Prime Minister John Howard is quite right: Australia has a strong economy.
Australia is a rich country and it is getting richer.
He is also right in saying that only when the economy is strong can you do important things like health care and education.
But there it stops.
Whoever wins, on Sunday morning it would be a good time to reflect on what sort of people and country we are.
In this election campaign we have heard too much self-delusion about the Australian character: compassionate, generous and tolerant.
The campaign is evidence to the contrary. The major parties base their policies on polling. Good representative samples tell the internal party pollsters what voters want and the parties respond.
What a merciless, mean, intolerant lot we are.
The major parties went on an auction for the vote. Virtually the whole six weeks was devoted to how many dollars a week families would get in tax relief, family allowances, Medicare changes and the like. Invariably, the gut message came down to dollars a week. There was even an argument over dollars per year against dollars per week.
They pandered to families “doing it tough”.
Ridiculous hyperbole.
We heard not a squeak during the whole six weeks about the people really “doing it tough”: poor people in poor countries and indigenous people in Australia.
Australia now gives less in foreign aid as a percentage of national income than at anytime since World War II. It is at a pitiful 0.25 per cent of national income.
Howard talks of managing the $800 billion economy. Can’t we manage to give more than one quarter of one percent of it to the poor in the poor countries? Probably not. It is likely that most of today’s voters would be horrified at $2 billion in aid. Too high, they would say. Even if a quarter of it goes to Pacific neighbours for largely selfish reasons of keeping them at bay or because we have inherited a colonial legacy.
Speaking of doing it tough, in undeveloped countries one child in nine dies before age five (more than 30 times the Australian child death rate). One mother in 16 dies in childbirth.
In the 1960s Australia gave more than double its present rate. We have become meaner as we have become richer.
Even in George Bush’s America foreign aid went up 30 per cent between 2001 and 2003.
Australia agreed in 2000 to the Millennium Development goals to lift aid from the developed countries from 0.22 per cent of income to 0.44 per cent by 2015.
“Compassionate” Australia, the country that believes in the “fair go” signed up to that target. Yet far from moving towards it, we are falling behind.
The election campaign has also concentrated on “security”. Poverty, sickness and illiteracy breed jealousy and violence and provide the incubating medium for terrorism. Yet the world spends $1250 billion a year on the military and just $80 billion in development aid. And that aid is been less than what the developing nations are required to pay in servicing the $2800 billion in debt to developed countries. The money is flowing the wrong way.
But we cannot spare anything because our political parties have to bribe Australian families “doing it tough” to vote for them (with money that should never have been taken from them in tax in first place). Someone on the average income in Australia is in the top 5 per cent of world income earners. They are not “doing it tough”.
Leave the money aside, the “compassionate”, “tolerant” Australia that espouses the “fair go” displays cruelty, intolerance and suspicion to the few thousand destitute in leaking boats who make it to our shores. In a weird irony, we are so cunning in our xenophobia that we declare parts of our shores not to be our shores at all. We are so bereft of tolerance and compassion that we lock refugee children up, sometimes for years.
Alas, the people who craft these policies know this is what we want. They poll for it. Don’t blame the politicians blame ourselves for not expressing our demand for humanity more forcefully.
And what about problems closer to home: health and housing?
In this election campaign there has not been a squeak about the nation’s most pressing health and housing problems: twice as many of their children die in the year after birth than average; twice as many of their babies are underweight at birth than average; their death rate in the 35-to-54 age bracket is five times the average; they live 20 years less than average; they have between five and 10 times the rate of most communicable diseases than average; they are five times more likely to live in an over-crowded house and less than half as likely to own it and they are five times more likely to have unsafe water. They really are “doing it tough”. But not a cent of Howard’s $6 billion in promises went to them. None of Latham’s promised money went to them. Latham even took from the poor whites.
The words “indigenous” and “Aboriginal” are not to be found in either Latham’s or Howard’s policy launching speeches. Neither are the words “foreign aid”.
Rather they appealed to the baser emotions of fear and greed. Are we such a fretful people that we respond to, rather than ignore, baseless scares that might affect our precious property values and turn our back on those without decent housing, clean water and health care?
There can be no security while this selfishness continues.