.. but realised that he is a New Zealander so the sunburnt country will have to make do with Clive Palmer.
Tentatively I might say that we have better gun laws but the similarities between the two countries are far greater than any differences. While we don’t have a George Bush in the closet we do have an Abbott as our representative intellectual giant; and I could never see us electing an Obama equivalent here.
We certainly have enough evangelical nutcases, an alarming number seeming to have achieved seats in parliament. We have our own equivalent of the far right of Genghis Khan Tea Party via the influential lobby group the Institute of Public Affairs which has amongst its donors Monsanto and various mining groups. We certainly have fast food aplenty, Coke, in both liquid and powder form, and an appetite for other various substances of abuse. Tentatively I might say that have better gun laws but a dyspeptic person as I myself might say that we are just as fat, foolish and ill-educated. Whilst they have a race problem we still manage oppress, dispossess and denigrate the aboriginal population of this country in a manner worthy of South Africa at the height of the Apartheid era.
We are a smaller Tweedledum to their much largish Tweedledee.
Any diatribe against America sounds suspiciously like the Monty Python “What have the Romans ever done for us” speech from “The Life of Brian” that ends with Reg saying “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? And Xerxes replying “Brought peace.” Which was pretty true after WWII when America saved the world’s bacon and made a lot of money out of it.
Since the WWII the two countries have grown increasingly alike - or rather Australia has drifted culturally across the Pacific and is now moored somewhere near the coast of California. Now I actually admire a lot about the USA, its perpetual sense of optimism that the future is there to invent, a generally marvellous Constitution based on principles, self-evident truths, that underpin a robust democracy, and an apparent ability for all its citizens to speak in complete sentences without pause, hesitation or embarrassment. They may not speak sense but they say it well.
What we have had, up until recently, was a better sense of fair play. Of at least trying to ensure that those who are disadvantaged by circumstance had an opportunity to bootstrap themselves out of their situation. The Americans have had a paradox of a Calvinistic streak of God’s judgment against the poor balanced against a Pollyanna piety that anybody can be President. Of course you can be if you have several million dollars at your disposal. That’s a lot of food stamps, partner. America may have more of the best universities in the world but you had a far better chance, until the last budget, of a good education in Australia without needing to win Tattslotto or putting yourself and your family into debt until the Last Post rang across the Parade Ground of life.
Whilst America may be brashly over-confident and assert that it is self-evident that the rest of the world needs to follow their values, Australia still limps around looking for a big brother to emulate. Roughly weaned from the rapidly shrinking bosom of the Mother Country, England, and left with an enormous and resource rich continent to rattle around the fringes of, we run around the playground looking for people whose gang we can belong to. Rather than establish a singular and unique identity Australia seems to faff around with the second-hand political detritus and outlandish ideas of other cultures. We are not America any more than we are Great Britain. But America seems unusually attractive again at the moment to the two major right-of-centre political parties here for some reason seeing themselves as equivalents of the Democrat and Republican parties.
In both countries the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer and the middle class vanishing; in the following sentence is the reason. Once we had a society and now we have an economy. They are not the same thing and they reveal and signify different priorities: a society needs real engineers but an ‘economy’ spawns that strange, dangerous and nerdish breed of ‘Financial Engineers’. Real engineers move mountains; financial engineers move money from Column A to Column B at the speed of light.
Of course I may be wrong. There may be genuine need for a person looking to do a Master of Financial Engineering Program that advertises its wares with the following blurb;
“You know how numbers work. Now apply them. Use your quantitative skills to help solve the complex and creative challenges of today's financial markets. Let us show you how. Graduates are equipped for careers in risk management, investment banking, money management, derivative pricing, private equity, hedge funds, and in technical operational areas of corporate finance.”
It might be easier and more ethical, though undoubtedly less profitable, to become a Satanist.