Children in Fast Lane Australia

Extract

We are all familiar with Donald Horne's descriptive phrase “The Lucky Country” as applied to Australia. It was coined during the resources boom years of the late 'sixties. It referred to the luck we have to be living in a country so rich in mineral resources – all we had to do was to dig it out of the ground and sell the raw stuff to equally boom economies overseas. Actually those economies then converted the stuff into manufactured goods – cars, fridges, television sets, plastic toys and so on, which they then flogged back to us … and we could afford to buy – much of the money our wealth generated went to make already comfortably-off people more comfortable - not much went to the not so comfortable or to the really poor. But in line with the optimistic theories in economics, the trickle effect of the boom years would ensure that the poor too got a gnaw at the bones thrown to them; distribution of wealth already distorted, stayed distorted. Then came Gough and a new era was about to dawn, the new wealth would be used toward producing a more egalitarian society and an enhanced infra structure of welfare sevices, a spanking new health service, a broadening of the social security system, more job opportunities, free tertiary education, the Australian Assistance Plan, and the list went on. But history has a mischievous, even misanthropic turn of mind, and no sooner was Gough crowned than the resources market turned sour and the money started to dry up, the dream faded and you know the rest. The Fraser years were years of cutback and belt-tightening, of dour and unglamorous attempts to keep the ship afloat. No more vision of building a new Jerusalem in Canberra's green and pleasant land.