So what are we Aussies missing out on then?
You know what they say: everybody is a genius in a bull market.
So you have sun, good food, plenty of money and little immigration.
Life is good (if you are not living in the desert naked).
Unfortunatly, there is nowhere in the world where things stay nice and easy. The run ended in europe after 1970, it ended in the US after 1990 and it will end in Autralia.
Now, when things are getting hard, having weak democratic institutions, no political awareness and corporate medling is going to hit hard.
But I wouldn't be too cocky because it's not like we didn't mess up loads of things in our own countries, even if we have strong political commitment.
Besides, if I could enjoy your life style, I would probably be way less sensitive to privacy issues.
So don't take what I said as the words of someone who has the ethical upper hand, because I certainly don't.
And Australia is damn comfy.
Also my partner will probably convince me to go back live there with her at one point, so I'll enjoy it as much as I can.
I wouldn't be so sure that they'll ever need to abandon their crutch of geological resources. There's nothing particularly industrious or forward-looking about Australia, precisely because they can dig up dirt and sell it at a premium.
The book anti-fragile have a very good bit on that.
The point is everything moves, nothing stays the same, good and bad runs go hand in hand.
But imagine if a dictator of the last century had access to Facebook social graph...
You gotta be careful when it's good, to not have it too bad when it's getting bad later
What is stupid, with Europe and the USA both planning a tax on carbon, in just a few decades the OP's wish will most likely come true, yet Australia keeps wishing for a different future.
Every side of politics has acted like complete cowards on this issue, with the Liberals the worst offenders - they pay it lip service every election then do nothing while handing out cash to the coal miners.
No amount of economic wealth is going to help once the environment has been damaged beyond repair.
There was a smear campaign in 2016 regarding a state-wide blackout, caused by severe weather affecting the distribution & transmission infrastructure. [see #1] The incumbant political party used this as an opportunity to blame the renewable generators (and state government, from the "opposite side" of politics). [see #2]
The same severe weather event would have affected any power generator.
[1] https://www.aer.gov.au/wholesale-markets/compliance-reportin... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout...
Instead, the incumbant governments just subsidise the inumbant industries; or rather, the existing "winners". (E.g. subsidising Murdoch media, mining companies, all pulling in millions/billions in profit.)
Australia has one of the lowest rankings in terms of economic complexity [see #1]. Until the government can subsidise emerging markets, there's no reason for businesses to take risks - the low population can't support it.
Propping up existing industries will eventually be a failing strategy. When Australia's "luck" (exploitable resources) runs out, "what comes after will not be so comfortable". But there's still time to steer away from that discomfort. (Unlike the imminent ecology collapse...)
[1] https://www.aumanufacturing.com.au/astralias-low-economic-co...
Australia has one of the highest rates of inbound immigration in the world. Number 2 in the OECD actually, right after Luxembourg.
And I, like the overwhelming majority of Australians, consider high immigration intakes to be a good thing.
Check your sources.
[1] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/migratio...
[2] https://data.oecd.org/migration/foreign-born-population.htm
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1133441/australia-attitu...
Also, I consider it a chance to be able to go to school as well, it doesn't mean exams are easy.
Immigration is the same. It gives, and it takes.
Because australia is an island with a pretty good legal filter for immigrants, they get less social tensions.
Also because they have plenty of space and money, right now they can welcome immigrants way more easily.
And finally because immigration from asia is a good part of the immigration source, which also makes things easier culturally.
The situations is different in every part of the world.
Immigration is not a single variable universal phenomenom.
Today if you talk about the challenge that diversity can bring, you are labelled with pretty harshed words. But nothing is free.
Source: I've been an immigrant a lot.
I grew up here in our system and was only vaguely aware there was even a second verse in our national anthem. The people trying to become citizens here and have only been here for a short time knew _all_ the words.
Like, you don't think all the people in India or The Philippines or Chad need doctors or economic advancement?? It's just incredibly greedy and selfish. Can you imagine what a person who has just lost their child due to a preventable illness from being unable to see a doctor think when they hear some privileged person from an unimaginably wealthy country that already has an order of magnitude more doctors per capita and whose children will never see the suffering theirs routinely do -- boasting how wonderful it is that they are harvesting all the best healthcare workers from their country. Makes you shudder to think about it really.
These same people will bemoan a corporation from their country going to another one to conduct a resource extraction business (exploitation!) and yet when it comes to their own interests, they are quite happy to take and exploit a less well off country's most valuable resource which is its human capital.
Most of the people I talk to in Australia are more concerned about all the people that DON'T get let in.
Another lens is that countries are in the business of providing defence, governance, economic opportunity and lifestyle services. Immigrants are customers.
It is neocolonialism because it is extracting the most valuable and profitable resources of less well off countries for your own benefit. Sure they can't compete with the massive incentives offered by the uber wealthy countries. Probably because those wealthy countries have been exploiting their resources including human capital in the past which keeps them poor and dependent.
