Enough Porkies Its Time For Some Home Truths (from the Sydney Morning Herald)

I often read great articles, but only occasionally ones I feel compelled to share. Thank you to Nathan Parris for bringing this gem of an article to my attention ...

Foreigners can get the funniest impressions of Australia. A charming, educated, middle-aged American working in the US Federal Reserve Bank told me some years ago that it was her dream to visit the Sydney Opera House.

So why don't you? "Oh, I couldn't stand the sharks!" came her emphatic answer. Sharks? Puzzled, I asked what she meant. "The Opera House is right there in the harbour, with sharks all around," she explained as if I were especially thick. "I am completely terrified of sharks."

But, I tried to assure her, you don't need to cross the water to get to the Opera House. It's on the foreshore. Just stroll along the walkway, or catch a taxi to the door. The land route is shark-free.

Was she pleased to discover that she'd been under a misapprehension, that her dream was now in reach? Not a bit of it. She simply refused to believe me. She actually scoffed at my insistence, as if I were a trickster trying to play a prank on a gullible foreigner.

It occurred to me that this woman probably knew only two things about Australia: it's home to a sublime piece of architecture on Sydney Harbour, and it has lots of sharks. All she had done was to put them together. With odd results. What she lacked was perspective.

In the past year, this column has been preoccupied with the porkies and porkbarrels of our national polity - as a political column must be. But for a moment, I'd like to put aside the scalpel and the quibble and get some perspective on the place.

Australia is a bloody miracle. If you had set out to design a successful, free, peaceful, prosperous, tolerant, modern society, you would not have started with Australia's beginnings.

On the contrary, Australia's white settlement set it up for failure. The population was stocked with Britain's criminal outcasts. Charles Darwin was confident that our convict genes were our destiny.

After inspecting colonial Australia in 1836, he wrote that "it can hardly fail to degenerate". White settlement had begun in criminality and barbarity and it wasn't going to get any better, the great naturalist determined.

Similarly, the landscape was most unlikely to support a prosperous society. Jared Diamond, a professor of geology and environmental health sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in his 2005 book Collapse that "ecologically, the Australian environment is exceptionally fragile, the most fragile of any First World country except perhaps Iceland."

Australia has less rain than any other continent apart from Antarctica and about a third less than the next-driest continent, Asia.

Soil nutrients were thin from the outset. And when the separate British colonies federated to form the new Commonwealth of Australia, the first moments of nationhood were not very promising for a society hoping to develop any sort of tolerance.

One of the very first acts of the new Parliament was a law prohibiting Chinese immigrants, the policy known as White Australia. Aggressive racism was one of the strongest common bonds bringing the new states together.

Yet, somehow, from criminal, brutal, racist beginnings, the country developed into a law-abiding, harmonious, tolerant society. The precariousness of the environment remains a problem, and it only gets bigger.

But Australia not only feeds itself, it manages to supply 20 per cent of all global food exports. This is testament to the ingenuity and resilience of its farmers and scientists over two centuries.

But at least the prosperity of the place was guaranteed, right? The mineral wealth lying just below the ground has given us a foolproof way of paying for high living standards, surely?

Not really. Coal, gas, oil, gold, copper, zinc, bauxite, uranium and diamonds are valuable commodities.

But, in the long story of humankind, it is normal that resource-rich societies end up failures. Paradoxically, the apparent blessings of nature usually turn out to be a curse. Not just most of the time, but virtually all the time. Resource wealth usually comes with high inflation, extreme indebtedness, corruption and civil war.

Professor Paul Stevens, from the University of Dundee in Scotland, surveyed 52 resource-rich developing countries and found that only four had managed to extract a real national benefit from nature's bounty: Chile, Malaysia, Indonesia and Botswana. That is a dismal record.

A large surge of money gushing into a fragile state will almost always break it, not make it.

Only a handful of truly resource-rich nations have made it all the way through the obstacle course to become First World countries: the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. (Norway sits atop a gusher of oil, but it was rich before it found the black gold in the 1960s.)

The common Anglo origins of these successful countries hint at one of the explanations for their success. The neo-Britains imported a ready-made set of helpful habits and institutions - a concept of citizens' rights protected in the common law, the rudiments of parliamentary democracy, an independent judiciary, the right to private property, a strong work ethic and the structures for capitalist risk-taking.

And, in starting afresh, these new societies also managed to leave behind some of the worst aspects of their colonial mother. We shrugged off the ruinous British class system, developing an aristocracy of merit rather than rule by an entitled idiocy. Egalitarianism is a deep well of national strength.

This constellation of forces created strong states that were able to extract vast natural wealth without destroying their society and their economies in the process.

