Australia: still the lucky country?

On the April morning I was due to start the punishing journey back to Australia, I woke with a minor ailment, one that could be quickly cured with antibiotics. “Don’t put yourself under pressure waiting here,” the hotel concierge advised. “See a doctor and get a prescription when you get to Heathrow.”

This sounded sensible. Airports are towns these days, places where you can shop and eat and drink to numb the tedium. But not - I soon discovered - see a doctor at the world’s busiest airport. Instead I was advised to go to accident and emergency at a nearby hospital, change my flight and lodge a complaint (first item on the BAA complaints menu).

“There are doctors at Australian airports, even third world airports have medical centres,” I fumed later to the steward onboard.

“Yes, that is one of the reasons I want to leave this country,” he said, “it just doesn’t work anymore. My wife and I really want to migrate to Australia, but we haven’t got family there, enough points to get in, or a spare $100,000 to invest to bump them up.”

The price of entry to Australia has risen over the past 220 years. Once the dumping ground for criminals and ne’er-do-wells, in the decades after World War II it became home for nearly seven million immigrants, many “ten pound Poms” wanting to start over in a sunny new country with a promising future. It is still the destination of choice for tens of thousands, last year more than 130,000 migrants arrived, a fifth from Britain. Australian cafes, shops, offices and hospitals are filled with British backpackers working their way around the country, undeterred by gruesome tales of murder in remote locations.

But the traffic is not all one way. More than a million Australians - one in 20 - live abroad, at least 300,000 of them in Britain.

The force field connecting the two countries is magnetic - it both attracts and repels. The pull of the cosmopolitan centre for those living in a country that former Prime Minister Paul Keating once described as the “arse-end of the earth”, is nothing new, it has operated since settlement.

Yet the scale of the current Australian Diaspora is unprecedented, drawing happy-go-lucky youngsters, the best and brightest graduates, high achievers and retirees seeking new challenges. Although researchers can only find a tenuous link between the political climate and emigration, undoubtedly many have left disappointed by the direction the country has taken since 1996. Big intercontinental moves need a push to amplify the pull.

Over the past decade under John Howard’s leadership Australia has become a much more cynical, unimaginative and materialistic place. Gone is the sense of crafting a unique environment, characterised by cultural diversity, openness, inclusiveness, Aboriginal reconciliation and a creative yet pragmatic approach to policy-making, most notably economic deregulation with a social net that provided the basis for the subsequent boom. The spirit captured by the Sydney Olympics and beamed to the world in 2000 has dissipated.

That outward-looking, self-confident Australia has become defensive, socially and culturally divided and domestically complacent. It still works better than most places, but it is no longer a demonstration project on the future.

Instead Australians have jettisoned much of their carefree larrikinism and learnt to be fearful, seeking solace in perfectly appointed homes bursting with appliances.

The country has grown fat on China’s insatiable appetite for minerals and energy, repaid in dollars and ever-cheaper consumer goods purchased with ballooning credit cards and mortgage redraws. The wealth generated by the long running boom - the quantum of tax revenue is unprecedented, even Treasury regularly revises its projections upwards - has not been directed into renewing social or economic infrastructure, or building social, educational or cultural capital. It has not been evenly distributed although almost everyone is better off.

As in most countries that have adopted a neo-liberal economic agenda, the rich have got richer than they could have imagined, but more than a million households still live in relative poverty and as interest rates and petrol prices rise so do the numbers in financial stress.

After an unimpressive first two terms, the post-2001 world has suited Howard. He is not afraid of being divisive - indeed he has made an art of deliberately targeting those he casts as “elites” in a series of culture wars aimed at imposing his narrowly nationalistic view of what it means to be Australian. He has learnt how to appear empathetic when necessary.

Despite widespread opposition, Howard has pulled Australia into ever closer lock-step with George Bush’s America since September 11, 2001, when by mischance he was in Washington, not far from the Pentagon as one of the al-Qaida piloted planes crashed into it.

Australian membership in 2003 “Coalition of the Willing”, the 30 countries which initially supported the invasion of Iraq, was trenchantly opposed with large rallies and widespread activism. Yet when the troops departed for the Gulf the operation, opposition appeared to dissipate, in part because the involvement, while costly, is only a notch above the symbolic. As other countries have withdrawn troops Australia has maintained its small commitment of about 1,500 troops in the region, about 500 engaged in training, logistics and support in southern Iraq. Only one Australian soldier, Jake Kovco, has died a result of “skylarking” on the base, not enemy fire.

As a consequence Iraq does not generate the same passion in Australia as in Britain or America where the roll call of daily deaths has reduced even the US Defence Secretary to tears. Australians are accustomed to deals with great and powerful allies, and prepared to accommodate them so long as the cost is not too high, and the action not too close to home and the benefits tangible - a pragmatic, if unattractive national characteristic.

