No vision, no hope? Suicide as the despair of the disadvantaged

Today the situation is very different. Public education is no longer free and often no longer good. The absolute numbers and the proportion of students completing high school and university have increased dramatically in Australia but the absolute numbers left behind have increased too. Fifty or 60 years ago many careers were open to those who never saw the inside of a university or even completed high school. Fourteen-year-old recruits to Public Services in Australia could aspire to the highest positions in the Service and many realised those aspirations without any further formal education. Those prospects no longer exist and many other careers are simply not available for those without tertiary education.

The social effects of exclusion of so many from a satisfying role in the economy can be debilitating. Society loses mobility and becomes sharply divided into economic and social groups. Even many middle-income groups have not done well since 1970. They have achieved material improvements in their levels of living, but at severe social and family costs. Burdens on energy and time in earning their income are heavy; attention to home and children has declined; recreational activities have retreated to the margin of most people's lives. The hopes and expectations of earlier generations for the ease and comfort that a successful professional or business career will bring have largely disappeared. The enjoyment of the civilization and culture that their grandparents knew is no longer available to them, at least in the leisurely form it once was.

For the lower-income groups, the outlook has become desperate. Those who remain in unions tend to be more highly skilled and highly paid, and feel little identity with the unskilled and "underclass" levels. A modern “proletariat” is now without effective union membership and support. Those parties that call themselves "Labour" and purport to be "worker’s" or socialist parties have moved so far to the middle or even the right that they are no longer dedicated to working-class or lower-income interests. Like Ramsay MacDonald's National Government, they are conservative in government and no less conservative in opposition - they have left much of their former constituency disenfranchised.

The Hawke and Keating governments increasingly left the economy - and consequently society - to the mercies of the market. What the Labor Party had been accustomed to regard as a capitalist instrument for exploitation of the workers was now left free to do as it liked, uninhibited by government or, so far as possible, by any other regulatory authority. Their only concern was initially to acquire and then to maintain themselves in power, at whatever cost in terms of betrayal of their political philosophy or their traditional constituency.

The social degeneration that the government's abdication of its role has caused has not been identified with any real clarity. A society which is patently unequal, which is patently unprotective of the interests of all its members cannot survive and does not deserve to. Certainly, it cannot survive without turmoil - the only question is when a major confrontation will occur. In Australia, the political tradition has never favoured violence or revolution. Political stability is characteristic of a system that contemplates gentle evolution towards - as Australians have imagined - a fairer, more egalitarian, more democratic society. Australians seldom get angry about political and social conditions. They get angry about other things, but no federal politician has ever been assassinated and few assaulted - at least for political reasons. No one wants to advocate violence but it may be a matter for regret that Australians and some other Anglo-Saxon societies do not get more angry about what their political masters do to them… or they may have to face the consequences.