Yet even the few societies, like Australia's, that managed to build a successful country in a resource-rich land remain under constant threat from man-made economic disaster.

The US is a case in point. Apparently unassailable only a decade ago, it is now an enfeebled giant. US unemployment stands at 10 per cent, against Australia's 5.7 per cent. Child poverty in America was 20 per cent even before the recession, against 12 per cent in Australia.

America maintains a mighty war machine that it can finance only at the discretion of the Communist Party of China. The US President may be commander in chief, but he wields a military on hire-purchase.

Or New Zealand, which discovered last year that it was so indebted to the world that it had effectively lost sovereign control of its fiscal policy. So just when it needed to be able to stimulate growth, in the midst of a global recession, it found it could not.

In sum, a bounty of resources is neither a sufficient condition nor even a necessary condition of national wealth.

Indeed, if we relied on minerals and energy alone, we'd be a developing country. Mining and energy, even in the midst of a commodities boom, accounted for a tad less than 8 per cent of our total economy in 2006-07, and about one-third of exports.

Australia did drift into a long, post-war economic malaise. But the country snapped out of it, thanks to the Hawke-Keating reforms and the Howard-Costello follow-through. The status report for Project Australia is that, however you measure it, Australia is one of the richest countries in the world.

According to the most comprehensive measure, the United Nations annual index of human development that ranks 182 countries, Australia is second only to Norway in enjoying the best living conditions available to the human species. This index includes life expectancy, education and purchasing power. If it incorporated climate, of course, Norway would have to vacate the dais.

And Australia is not just one of the very richest, but also one of the very fairest. The Paris-based club of 30 rich democracies, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, reports that in the past few years the level of income inequality in Australia fell below that of the OECD average for the first time.

It turns out that John Howard and Peter Costello delivered the closest thing to a socialist paradise that Australia has seen. Who knew?

Opportunity abounds: "Australia is one of the most socially mobile countries in the OECD. What your parents earned when you were a child has very little effect on your own earnings," the OECD reported last year.

Australians enjoy First World living standards, but are as carefree as the most contented peoples of the Caribbean. A British think tank, the New Economics Foundation, this year rated Australians as the third happiest people in the world after the citizens of Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. The Brits themselves came in a glum 74th.

Is the place perfect? Of course not. Aboriginal Australia is a parallel universe suffering Third World conditions, for a start. Then there's the problem of water and climate, the state of our hospitals, the high cost of housing, a mind-numbing booze culture, the rotten State Government of NSW and, of course, there are the sharks.

But let's put our gripes in perspective. We share a country that's one of the safest and most stable on Earth. People from around the world have left behind ancient strife and anguish to create a country of unsurpassed harmony and hope, that offers wide-open opportunity for the ambitious and a social safety net for those who fall by the wayside.

If there is a sweet spot in human existence, Australia, you're in it.

Eyes Wide Open But Still Out Of Focus

I have mixed feelings about the result of a week-long, but really years-long, climate summit just concluded in Copenhagen.

On the one hand the mere fact the world’s leaders turn up to such a gathering shows that humanity is making progress towards recognition of climate change as the most enormous issue of our species’ existence. Further, the fact that expectations leading up the summit and discussions during the summit were so widely and intensely followed by the world’s media proves that these existential issues are categorically in the mainstream consciousness of people everywhere. These are the necessary conditions to unraveling the political and commercial complexity that bridles our response to the accepted knowledge that the ‘life-conducive’ environment we live in is under threat. Until people force politicians to correctly prioritize the restoration of our ecological systems, a multi-lateral universal action plan will continue to elude us.

Government’s role here is to lead. Lead by showing us the high road that individuals and businesses in one country or another either don’t know exists or are too scared to take. It’s true that no one segment of society can fix our problems in isolation. Ultimately it requires business, households and government to work in unison globally, which is why meetings such as we have just witnessed are the only way forward.

The universal grip of global capitalism is alive and well. Whether you are a developing nation or a developed nation, I believe the key to this seemingly impossible problem of global warming lies in making ‘being clean or green’ profitable. Capitalism is the only ‘other’ thing that is global. Ironically, the pursuit (sometimes reckless at points in our history) of economic progress that got us into this mess, will be the very same driving force that will get us out of it. Our only two truly universal dependencies locked in a mutual live-saving dance across the decades.

The failure to achieve binding consensus on any road map for the future in Copenhagen will be judged by history in a kinder context than the abject disappointment felt now. History will show that this week was an important stepping stone in a much longer conquest to address our most complex issue ever. When triumphant agreements are forged in the years ahead, on reflection we will agree they weren’t possible without the participation, dialogue and learning provided this week in Copenhagen.