But they should be thankful that their children get to sew shoes for us for a few cents a day.
Suppose we take the Phillipines and Malaysia, they (together) have about 6x the population of Australia. They have the capacity to train a lot of doctors - and a doctor can have a great life in either of those countries.
They can both also produce doctors more efficiently than Australia, partly due to living costs / ppp and population size, and partly due to Baumol's disease hitting education costs harder in AU.
But let's be honest, no country is talent-limited on doctor production. What's limited are training slots, and that is partly a practical concern... but also licensing restrictions - which tend to be regulated by doctors who have a strong interest in avoiding the oversupply of doctors.
What I am trying to say with all this is that there are many reasons someone might not be getting good medical care in say, the Phillipines but those reasons are not primarily due to doctors emigrating.
Skimming their best resources off the top can't be justified by some dry economic formula (if it happens to be correct) that just by pure coincidence results in a worse outcome for that poorer country and a better outcome for the wealthier one. Colonialists had all sorts of economic arguments too.
I would agree that the Phillipines are under-supplied according to OECD ratios but again, I don't think the problem is emigration.
Personally I think your mental model of these countries is out-of-date. They are sophisticated and industrialised but do have high inequality and some governance problems. As usual, it's a distribution problem. I think you are under-estimating their capacity and they are not at all lacking in talent, education or human resources. Australia is lucky to get skilled migrants but is by no means "draining" them. I think I'd want to see a more quantitative argument before I was willing to accept that.
There is a difference between that and the systemic concerted efforts by wealthy countries to poach and take the most valuable, skilled, educated of the human capital from poorer countries who are in positions of weakness and far less bargaining power.
I understand that the narrative is that it's about "helping the unfortunates", but really it's not. If a country wanted to help people you wouldn't "help" mainly the ones who can give them something (they are actually helping you), leaving the many more less fortunate ones in an even worse state.
In Germany(already a wealthy country) doctors move to Switzerland for better pay and better working conditions too.
It’s also very expensive to move internationally. Visas can cost up to $10,000 alone, so I doubt that so many people actually leave developing countries for developed ones.
There are also tons of people who would never move countries because their family and social circle is in that particular place or they want to make their country a better place.
I also think many people move back home from overseas to their home country, bringing their improved skillset with them.
I think you're rationalizing or painting yourself a reality that you wish was true. Brain drain from disadvantaged countries on an industrial scale is a serious problem. Not for the wealthy privileged countries who benefit of course, which is why nobody says much about it and those who do get attacked.
Now that is meaningless. There are a whole vast range of ways to be exploitative and wealthy and powerful taking from poor and powerless.
> not private citizens having the option to leave often abusive governments.
I'm talking about the aggregate outcome for the people. The greater good. It's funny the disconnect some people have here between being so fast to denounce "individualism" greed, selfishness etc., in their own countries when they see it is a detriment to them. And yet they go completely the other way when it's a benefit to them and a detriment to people of other countries. That's the height of selfishness and hypocrisy as I see it.
> By your definition, neocolonialism is simply the absence of serfdom.
No it's not.
The collective outcome may be bad for the country from which people emigrate, but the individual outcome is very good for the people who emigrate. And at a higher level of organisation, the importance of retaining one's best and brightest creates incentives for all governments to behave better than they would if it was accepted the people born in a country belonged to the rulers like some kind of global slavery system.
Trying to say it's either the industrial harvesting of the most skilled people from less advantaged countries, or it's "serfdom" is just outlandish. I don't even know where to start with that!
Graduates: 58% yes
Non-Graduates: 24% yes"
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2020/10/72-of-aussies-do-no...
Not overwhelming.
Also there are some people who are happy with immigration, but only from other culturally-compatible regions, and as long as diversity (eg. max 10% from any one country) and equality (eg. max 49% males from any one country) is part of the intake.
Many living in democracies will find this true for their country.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28139889
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/10/protest-stop-c...
Hilariously, Australians protest about their rights by trying their best to extend lockdowns further [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jul/24/anti-...
I didn't protest the lockdowns because it seems reasonable to me that you'd want to ban proximity to curtail the spread of a disease that spreads by proximity. That doesn't mean I won't protest a dictator just declaring an emergency and violating everyone's rights.
This does seem a pretty common misconception. People seem to forget that even the most liberal countries still regularly and systematically infringe on people's rights, e.g. by imprisoning criminals. But you don't see many of the anti-lockdown types protesting the existence of prisons.
In both cases, it's a matter of proportionally balancing the loss of individual rights with the interests (and indeed, other conflicting rights) of the community as a whole.
If you’re saying a government shouldn’t be locking people up so that an individuals rights aren’t violated, then you’re saying a government shouldn’t be looking after the wellbeing of its people. In which case, you’re essentially talking about anarchy.
How far along the spectrum does the emergency need to get to justify a lockdown?
