Down Under/A Few Right Moves
Cranston, Maurice
DOWN UNDER A FEW RIGHT MOVES P rime Minister Bob Hawke's Labor I– government is busy burying socialism. The last party conference accepted his proposal to sell off the airlines, the...
...As soon as they were released, they mobilized Australian workers into a militant political force, one the Communists almost got a grip on in the 1950s...
...Immigrants from rural southern Europe have added a Mediterranean joie de vivre to the solid Anglo-Irish bulk of the population...
...Second, while the government rejects public ownership, it clings to syndicalism, i.e., to trade-union domination of industry and commerce...
...Every daily paper in the state of Victoria lost circulation (the Melbourne Herald 9 percent), and the Adelaide News in South Australia lost 7 percent...
...Since the possession of either skill or money has been demanded of every immigrant, there is no underclass of the unskilled and alienated turning to drugs and crime, as there is in the United States and Western Europe...
...In vocal music, Australia is second only to Italy...
...Hawke has convinced the public that he is in command of his party, but whether he can convince his countrymen of the need to tackle syndicalism head-on is another matter...
...More practical are the conservationists in the mining industry, who have an excellent record of taking care of the land...
...The past year was a bad one for publishing...
...Sport is taken as seriously as religion in Tibet...
...in August, he said there was no recession...
...They are free of that ruinous middle-class disease, anxiety...
...The conspicuous absentees are the leading ladies of feminism...
...Australia's immigration policy was nevertheless largely a success...
...Even Hawke, who often plays the part of barroom redneck, has been known to swoon in the presence of a diva...
...Qantas, the most attractive of the industries to be privatized, lost $Al25 million in 1990 (compared to a profit of $A177 million the year before), so it won't have the appeal that a prospering British Airways had in 1984 when Mrs...
...Those who bought land, which was more extensive and more expensive than land in Canada, tended to be younger sons of the English land-owning gentry, who held the Tory notion that the government should give more consideration to agriculture than to industry and commerce...
...it exports coal, wool, gold, wheat, and oil...
...This was shortly before Keating's favorable rating in opinion polls dropped from 68 percent in August to 27 percent in December...
...It attracts both conservatives and progressives, but its commitment to a national interest deprives it of the support of factions—the unions are behind the Labor party, while the farmers back the National (formerly Country) party...
...His oratory, a distinctive mix of sentimentalism and common sense, won the day at last fall's conference, as he convinced Labor to repudiate its traditional commitment to state ownership of industry...
...Hawkes handling of privatization is one reason for his rebound...
...A few months ago, it looked as if they might join with other blocs in replacing Bob Hawke with Paul Keating as party leader...
...Construction has come to a standstill, with vacancies for skilled workers down by more than 50 percent in the past year...
...to 5 p.m., because the university cannot afford to pay union overtime rates to staff after business hours and the unions will not allow the university to employ graduate students to keep the premises open...
...The Asian minority has discreetly Westernized, and, in any case, is not numerous enough to alarm those Australian nationalists in dread of the Yellow Peril...
...Third, the government is determined to continue intervening in the economy, even after it has sold off its industries...
...voting is compulsory...
...As a result, Australia acquired a working-class population sophisticated enough to make sure it received a high price for its labor...
...The last party conference accepted his proposal to sell off the airlines, the telecommunications systems, some pipelines, and several smaller industries...
...The Greens—who demand protection for both vegetation and the animals, such as kangaroos, that destroy it—are_ not the most logical champions of the environment...
...the unskilled were unwanted...
...Economists have shown that if the government were to withdraw, farmers would have to switch to the finer wool, which they could easily sell to consumers...
...The unions' first priority is reducing working' hours, and Australia's work week is now about the shortest in the world...
...In March, Keating said there would be no recession...
...they want the subsidy system to continue, even if the stockpile becomes a mountain...
...In a country as beautiful and temperate as Australia, the tendency is to live for the day rather than work for the morrow...
...Whereas in America politics is world politics, the President a world leader, and the taxpayer the underwriter of world defense, Australian politics is about Australia...
...There is a distinctly Mediterranean quality to Australian politics: intrigue is frequent, making the decline in daily paper sales particularly disturbing...
...Australia was so far away, and its soil so hard to cultivate, that a colony would flourish only if immigration were subsidized...
...Only the Islamic group seems out of step, so much so that a senior woman judge recently suggested that polygamy be legalized to keep the Moslems happy...
...and, in late November, he suddenly said that there had been a recession, but the worst of it was over...
...But it is institutions, not non-optional franchise, that best explain Australians' political passion...
...The few successful manufacturing firms export such little-traded goods as concrete and packaging...
...The Australian upper class thus made common cause with the Australian skilled working class...
...Australia ought now to make swift economic progress, but that won't happen anytime soon...
...W hen the British were colonizing Australia, they could not leave it to immigrants to make their own way and build a settlement, as they had done in North America...
...work commands nothing like the same devotion...
