countries as being essentially similar, there are some big glaring differences that stick out when you look deeper. And the Australian attitude that government is an endless source of goodies is one of them.
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Alston? Are you yanking my chain? He never thinks the Internet is worth anything--really silly.
But as we've found over the last eight months, Telstra's Bigpond Megapop service has been more than adaquate, even in remote locations like Longreach, Kununurra, and Birdsville. Always get connected, and we never get disconnected involuntarily. The only time we've had problems is when the motel's PBX can't deal with modems or the (01) area code, or (worse) when the motel management doesn't understand that the phone number is not long distance, but just a local call (that phone number is (01) 98 308 888, which looks weird even to us at this point). Last night they insisted the four phone calls cost us $15. Should have been $3.20.
I think it's more a Telstra issue than an Altson issue about broadband. God knows that if Alston insisted that Telstra do fair pricing for DSL interconnects, that the country would have a much better penetration of broadband. That's what we have in California--PacBell has to charge a fair price for non PacBell DSL, and it's really lead to a massive takeup in DSL, even more so than cable at this point.
Then again, maybe Alston and I have something in common. After all, I like using broadband for porn :-)
That's an interesting insight into our regard for government as opposed to yours. My take is that it's a legacy of a generally more socialistic political environment in Australia, particularly since the 1970s. We certainly don't have the strong libertarian streak here that is evident in the USA, and our recent political history probably has closer ties to the social democracies (and, in some cases, democratic socialism) of Europe than to the USA. Our current government represents a fairly radical move away from this position, and I guess what you're seeing is peoples' expectations not keeping pace with the changes. :) Whether it's a good thing or not is a question I won't engage...
Oh, I agree. I argue that Watergate and Vietnam really cut short the full uptake of mid-20th century socialism in the US, whereas the UK and western Europe had a strong legacy of that since the union/Communist movements of the 1920's.
There are some interesting aspects of Nixon that no one seems to notice now--his abolition of conscription, his advocacy of universal health care, his internation politics of detente with the Soviets and engagement with China--that make him far more liberal (and I would say more interesting) than even Clinton. Gasp, he might have even forced through metricification of the US--had it not been for Watergate, which sucked the air out of US politics for a good four or five years.
As far as Howard goes, I'll break the Aussie rules, and discuss politics with mates. I don't think he's doing a good job for the country, but with three elections he is doing right for the country. With the aging population, with a more and more conservative mindset, they're looking for someone to stay the course. Johnnie Howard fits the electorate's mood.
But I really think John Howard's more an administrator more than a leader, and the next five to ten years for Australia will be interesting. The country has a large problem with an aging population, still assuredly wants to be European (forget Bob Hawke's Asian overtures), and is primarily dependent on commodities and resource extraction for foreign trade.
There's no emphasis on new thinking, no push for value-added products, and little action as to whether current practices can continue. These current practices are strange, too--why should Melbourne have an auto manufacturing industry when there's global overcapacity in autos, or South Australia make appliances when folks in Guangdong can make them for one tenth the price? I haven't begun talking about environmental uses--Murray basin farmers converting cropland to saltlands, inland Queensland farmers taking bore and surface water far beyond the recharge rate, Tasmanian timber industry cutting virgin forests without any plan for when the forest can be reharvested (if it can at all).
I guess all I'm saying is that there's a much higher inertia to change in Australia than where I'm from.
Sorry. I hesitated posting this--you don't need another American lecturing you (especially as I don't agree with a lot of the direction that the US is taking lately).
But there's a lot going on in this country. While most Aussies seem to complacent to notice these big trends, they certainly feel hurt when something happens outside their control--and expect the Government to ease their pain.
strange how American farmers are subsidised by the USA govt to keep little midwest towns of 50 people alive and kicking? And as for pensioners, most at that age don't have super, so living off $300 a fortnight doesn't make ends meet. But they can't work, because no one wants them.
In my circle, the biggest issue in Australia is Immigration and the treatment of Refugees. A great pity this argument has been hijacked by the Fed Govt as a powerful political toy to get the white australia policy conservatives from the 1950's on side.
And probably the biggest issue is the media's portrayal of Aussie society, a very narrow viewpoint at that!!
Oh, yeah. I agree. You can see my response to Julian's comments above.
This country is still basically xenophobic, and common terms around the country would never be uttered in public in North America. I cringe when I hear the term 'blackboy' for grass tree, but 'black gin' for Kingia plants is a winner too--"gin" being short for vagina. Even on the offical StreetSmart maps from the WA government we spotted 'Nigger Hill'. And that's just for the Aborigines... plenty of Chinaman Creeks to go around.
Chris and I call the 6:00 to 8:00 hour the 'pensioner's hour', with shows like 'A Current Affair', 'Today Tonight', and even 'The 7:30 report' running topics that appeal directly to the over-50's demographic. It's talkback radio with pictures, as far as we're concerned. And one thing we've noticed is that the country networks--the WIN, 7 Prime, GWN, etc--have fairly different lineups. They're more conservative, less risky, than the capital city television stations. Most of the time (as I'm sure you know) you can't get SBS either--so you're left with the ABC, WIN, and the oddball 7 network, and the private networks often show their own newscasts. I think their programming really does influence people in the country, and contributes to city/country misunderstandings.
As far as US farm subsidies go... well, I don't know of too many family farmers getting them; I'd think they'd be larger agribusiness with resident managers, but you'd know better than that. But, yes, many places in the midwest are losing people rather dramatically. I'd hazard that it's due to access to distribution channels and chronic low global prices for commodities than anything else, but what do I know?
'gin' is short for 'vagina'? Even I didn't know that. I knew it was a very offensive term for a black woman, but I didn't know where it came from.
There's a town in Queensland called Gin Gin. I joke that they might as well have called it 'Nigger Woman Nigger Woman'.
By the way, have you become familiar with any Henry Lawson poetry?
Uh. Maybe. I feel a bit silly now; I think I mixed a couple of things up. Macquarie says it came from Dharug, not colonists. Doh!
Haven't become familiar with Henry Lawson poetry at all. Got any recommendations?
Dan:
You're starting to sound like Alston more and more.