The cynicism that marks this engagement has been repeated time and again over the past decade; in immigration, Aboriginal affairs, foreign relations, security, climate change, industrial relations and education. Mapped on a flow chart the pattern would be boxed as denial followed by distraction and finally belated action. As the election approaches, we have moved to the belated action frame, with (uncosted) new initiatives announced daily on education, Aboriginal affairs, climate change, broadband and health.

While this cynical style has enabled many to feel “relaxed and comfortable”, Howard’s stated ambition, it has had a corrosive impact on the character and confidence of the nation - sapping initiative, stifling creativity and undermining public engagement.

Immigration is a good example. Successful management of mass immigration has been central to the creation of the ethos of contemporary Australia, once at the international forefront with social policy that integrated new arrivals while also acknowledging and respecting cultural and religious differences. This was built into every facet of public life, from language classes and anti-discrimination laws to a dedicated national television network with an explicitly multicultural mission. Its success could be measured in many ways, the most tangible, very high rates of intermarriage between people of different backgrounds.

Howard was never comfortable with multiculturalism a concept he had branded “politically correct” and once elected he set about dismantling the mechanisms that ensured, until December 2005 when thousands of drunken “Aussies” fought equal numbers of louts “of Middle Eastern appearance” at Sydney’s Cronulla Beach, that Australia had been free of ethnic violence. In January 2007 Howard signalled it was dead, when he renamed the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship and started drafting multiple choice questions to test any would-be citizen’s understanding of Australian values.

Yet immigration rates have been at record levels for five years. Typical of the bait and switch trick that has characterised Howard’s prime ministership the very real impact of this population increase - measured in falling housing affordability, shortages of skilled labour and increasing pockets of mono-cultural suburbs - has been deflected by public attention focused on the ghastly plight of the few thousand refugees who were denied entry, sent to off-shore processing facilities or detained in desert camps and immigration centres.

Howard has made political hay for years after sowing the seeds of social distrust, declaring like the authoritarian father he often resembles, “We will decide who comes into this country” and then suggesting judgment based on ethnic characteristics.

But the mood of the country is changing, as the strong public reaction which forced the release of Dr Mohammed Haneef after he was wrongly charged with recklessly supporting terrorism, showed. Every week new polls reveal less support for the government, a trend that has left many mystified. Never before when the economy was booming has the electorate been so ungrateful. “It is as if they are no longer listening,” senior ministers complain. It is clear that the majority are no longer convinced that “father knows best”, instead according to internal Liberal Party polling leaked this week they consider the prime minister at 68 an “old, tricky and dishonest” liability.

The polls are now revealing that beneath the complacency fostered by strong economic growth, dissatisfaction is real and not confined to traditional Labor supporters. Some of the prime minister’s most strident critics are former leaders of the Liberal Party, affronted by the reactionary insularity that has been encouraged by his willingness to foster an “us and them” mentality, targeting Muslims, refusing to apologise for past injustices to Aboriginal people or most recently to Dr Haneef for his “crime” of association.

Just as British Labour learnt how to develop and implement an inclusive modernisation agenda from the Hawke-Keating years, John Howard learnt from Margaret Thatcher, his political heroine - a photo of them together is on proud display in his Canberra office and both his official residences.

Howard’s libertarian agenda has been almost as pervasive, but marked by less confrontation. Howard mastered the code words that ensured sufficient numbers responded “quickly, effortlessly, automatically and emotionally” to his agenda. He skilfully pitched this message to a media that had been bullied and wooed and used his favourite medium - talk-back radio - to reach lower middle class and working class “battlers” who were rewarded with a complex system of family income support, noisy nationalism and force-fed fear. In this he became the “stealth bomber of libertarian politics”.

The competing visions at the heart of the Australian story were once categorised by historian Manning Clark as the battle between the “enlargers” and the “punishers and straiteners”. The last decade has not belonged to the enlargers.

In 1964 Donald Horne sought to jolt the complacency of another era when punishers and straiteners prevailed, he famously described Australia as “a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck”. There is still a lot of luck in the country, fewer second-rate people, things work, life is good, but the spark of creativity, imagination and flair has not burned brightly for a long time.

Even if the polls are wrong and Labor does not win the 16 seats it needs to form government later this year, a new spirit is blossoming. It promises to displace the fearful cynicism that has prevailed and pushed many people abroad. Over the past year more than 300,000 people have flocked to see Keating the Musical, a high camp, witty political cabaret that celebrates Paul Keating’s bold vision, his flamboyant language and personal style.

It is a sure bet that in 2017 Howard the Musical will not be the sell-out show of the year.