Day 9: Sunday, Feb 17, Cairns

Today we went to church at a Baptist church within walking distance of the hostel. It was about the same size as the Sydney church, which is to say it was small. It was also a good mix of age ranges and ethnicities.

We had a fascinating lunch. We ate with a number of people from church. I was at a table with a lifelong Aussie (Allen), an immigrant from Singapore who has been here 30 years (Alice), and a Filipino who is trying to get citizenship (Belle); while Allen was the main voice, I think we got a decent range of perspectives and opinions. I had to wait on my food to be cooked, but when I joined the conversation Allen was talking about the U.S. economy. At one point he said for some unrelated reason that “Aussies pay attention to the U.S. much more than you pay attention to us simply because we have to,” and it could have applied to this as well. We talked about the subprime mess and he talked about how, for all practical purposes, he thought the U.S. was bankrupt. The conversation ended up going everywhere, and I loved it.

We talked about American foreign policy and domestic policy. He characterized our foreign policy as usually “supporting a devil and creating a worse devil.” He also said he was sorry that Hillary hadn’t gotten her universal healthcare passed. We didn’t talk very much about Australia’s healthcare system, but he said that Australians “couldn’t fathom a system where the richest nation in the world has its poor die of disease on the streets.” We said that in actuality the U.S. does have universal healthcare, but it’s via the emergency rooms. No one who shows up for healthcare can be turned away; it’s not an efficient system and we have poor, but neither are we third-world in our healthcare.

We also talked about Social Security. In 1993, Australia implemented superannuation funds. Employees are basically forced to have an IRA. Employers must contribute 9% of an employee’s salary to this fund, which can be invested in a range of approved funds. This contribution is behind the scenes and does not come out of an employee’s salary. People can’t touch it until they are a certain age. The account is tied to the person, not the job, so it follows people if they change jobs. (Alice said Singapore has had the same system for a long time, but the contribution there is 25%.) They also have something called Social Security, but it basically makes up the difference between what someone gets out of their superannuation fund and a minimum income. It sounds like they still have some of our type of government-funded Social Security, but they are phasing it out by replacing it with the mostly-private superannuation funds. Allen said that “if we could do it [make the change], there is still hope for the U.S.”

We also talked about immigration. Allen and Belle recently got married, and how they met is a story in itself. Belle is from Manila, where she ended up basically raising her siblings. I don’t know her whole history, but her two brothers both graduated from college, she somehow managed to get a mechanical engineering degree, and she raised her mentally-challenged youngest sibling as well. Somewhere along the way she ended up in Brunei working for a construction company. I’ll interject here that when I went to Qatar, my first memory is landing in Dubai and having a swarm of Thai or Filipino men board and clean the plane before we flew on to Qatar. I was naively expecting Arabs, but I quickly learned that the Middle East imports a huge number of cheap laborers from Indochina and the Philippines and the unskilled laborers lived in squalor. Anyway, Belle’s next assignment was Oman. She said it was technically an open country, but that women weren’t believed to have souls, putting them on the level of dogs and cattle, and that it was common for single Asian women to be raped. (I'm not sure who she was saying believes this -- the population at large, a certain sect, etc.) She said that a company car took her directly from her office to her house and she had instructions to not set foot outside her door, which were meant quite literally. They went to the grocery store in groups of five and carried box cutters, which was illegal but deemed a necessary risk. It sounded awful. It sounded very little like Qatar.

The other part of the immigration discussion centered on who is welcome in Australia. When Australia left its White Australia policy it decided to treat all immigrants equally. After a while, however, it moved toward being more selective in the nationalities of those it let in. It seems that a large part of it is anti-Muslim, though I doubt anyone will publicly say so. It was said that Australia would let people of any color in, but you had to let Australia adopt ideas from your culture without letting you impose your culture on Australia.

The Australia/U.K. ties also came up. Australians are pretty mad at the British, it seems, and retain only formal ties and not much even in the way of positive sentiments. Alice said they were grateful for the British example of democracy and common law, etc., but apparently the U.K. had to impose restrictions on trade with Australia in exchange for becoming part of the European Common Market. Agricultural exports are a big deal for Australia, so this was not well received. Australians love to beat the British at anything, and apparently there is a shirt that cricket fans wear that says “Don’t you wish your grandfather stole a loaf of bread.” (It refers to the fact that Australia was originally populated with petty criminals from England, and therefore having a thief for a grandfather would probably have meant the Englishman would instead have been born an Aussie.)

The final analysis is that the few Australians I’ve talked with think they have a very bright future. The economy is doing well and looking like it will continue. Their currency is strong (it has gained significantly on the USD since we’ve been here, which hurts) and their Asian neighbors are becoming economic powerhouses (opening doors for Australian trade). Interest rates for a 6 mo CD top 7%. Australia doesn’t really have any foreign affairs issues, though the flip side is that the reason they don’t have foreign trouble is that they aren’t an international powerhouse. Immigration and aboriginal issues seem to be big, but neither is crushing. Allen said that the geography book he used growing up said something to the effect of “poor Australia, its Asian neighbors will never be anything more than subsistence farmers and thus Australia will never amount to much.” Today’s books certainly say no such thing.

Aussie lingo of the day: “hire.” Here, “hire” frequently means “rent.” You hire a towel if you didn’t bring your own, for example, whereas in American use we rarely hire objects. I’m cheating a bit because I have also heard the word used this way in countries besides Australia.