"Australian Exceptionalism"… let that phrase roll off your tongue.
Now stop laughing for a moment if you can!
There's something about that phrase that just doesn't sit right with us. We're not only unaccustomed to thinking about ourselves that way, but for many it's a concept that is one part distasteful to three parts utterly ridiculous - try mentioning it in polite company sometime. Bring a helmet.
We'll often laugh at the cognitive dissonance displayed by our American cousins when they start banging on about American Exceptionalism - waxing lyrical about the assumed ascendancy of their national exploits while they're forced to take out a second mortgage to pay for a run-of-the-mill medical procedure. That talk of exceptionalism has become little more than an exceptional disregard for the truth of their own comparative circumstances.
But in truth, we both share that common ignorance - we share a common state of denial about the hard realities of our own accomplishments compared to those of the rest of the world. While the Americans so often manifest it as a belief that they and they alone are the global benchmark for all human achievement, we simply refuse to acknowledge our own affluence and privilege - denialists of our own hard-won triumphs, often hysterically so.
Never before has there been a nation so completely oblivious to not just their own successes, but the sheer enormity of them, than Australia today.
So this is our economic reality - we are the wealthiest nation in the world with 75.5 per cent of our adult population making it into the global top 10 per cent, our economy has grown faster than nearly all others (certainly faster than all other developed countries), our household income growth has been one of the fastest in the world (including our poor having income growth larger than everyone else's rich!), we have the highest minimum wages in the world, the third-lowest debt and the sixth-lowest taxes in the OECD and are ranked second on the United Nations Human Development Index.
Que's the howls of protests from the whiny bitches
Ignore posts by The Whole Truth · View Post · End Ignoring The forum fuckwit goes RRRAAARRRGGHHhhh - But not a fuck was given..................by anyone.
It's all lies promoted by the real estate spruiking industry. The REIA, with the connivance of the gov ABS and RBA, have infiltrated the United Nations and OECD statistics departments. Australia is a really poor second rate squalid bogan nation and people are paid a pitance compared to the glorious rich Germans and Japs but those countries don't have their real estate agents planted in the UN and OECD to produce these lies which are spread with no other purpose than to make people go out and spend ever more debt on houses to keep the RE gravy train steaming along.
To be honest I don't really see how collective 'wealth' has much to do with the wellbeing of the nation, unless you want to go on holidays in Bali or import a flat screen. Cost of living increases will mean the 'wealth' isn't really felt by the majority.
There are far more important indicators of the wellbeing of a nation, like:
Literacy rate Life expectancy Hours worked per week Crime rate
Amongst many others.
This is the stuff I would be spruiking if I wanted to say how good my country was. Australia does pretty well on most of these I think.
WE'RE not Greece, in case you were confused. I suppose our government's about as stable. But our collective fiscal funk has recently compelled Treasury supremo Martin Parkinson to point out this obvious geographical fact. So let's cut through the persistent gloom and doom and look at how our country stacks up.
1. Government debt and deficit
As a proportion of gross domestic product, the IMF says we owe 24 per cent. The US has racked up 100 per cent, Italy 120 per cent and Greece 152 per cent. Yes we have a deficit - tiny by world standards. The IMF says it was minus 2.8 per cent in 2011 and the government has crossed its heart and hoped to (ahem) die that it will be a surplus by 2012-2013.
France's comparable figure was minus 5.7 per cent, Spain's minus 8 per cent and the US's - tut tut - minus 9.5 per cent. Greece's is ratcheting up so fast it will be wrong before I type it: the 2012 forecast is 6.7 per cent. That country is now widely expected to default and Fitch's credit rating of ''C'' reflects it. Ours is ''AAA''.
2. Resources and economy
Remember we were the only Western nation that didn't go into recession during the global financial crisis. One of the reasons was mining. An embarrassment of riches from resources means we can feed the insatiable industrialisation of developing Asia. Indeed, the governor of the Reserve Bank, Glenn Stevens, told Friday's parliamentary economics committee the boom is ''still building'' and ''will take the share of business investment in GDP to its highest level for 50 years''. The mining tax - whatever you think of it - is designed to spread the proceeds. Meanwhile, most commentators believe the EU is back in recession and Greece never climbed out of it.
3. Interest rates
Here they are relatively high on a world scale, precisely because our economy is strong and needs to be kept in check, but they're also far lower than they were in the 1980s. As a consolation to mortgage holders, the RBA has a loaded gun if it needs to shoot its way out of another crisis.
I was inspired recently by a blog post written by a Fairfax colleague about the reasons Aussies should feel smug. She refers to five factors, such as our resources boom and resilient economy, to make the claim that we’ve got it pretty good. But it got me thinking. How does this good fortune compare with other countries when we examine what life is like for employees?
