Classless
Wherein our narrator stops whinging long enough
to make some observations.
Last evening I went to bed at 7 PM, and slept all
the way through to 4 AM. Whee! Sleep! It felt very good, and even better to
go down for another hour between 5:30 and 6:30 AM. Here's hoping I can maintain
some sort of normal sleep schedule.
But
enough about me. There's been far too much about me in this blog lately, and
that's got to stop. Let's get back to talking about Australia. I had one of my
minor ephiphanies on Friday, while riding home on the bus. Australia is a
classless Britain. I don't mean they're all insensitive clods, but rather, the
most common complaint about the UK which I hear from my ex-pat friends is that
there is still, very clearly a class structure in the country. There's a Ruling
class, an Upper class, a Middle class, and a Lower class. There is very little
movement between the classes; occasionally someone might move from the Middle
class into the Upper class, but even that's rare, and takes an awful lot of
money. No one ever moves into the Ruling class. And I'm not sure that anyone
actually moves out of the Lower class, either. Social mobility is constrained
by tradition in Britain.
It's not that
way in Australia. Now, while it would be going too far to say that there is only
a vast middle class in Australia - because most certainly there are rich people
and poor people here, as there are everywhere - there isn't any visible
reification of those economic realities within the class structure. That's true
in the two other formerly-British colonies of Canada and the United States, as
well, so it's not particularly suprising that it's happened here. What is
surprising is that in many ways I find in Australia a cultural copy of Britain.
It's not that it isn't unique - it is. But here, far more than in Canada and
the United States, they look to Britain as the cultural
exemplar.
So, in some sense, Australia
is the best that British culture has to offer, with none of the downsides.
You've got a tidy, comfortable population. People are taxed (about 40%, given
my first paycheck, not all that different from the US) to pay for a high level
of social services. There's comprehensive medical insurance. Unemployment
compensation. The government takes a portion of your paycheck (superannuation)
and invests it for your retirement. All in all, it's tidy, cozy and seems to
work quite well. The Australian economy is humming along at a steady 4% growth
rate, while Europe, the US and Asia (excepting China and India) limp along
lethargically.
In other words,
whatever they're doing here, it's working. The only bump I see on the horizon
is the real estate bubble that is surely forming in Sydney, with houses going
for outrageous prices, and a near frenzy of investing in property. That does
look dangerous, and if it suddenly bursts, the country could well be plunged
into recession.
So all this tidy
success may contribute to a certain quietude. Things are going well here, but
they're not exciting. There aren't any screaming highs like the tech bubble in
the US, or lows like crash the ruined Southeast Asia in 1997. Things
are...dull. That's not an indictment, to be sure: when things get interesting,
culturally, people tend to get hurt, and badly. But I do think it makes young
people a bit restless. Most young Australians spend a year touring the world,
and many work abroad, in Canada or Britain or the USA. But they all come home,
eventually. And why wouldn't you? The climate is nice, it's a great place to
raise the kids, and you can be assured of retiring in comfort, grilling up
shrimps on the barbie, and playing with the grandkids, until the time comes to
shuff off the mortal coil, and leave this gentle land
behind.
Surely, I must be romanticizing
this. It couldn't possibly be that nice. Could it? Is this the reason that
Australians are consistently ranked as the happiest people on
Earth?
There are downsides; while the
state here is not at all authoritarian, there is a lot more involvement of the
state in human affairs than you'd find in, say, the United States. You're
dealing with paperwork and bureaucracy at a far more comprehensive level than
you might be in the US. Still, so long as the state minds its own business -
and given the brothels in Sydney (there are a few just blocks from my house) and
the permissive culture which allows a queer community to thrive there, the state
doesn't seem to be minding anyone's morals - it may not be utterly abhorrent.
But that's not the kind of thing you learn overnight; it takes time to discover
the extent of contract which exists between the ruling and the
ruled.
The question is: do I want to
find out?
Posted: Tue - October 28, 2003 at 08:07 AM