Oz is changing

Old Nov 16th 2003, 6:19 pm
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This is a cut and paste from the FinReview about the changing face of Australia. Wonder how many people are moving to Australia to escape all this without realising the changes that are taking place in the society here.


The new Australian (A little like the old American)

In the early years of the 21st century, Australia changed from being a nation of home owners to one of landlords and tenants. At an average Sydney auction today, those most likely to win with a wink or a nod are small investors, second-home buyers or downshifters. The first-home buyers - once the engine of the property market, darling of politicians and barometer of the economy - will win only 13 per cent of the offerings.

Home is no longer an Australian's castle. Home is super fund, financial instrument, TV series, debt lever, renovation site.

The changing faces in auction rooms are both a reflection of emerging Australian values and a shaper of those values. Aspirational, individualistic, self-sufficient, hard-working and entrepreneurial, the new Australian looks a lot like the old American. How these emerging characteristics are recalibrating politics, business, economics and the shape of our days is still filtering through; how they evolve over time will be fascinating reading, but just a glance at them gives some idea of how comprehensive the changes in the country's values have been.

Aspirational
It was shadow treasurer Mark Latham who tagged new suburbia as full of aspirationals, but it was Prime Minister John Howard's exploitation of the aspirationals' fears and dreams that won the last election. Although the term has been interpreted as materialistic and self-centred, it does describe a new class that might once have been called working class, with all those leftist, unionist connotations. It is now a mobile class, through its own labour and initiative.

It is the aspirationals who have been most enthusiastic about investing in property; it is to them that television programmers pitch their millionaire quiz shows and renovation reality tales; and it is the new middle Australia that has underpinned a sustained consumption boom. Most importantly, it is at this group that national political policy is aimed, because while aspirationals are a real demographic located in strategic postcodes, the characteristics of the aspirational are also a more prominent part of most people's values.

Self-sufficient and entrepreneurial
The shift of resources from the public to the private domain has forced all Australians to be more self-sufficient. A generation ago, free school education was chosen by the vast majority, university was free, medicine was available to all equally, roads were paid for with taxes and the pension was an assumption rather than a default position. That so many more are paying tolls, school and university fees, superannuation contributions and insurance premiums has eroded the sense of citizenship. We are now consumers. The customer is not just the person on the other side of the shop counter. We take our consumer sensibilities to uni courses, schools and doctors' surgeries and into parliament. Government is no longer seen as the manager of national interests but a service provider.

Once a nation of staff, we have been freed, or forced, to become entrepreneurs of our own lives. The dotcom boom created an era of nimble small businesses, the sharemarket boom put scrip in most household drawers (51 per cent after the Telstra floats), and the deconstruction of the full-time workforce led more workers to hang their shingle on the door to the spare bedroom. One in five workers now runs their own business, rising to one in three for those close to retirement.

Hard-working
It was less than a generation ago that Australians considered smoko sacrosanct, looked askance at the hard-working Japanese, got paid to go on holiday, and used the slowest worker on the floor as a performance benchmark.

Now full-timers work among the longest hours in the industrial world (International Labour Organisation), 1.7 million work more than 50 hours a week (Australian Bureau of Statistics), and average working hours have increased at a faster rate than in any other country (by an average 3.7 hours a week in two decades).

As John Buchanan of acirrt notes, the land of the long weekend has become the land of the lost weekend.

The lengthening and intensification of work are only part of a workplace revolution. The growing divide between full- and part-time work, the rise of the contractor, the decline of union membership, early retirement and the growth of franchise business are also part of the story.

In a generation, the number of people who have been in the same job for five to 10 years has dropped by a quarter. Jim Bright of the University of NSW says the students he teaches will have "five careers, not five jobs".

These more competitive and less institutional workplaces have moulded new national traits. ANOP's Rod Cameron sees it as the death of mateship; IBIS's Phil Ruthven prefers to describe it as a shift from serfdom to self-determination. It is restructuring other parts of our lives. A Saulwick poll has found that most (54 per cent) are too tired to go out after a working week; the low fertility rate has been blamed partly on hard-working households; and all agree that it has been the death of loyalty.

Individualistic
The Australian identity has traditionally been a collective one. Arriving on boats as convicts, settling the land as dirt-poor squatters, or joining the union as school leavers, much of our history has been crafted as a collective.

But the ties that bind communities have been unravelling under the pressure of work, postcode mobility and fractured families.

The club/pub culture that once bound communities continues to wither. In just the past three years the number of clubs has fallen 8 per cent, while the solitary pleasure of going to the movies has boomed - numbers up 15 per cent in the past three years. We bowl alone now.

Union membership is down from its historic high of 62 per cent 40 years ago to 24 per cent, while the old union stamping ground, the trades, has been taken over by franchise owners and contractors.

The classic parents-and-children household is dwindling at about the same rate as lone-person households are increasing. One in four homes today are inhabited by just one person - a figure that could reach one in three within the next two decades.

Whether it's of our own volition or as a consequence of modern pressures, Australians are more likely to think of themselves as individuals than as a collective, and they have looser ties with institutions and with other people. In the cultural landscape they resemble the six characters in the TV sitcom Friends. Freed of old family commitments, not yet tied down to new families, they flit between jobs and relationships, committed only to themselves, their café and the couch.

Apathetic or apolitical
While Australians have responded to the emerging global challenges by becoming more flexible, independent and, frankly, hard-nosed, they appear to have done this at the expense of their community responsibilities.

Social researcher Hugh Mackay is more acerbic: "We have taken our eye off the big picture. We don't want to know. We've shifted our gaze to the things we can understand and control - the minutiae of our personal lives.

"We prefer TV programs about backyards to news and current affairs; we have rediscovered the healing power of retail therapy; we have become more self-absorbed; we are obsessed with the idea of security. We're more prejudiced and, correspondingly, less interested in information that might challenge those prejudices."

Another form of disengagement is measured by those who are dropping out or, at least, dropping out of the main game. The Australia Institute reports that 23 per cent of 30 to 60-year-olds have deliberately downsized their engagement with the work/spend cycle by taking less demanding and lower-paid jobs. As the institute's Clive Hamilton told the Ideas Conference in Adelaide: "The downshifters, often people with no more than average incomes, expressed a desire to do something more meaningful with their lives, and to achieve this aim they considered it was necessary to consume less, work less and slow down."

Perhaps the third form of disengagement with the Australian way of life is reflected in the number of Australians who have left our shores. In the increasingly congested traffic of workers criss-crossing the globe, Australians are leaving in greater numbers - almost 5 per cent of the working population is overseas at the moment.

While commentators worry about the apathy towards national politics, they may be missing the bigger picture. Maybe national politics doesn't matter as much as it used to.

The global pressures on Australians have forced them to restructure their working lives, and their response has been faster than that of many other first-world countries' citizens.

Others have taken the less-travelled path and opted out of the mainstream - a move they have made without any political party support, without any institutional support, without even an ideology showing them the way. And still others are living the global lifestyle, engaging with foreign workplaces, economies and, possibly, foreign issues.

Whether it's a franchise lawnmower working towards a bigger barbecue or the teacher who has opted out to a sea-change town to do relief teaching or the Melbourne lawyer working in London, for them it's the local and the global that increasingly shape their lives. Not the national.
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Old Nov 16th 2003, 7:35 pm
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I would say that the entire article is spot on, very informative and definately worth reading right through. It gives a good picture of the way life is in Australia (although more representative of the non-rural population)
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Old Nov 16th 2003, 8:09 pm
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I agree that this article strikes a chord ... I recognise our life choices there, and acknowledge their pros and cons.
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