A Wander Down Under
VIEWPOINT
by Eldon Griffiths
Our latest visit Down Under started on a freighter the size of a small aircraft carrier. My wife and I were the only passengers on the Columbus Florida, which carried 1,400 containers of U.S. exports bound for Auckland, New Zealand and Sydney.
It was a long voyage, but reading, writing and walking around the ship’s quarter-mile perimeter kept us out of mischief between the three cubic meals a day we shared with the German captain. We also reveled in two of the world’s scarcest commodities,silence and the serenity of ocean and sky.
Australia, we found, was booming. Sydney’s glorious harbor, surpassing San Francisco’s, has made it a magnet for the southern hemisphere’s greatest concentration of gleaming skyscrapers, five-star hotels, science labs and technology- based offices, nearly all e-linked to their “oppos” in the America, Europe and increasingly, China and Japan.
Climbing the hills above Sydney, we saw street after street of multimillion-dollar homes. Commuters were traveling on express ferries, which they board with the same familiar ease that Londoners and New Yorkers use buses and subways, passing in Sydney Harbor the world’s largest fleet of yachts, at last count 96,000.
It was the same in the smaller cities we visited on a 900-mile drive to Brisbane and in the federal capital, Canberra. Australia’s farmers are suffering from a 6-year-long drought, but the rest of the economy is on a roll.
Take mining, where a flood of Japanese capital opened up Western Australia’s iron mines. Today it’s the upsurge of China that’s powering the country’s mineral riches. In Newcastle, named after the English city that once was a synonym for coal, I counted 22 bulk carriers, waiting to be loaded in what’s now the world’s No. 1 coal port.
And then there’s tourism. Curving through southeast Australia, the 2,000-mile-long Boomerang Coast has as many if not more, golden beaches, dramatic headlands and roaring waterfalls, as Oregon and California. But more than three-fourths of this remains undeveloped. Opportunities abound for hotels, golf resorts and restaurants as wealthy Asians join the Aussies in buying second homes and Singapore Airlines, for instance, invests in 800-seat Airbuses.
Australia is in its 13th year of uninterrupted expansion. GDP growth has averaged well over 4% annually for the past decade. Labor productivity has increased by 2.7% per annum, exceeding America’s. Successive governments have pushed through Thatcher-like reforms to reduce trade barriers, deregulate product markets and introduce more flexible labor practices.
The living standard of the majority of Australians,including most, though by no means all, its native people (don’t ever call them Abos!),now matches that of most Californians. And the quality of life may be higher: While cars and gasoline are dearer, there’s more to spend on sport and vacations.
What are the snags in the Garden of Oz? Two big problems arise from its success.
A higher Aussie dollar makes exports costlier and imports cheaper, worsening the trade deficit. There’s also a house-price bubble, which, like California’s, raised the price of the average Australian home by 19% last year while doubling or even trebling the cost of city-center flats.
Australians, like Americans, also are hooked on spending and borrowing. Their average household debt (most of it mortgage) rose from 85% of disposable income in l996 to 140% at the end of last year. That’s as fast a leap as in Orange County, which makes many Australian families vulnerable to a hike in interest rates or recession.
These worries are feeding into the political debate. Until recently the polls suggested that Prime Minister Howard’s Liberal Party would coast to a third term at the next election, expected this fall, on the back of the country’s prosperity and his tough stand on illegal immigrants (like the thousands of Vietnamese boat people forcibly diverted last year to Nauru island). Australia also was devastated by the terrorist massacre of 89 of its young people and 113 other vacationers at a nightclub in Bali. Howard’s stout support for the invasion of Iraq at first was no less popular than it initially was in the U.S.
No longer. During the weeks I was in Australia, public attitudes toward Iraq seemed to change. One reason was gathering gloom over the U.S. military’s failure to restore law and order in Falluja and Najaf. Then came those revolting pictures of Americans abusing naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib; the reaction was one of disgust, anger and bewilderment.
Never before have I heard such anti-U.S. rhetoric from America’s friends Down Under.
The new leader of the Australian Labor Party, Mark Latham, promises, if elected, to remove Aussie troops from Iraq. Confidence in America has been severely damaged and is unlikely to revive soon.
Yet I remain a long-term optimist about U.S.-Australian relations. As the risk of chaos in Indonesia, their nearest neighbor, becomes more threatening, and as China and India loom larger as future superpowers, the Australians, in their own interest, will want to snuggle up closer to the United States. Their future will be multicultural, part Asian and part south Pacific. But deep down, the Aussies’ instincts are so profoundly democratic and Anglo-American that their immigrants as well as their old-timers can be counted on to honor and defend the values we share.
Which is why, if I were in my twenties, I’d invest a few bucks in a farm in the Snowy Mountains or in such recreational land as I could afford on the tropical coast around Cairns. Because Oz is a land for the future. There’s a wonder developing Down Under.
Griffiths, a resident of Laguna Niguel, is an author, journalist, former member of the House of Commons and under-secretary of state in the U.K. government.
