It is a mark of Australian affluence that such as question is asked. In an affluent society such as Australia many people have everything they need or want. If during the year they want something they just buy it, so come Christmas time there is no obvious thing to buy them.
Sure, there are plenty of people not so well off who might have quite a large Christmas list. But in Australia, my guess is that most of it would be stuff people do not really need — stuff that would find its way into landfill before very long.
One of the great lies in the last election campaign was that a great chunk of Australians are “doing it tough”. Comparatively, they might be. They might not have a widescreen TV like the Joneses, or a car for every teenager in the family like the Smiths, but they are not “doing it tough”.
The Australian Year Book does not list “starvation” as a cause of death in Australia.
Perhaps a third of the world’s population would have the following as a wish list:
1. To have enough to eat.
2. To have clean drinking water. (Just 5 litres a day per person will do, not the 500 litres we use in Australia.)
3. To be able to see a doctor and get prompt hospital treatment for life threatening events.
4. To have a house with a floor other than earth or straw matting and a roof that does not leak.
5. To be free from fear of life-threatening violence.
6. To be free from a score of easily preventable diseases.
7. To be free from religious repression and religious zealotry that condemns millions of women to a life of little better than slavery.
In short, to have had the good luck (and it is all luck not merit) to be born in a western democracy.
How can we be Santa Claus? How can we fulfill this wish list?
Of course, it might help if we made this a general wish list not tied to any festival or any religion, but Christmas has now reverted to its pagan beginnings as – literally – a feast day and a day for general enjoyment and good will.
We have to apply fairness and compassion. We harp on about fairness and compassion being hallmarks of Australian society but the foreign-aid figures show it is more propaganda than reality.
Australia falls in the bottom four rich OECD nations when it comes to recognising the unfairness of wealth distribution on earth and having the compassion to do something about it.
We should not need an Irish pop star to tell us how miserable we are at foreign aid. We should recognise it ourselves and pressure our government to do something about it.
Government foreign aid is a 0.3 per cent of GDP, or a little under 1 per cent of total Government spending – about $2.5 billion in a GDP of $800 billion and a Federal Budget of $250 billion. Private giving is about double that. The parts are obviously greater than the sum in this field of human endeavour.
It gets more miserable. Perhaps as much as three-quarters of Australian Government aid is utterly self-centered. A third stays in Australia and is paid to Australian companies who provide the goods and infrastructure under tied grants. Almost another half is spent in military or peace-keeping or other help in our immediate neighbourhood to prevent the spread of nastiness to Australia.
Yes, Australian individuals are fairly generous, but even these figures often include money remitted overseas to families by overseas-born people working in Australia.
Perhaps the phrase “Indian giver” should be renamed “Australian giver”.
On the fairness front, through no fault of their own, 20 per cent of the world’s population live on less than $2 a day (that is $US in 1985). This is a US think-tank definition of poverty. The very fact that its definition is so extreme illustrates the fairness point more profoundly. It would not take much to lift these people – even if there are a billion of them — from the grindingly starving poverty.
There is always enough money to fight a war or be ready to fight a war. Some of that money could be better spent.
The ratio is about one in 14. Worldwide, about $1400 billion is spent on “defence” and less that 100 billion is spent on development aid.
Development aid as a percentage of income in the rich countries has fallen since the 1970s. We have become richer and we give less. Bizarrely, despite the extra wealth, there is no evidence to suggest we have become happier. To the contrary.
All this wasteful consumerism is making us more miserable. And all of this “defence” spending is making us less secure.
I know what I want for Christmas: I would like Australia’s “defence” budget to halved and the foreign aid Budget to be doubled. And the same again next year. And even then the two figures would be only just be on par.