...Bank profits are down, due to bad loans and bankruptcies in the smaller trades and industries...
...The lesser figures who are left to plead for women's rights have an uphill struggle in a country where males traditionally prefer outdoor sports and drinking with "mates" to courting females, and where women's rights has to compete with animal rights, gay rights, Aboriginals' rights, and—above all—conservationism, which has already produced a Tasmanian Green party that holds power in the state parliament...
...Its Sydney Opera House is not only an architectural sensation for which citizens willingly paid astronomical sums, but also a temple to the national art of song...
...The legislator is likely to be the man next door, particularly in such places as Tasmania, where the population is small and politicians numerous...
...The library in which I had a desk is open from 10 a.m...
...He has since won a measure of popularity by sending a naval force to the Gulf, despite left-wing demands for nonintervention...
...Next, the colonial authorities in Australia had to finance the journeys of poorer free immigrants, and could do so only by selling land to rich immigrants...
...People are active, fit, and well fed on an old-fashioned diet...
...Their constitution demands as much...
...Besides, the stars of several arts are beginning to return...
...Australia's remaining Marxists form one of the smaller factions in the Labor party...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 21...
...The word "liberal" has not been debased in Australia as it has in America, and is still the name of a political party that preserves classic ideas of political liberty at the head of its beliefs...
...First, the country is in such deep recession that nationalized assets probably won't fetch the price they should...
...The press is an essential corrective here...
...It imports cars, computers, machinery, and electronics...
...Educated middle-class immigrants and entrepreneurs of the type who were to be the chief motor of America's progress were not encouraged to come to Australia...
...The economy was in recession for much of 1990, although federal treasurer Paul Keating refused to admit it...
...Jill Ker Conway, whose beautifully written account of an Australian woman's predicament in The Road from Coorain was a bestseller in England in 1990, transmits her message from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
...The wool industry—historically the most important in a nation that "grew on a sheep's back"—can sell to the state at a fixed price anything it doesn't sell on the open market...
...Labor members of parliament, except for a few left-wingers, are pressing for even more privatization...
...The Greens are too left-wing to appreciate this, but at least they have not yet gone the way of the German Greens in forging alliances with residual Marxists left in the pan after socialism has been flushed down the drain...
...E mployers are to blame for continuing government intervention in the economy...
...The situation was not improved by the British government's policy in the nineteenth century of transporting organizers of illegal trade unions and Irish rebel politicians to serve their sentences in Australian penal colonies...
...Australia has a remarkably high proportion of skilled men in its workforce, yet it exports hardly any manufactured products...
...The government paid for convicts and soldiers to settle there, and paid lavishly, for fear 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 the French would colonize the place first...
...automobile Maurice Cranston, professor of political science at the London School of Fxonomicg spent last fall as a fellow at the Humanities Research Center in Canberra dealers cannot sell their cars...
...TN° of the three leading television networks are in receivership...
...Australia remains blind to the example of England, by Maurice Cranston where the best and most varied press in Europe flourishes only because foreign owners—the Astors, Beaverbrooks, Thomsons, and Murdochs—have been allowed to enter the market...
...The four leading newspapers in Melbourne and Sydney were consolidated into two, and several smaller local papers lost their independence to the three big chains...
...Statistics in December showed the recession worsening...
...scandals are never covered up, as in Europe...
...M ost Australians, polygamous or no, regard happiness as a duty...
...Even in Sydney's most louche quarters, it's safe to walk at night, and every Australian city has a kind of open-air life Americans have not known for forty years...
...The cost of labor is so high that Australian industries can neither attract capital nor compete with the industries of other nations...
...The trade unions' preeminence dampens hopes of recovery...
...Even so, Australians take more interest in politics than most people...
...It might be supposed to have middle-class support, but the middle class in Australia is not the powerful bloc it is in the United States or England...
...Farmers cannot- sell their wool...
...The Liberal party remains in opposition...
...Australia has a more vigorous cultural life than one might expect, given that so many of its stars have departed for England or America...
...There are historical reasons for this...
...For years, Australians put up with the inefficiency of their socialized industries, and it took the repudiation of state ownership in Eastern Europe to convince them to get rid of their own...
...The Nine Network lost $A618 million in 1990...
...Germaine Greer, whose book The Female Eunuch is a bible of the women's movement, shows no sign of leaving her homes in Tuscany and England to return to Sydney...
...Public lamentations greeted these developments, but the state still forbids foreign ownership of newspapers...
...The men whose passages were paid were carefully chosen for their skills...
...There is still a large reservoir of talent, and a public to appreciate it...
...But the farmers dread the risks and shake-out of the change...
...Lastyear, the state bought 70 percent of the crop—a coarse wool, unwanted in a market eager for a finer weave—and stockpiled it...
...Thatcher sold it off...
...Journalists share these habits of mind...
...Union members strike at the drop of a hat, airline pilotsand actors as readily as truck drivers and keypunchers...
Vol. 24 • March 1991 • No. 3