A good starting point would be to look at our unemployment rate. This one is a no-brainer. Hovering just above 5 per cent, it’s very close to what economists regard as full employment. Unemployment exceeds 8 per cent in the UK and the US. And, as has been well reported, some European countries are hitting the vertiginous 20 per cent mark.
This is an important statistic because it represents a luxury a lot of us take for granted: we can afford to be fussy about where we work. It’s probably rare to hear people in Spain or Greece whinging about their lack of career advancement. They’re just happy to be employed.
How about wages? According to figures released by the OECD, we’ve got the fifth-highest disposable income in the world, beaten only by the United States, Luxembourg, Ireland and Switzerland. In terms of minimum wages, the IMF’s figures show that even the lowest-paid are better off in Australia. Here, the minimum wage is higher than in the UK, US, and New Zealand. Much higher.
Of course, it’s not just about money. What matters is how much stuff that money can buy. The Economist Intelligence Unit ranks Zurich as the world’s most expensive city, followed by Tokyo and Geneva. Squeezing into the top 10 are Sydney and Melbourne, which indicates that even though we earn more than other countries, you still need a bucketload of cash to live here.
Another useful indicator can be seen in the generosity of annual leave. In Australia we get four weeks, which isn’t as good as what the British get (5.6 weeks) or the French (five weeks), but it’s still better than the Americans. In the US, there’s no federal law stipulating the amount of annual leave to which employees are entitled. That’s why one quarter of people working there don’t get any holidays at all. The rest generally receive about two weeks.
It is good to hear some positive articles and they do make some some good comparisons, but with the government in charge at the moment, doesn't fill a lot of people with confidence, this older comment that was emailed to me comes to mind..
Quoted by: Ross Greenwood of Money News..
Right now the Labor Government is at pains to tell everyone - including us the mug-punters and the International Monetary Fund, that it will not exceed its own, self-imposed, borrowing limits.
How much? $200 billion. And here's a worry.
If you work in a bank's money market operation; or if you are a politician; the millions turn into billions and it rolls off the tip of the tongue a bit too easily. but every dollar that is borrowed, some time, has to be repaid. By you, by me and by the rest of the country.
Just after 5 o'clock tonight I did a bit of math for Jason Morrison ( Sydney radio presenter). But it's so staggering its worth repeating now.
First thought; Gillard, Swan, Wong, before that Rudd, all of the Labor Cabinet, call these temporary borrowings, a temporary deficit.
Remember Those Words : Temporary Deficit.
The total Government debt will end up around $200 billion. So here's a very basic calculation .. I used a home loan calculator to work it out..... it's that simple.. $200 billion is $2 hundred thousand million.
The current 10 year Government bond rate is 4.67 per cent. I worked the loan out over a period of 20 years. Now here's where it gets scary .... really scary.
The repayments on $200 billion, come to more than one and a quarter billion dollars - every month - for 20 years. It works out we - as taxpayers - will be repaying $15.4 billion in interest and principal every year .. $733 for every man woman and child - every year.
The total interest bill over the 20 years is - get this - $108 billion.
Remember, this is a Government, that just 4 years ago, had NO debt. NO debt.
In fact it had enough money to create the Future Fund, to pay the future liabilities of public servants' superannuation, and it had enough to stick $20 billion into the Building Australia Fund ......
A note was sent to me which explains that the six leading members of the Labor Government, from Ms Gillard down, have a collective work experience of 181 years, but only 13 in the private sector.
If you take out of those 13 years the number that were spent as trade union lawyers, 11, only two years were spent in the private sector.
So out of those 181 years:
- no years spent running their own business - no years spent starting their own business - no years spent as a director of a family business or a company - no years as a director of a public company - no years in a senior position in a public company - no years in a senior position in a private company - no years working in corporate finance - no years in corporate or business restructuring - no years working in or with a bank - no years of experience in the capital markets - no years in a stock-broking firm - no years in negotiating debt facilities with banks - no years running a small business - no years at the World Bank or IMF or OECD - no years in Treasury or Finance.
But these people have plunged Australia into unprecedented debt.
Well, in a way you can't blame them. It's clear the electorate did not do their homework, because the Government is there by right.
Ah, but they are Labor and people vote for them because Labor is good for the working family - right???
If you have read this you may like to pass it on to your friends to help educate a little as you, them and I, will be repaying the above.
Casloa your quoting old numbers from mr greenwood. www.aofm.gov.au debt is now $233b, (and growing) the surplus next year will more likely be a projected not actual therefore lets redo the numbers on $250b
but don't worry its tiny compared to other countries it doesn't include personal debts (which if you add that and company debts we are not that far from other countries debt per capita)
cool I love paying something off
It’s not getting any smarter out there. You have to come to terms with stupidity, and make it work for you - Frank Zappa
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