For example
- The Black Plague which killed 30%~ of Europe. At what point would a lockdown be justified?
- Germany just invaded my northern border. Again. Am I allowed to force my residents to turn their lights off to avoid bombing?
Rights aren't universal, and no serious person argues this. There is always an emergency that's bad enough.
The question is 'what is bad enough' and this has no scientific answer. The answer is up to the government of the day, and the population who can decide whether to turf that government.
I feel like this is the point of contention. Many people truly don't consider things that can be taken away a right. Is the constitution a suicide pact a serious question that has been argued in the US Supreme Court (that phrased originated by a justice arguing that it wasn't... he was in the minority opinion).
I will try to keep this neutral, but people say things like "driving isn't a right, it's a priveledge"... what distinguishes between rights and priveledges?
How's that boot polish tasting?
That's a bit condescending. In recent weeks there were tens of thousands of people marching on the streets of Sydney and Melbourne to protest covid lockdowns and defend their right to free assembly.
Perfect example, nicely done.
As an Aussie I must say that I see these protests rather differently. For better or worse, Australia has gotten used to having zero COVID: people here tend to see the protesters not as brave individuals defending their rights, but as idiots who recklessly endanger the lives of others by spreading disease through a largely unvaccinated populace. Many people here are of the opinion that some ‘fundamental’ rights can and should be suspended in a critical emergency.
Thankfully only 3,500 in Sydney out of a population of 5 million. Fortunately the vast majority of Australians aren't completely selfish and thoughtless. Nobody likes lockdowns. The government doesn't benefit from them, it's not lining some evil overlord's pockets.
It feels to me that Australia will be a country suffering from PTSD once it finds a way out of the pandemic and impossible dream of zero covid.
(For comparison, here in Europe, the pandemic is largely over, and our vaccination wall is looking strong enough that even what's coming over winter shouldn't be too bad.)
They aren't benefiting from anything: the governments are all rightly tanking in popularity, and being held up by Rupert Murdoch's multi-decadal commitment to dumbing down the narrative.
When we're not in pandemic conditions, people are quite welcome to gather and protest whatever the heck they want.
Question: why is there not a flu pandemic every year? Answer: because the flu is not a novel virus, and does not hit the population in the same way. The flu can be very severe, which is why we vaccinate against it, but within any given population there is a multitude of degrees of existing immunity from previous rounds of flu through the population.
COVID-19 is a novel virus - no human on Earth until 1.5 years ago had ever been infected with it, and it's spread follows the expectation of a novel virus: with no prior immunity, the entire population is initially infectable.
This, obviously however, is not a continuing situation: prior infection with COVID-19 confers immunity against COVID-19, as well as effective immunity against the variant mutations which have arisen. There have not been cases of reinfection within over a year. Even if COVID-19 can infect vaccinated populations, it does so with less severe outcomes, and having done so leaves behind a reservoir of now immune recipients.
In fact even if a new COVID-19 strain arose well after infection, people who had been exposed or vaccinated to earlier strains would not present the sort of completely vulnerable population which the initial COVID-19 virus represented.
COVID-19 is now going to be an endemic disease, but that hardly means people will keep catching up, but instead that in any given year a small subset of the population is likely to contract it and recover - possibly requiring medical intervention, but this is a number which can be managed and planned for.
What has made COVID-19 a problem though, is the novel nature of the virus and it's rapid spread. We are perfectly able to deal with expected loads on healthcare, but not with a surge of 10-20% of the entire population of a country within a 6-12 month window with over a month of recovery time. But against a vaccinated population that figure falls by almost 92-96%, with 60-70% of people never developing symptoms. That is a manageable number over the same time frame.
COVID-19 is not like the flu, and infectious novel diseases will always require immediate and drastic countermeasures. An ideal outcome for COVID-19 would have been containment in Wuhan: it would have lent plenty of time to develop, test, and incorporate into routine vaccine schedules innoculations against it.
We all keep good spacing (1.5m) between each other, wear face masks, etc.
Very, very different to the protests apparently, judging by the photos in the newspapers.
Australia is a largely apathetic country, complacent because of their own wealth and removal from the international community.
But the situation is going to turn quite negatively for Australia, its becoming progressively worse because nobody actually believes in anything fundamental. We keep installing savvy businessmen politicians rather than people with a longterm vision for the country.
The result is exacerbating social problems. It makes you think where the countries priorities are when homelessness in Melbourne has gotten terribly worse in the past 7 years. People rather maximise their gains on the property market, borrowing exorbitant amounts of money to buy property they cant really afford, meanwhile devaluing the currency.
The result is the social fabric of a nation disintegrating.
Most EU countries are not sovereign states, given by the fact they don’t control their borders nor their economy (See Greece, or the other affectionately named PIGS countries). There is an insane amount of influence from Germany and Belgium.
This is a glasshouses and stones situation.