The Land Of Plenty: Australia In The 2000s

By Mark Davis

'There is an Australian dream that is collective. It goes to the roots of what it means to be Australian, since it's imprinted in Australia's history, the collective acts of its peoples, their attitudes, their gestures, what and how they eat, how they spend their leisure time, and the way such things reflect upon and derive from who they are.'

In The Land of Plenty, Mark Davis argues that this dream has been forsaken. Over the past few decades Australians have felt the ground shift beneath their feet. Many people are asking why Australia is no longer the egalitarian place it once was. While the airwaves sing and newspaper front pages burst with news of how prosperous Australians are, many people wonder why they are working harder and longer, for so little, while important social agendas have fallen by the wayside.

The Land of Plenty is at once a devastating record of the changes that have taken place in Australian society since the 1980s, and a goldmine of ideas for change. Insightful, provocative and thoroughly original, The Land of Plenty is a manifesto for our times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Sep 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9780522859096

Mark Davis

Mark Davis is a former White House speechwriter and a senior director of the Washington-based White House Writers Group, where he has consulted with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as well as with some of the nation's leading telecommunications, information technology and defense-aerospace companies. He is a frequent lecturer, writer and blogger on politics, technology, and the future.

Book preview

Mark Davis is the author of Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism. He teaches in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.

THE LAND OF PLENTY AUSTRALIA IN THE 2000s

MARK DAVIS

For my girls, always

I said to the man, ‘Are you trying to tempt me

Because I come from the land of plenty?’

Down Under, Men at Work

Contents

Prologue: A Prosperous Place

1.   The Australian Dream

2.   The Quiet Revolution

3.   The Enduring Politics of Us and Them

4.   New Mythologies

5.   Trouble in the Suburbs

6.   A Changed Nation

7.   A Sense of Place

8.   The Elements

9.   Border Wars and Ghost Ships

10. An Economic Fool’s Paradise

11. The Howard Legacy

12. The Land of Plenty

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

Prologue

A Prosperous Place

Sandwiched between the older skyscrapers of the business district and the newer skyscrapers of the reclaimed Docklands, the Telstra Dome stands on the western edge of Melbourne.This, Australia’s second city, revels in its one-time tag ‘the world’s most liveable city’, a counter to its mild inferiority complex. The Dome is a micro cosm of that liveability. Built in the late 1990s for a cost of $460 million, it’s a thoroughly up-to-the-minute venue. It has more than 50 000 seats, its own multi-level car park, a nightclub, built-in television studios, a range of sophisticated bars and res taurants that can be operated independently of whatever might be happening in the arena, and a 4000-tonne roof that can be opened and closed according to the weather. Five Australian Football League (AFL) clubs use it as a home ground, and moveable banks of seats allow the arena to be reconfigured to accommodate different uses.¹ It has hosted cricket, soccer, rugby, wrestling, gigs by international acts such as Barbra Streisand, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Robbie Williams, and a gigantic Catholic mass. More than just an arena, it’s a lifestyle hub. Crossing the high spans of the nearby Bolte Bridge at night when there’s a match being played at the Dome is to look across at a light-bathed shrine that stands out against the darkness of the city.A spectacular vista.

The Dome is a symbol of the prosperity that’s become a taken-for-granted part of Australian life. Its naming-rights holder, Telstra, is one of Australia’s largest corporations, and is the business in which the largest number of ordinary Australians own shares.This sense of prosperity is felt inside the Dome as well.A lift takes you to your seating level. Premium seats have individual television screens that swing out from their arms on which you can watch the match being played or other sporting events via Foxtel.Where once you might have stood in the cold outer at a football match vainly hoping for a pie-seller to come your way, now even ticket-holders for the most basic public areas have access to à la carte dining and bars selling a range of local and imported beer and wine.Ticket-holders for premium seats can dine in style at silver-service restaurants, and might even choose to watch the match on one of the many monitors that carry coverage from the arena. Australians famously know how to relax and enjoy themselves, and the Dome, like most recently built sporting venues, is designed to bring their favourite things together: good food, coffee, beer, a punt, a love of sport.

Even the location of the Dome, on land once used for industry that was derelict for many years, is an indicator of regeneration and prosperity. What was once a scatter of decaying warehouses separated from the city by a railway yard is now home to a popular focal point, linked to the western edge of the city proper by architect-designed pedestrian bridges that loop over a much more efficient, redeveloped railway yard. Since the Dome was built, that part of the city has been regenerated. A shambling collection of boarding houses and cheap hotels has made way for shiny new boutique hotels and office blocks. One of Australia’s leading architectural firms now has its offices among them. New upmarket apartment blocks on the city side of the river overlook the Yarra and the upmarket Crown casino, exhibition centre, and the Southbank complex of shops and restaurants that, since the early 1990s, have been built on the south side of the river. Collins Street, the most famous of Melbourne’s tree-lined streets, has been extended to link the city with the new waterfront restaurants, office blocks and apartment towers of the Docklands precinct adjacent to the Dome.

Developments such as the Telstra Dome and Docklands are but a small part of an incredible rejuvenation that’s taken place across the nation in the past decade. To walk the main streets of Fremantle, down Rundle Mall in Adelaide, along the river at Brisbane’s Southbank or Eagle Wharf, on the waterfront at Salamanca Place in Hobart, or through Woolloomooloo and Walsh Bay in Sydney, is to be struck by the wave of urban renewal and prosperity that underlines Australia’s new ‘lifestyle’ precincts. In the past decade or so, Australians have come out of their homes and onto the streets, taking up the spirit of outdoor eating and drinking inherited from migrants from southern Europe and South-East Asia.The same spirit of cosmopolitanism can be found in regional cities as disparate as Mount Isa, Broome, Newcastle and Geelong.

This prosperity reflects Australia’s place in the world. Sound economic management has become a mantra for Australian politicians. Not only did Australia survive the 1997 Asian crisis, the 2000 dot-com crash and the US and Japanese downturns of the early twenty-first century, it thrived. Simultaneously locked into the ups and downs of the global economy, yet remarkably insulated from their worst effects, Australia is an incredibly prosperous country. By all accounts the economy has never been better managed, and we are the economic envy of most of the rest of the world. Ranked fifty-third in the world by population, Australia is the fifteenth largest economy in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), has the fourteenth largest industrial output, and is the twenty-fifth biggest exporter. We rank third in the world for overall quality of life, produce the seventeenth highest GDP per head, and our two largest cities are both rated among the world’s top twenty liveable cities.² Economic growth currently averages almost 4 per cent, profits and wages are up, the share market is strong, the dollar is at a historic high, and unemployment rates are at their lowest for thirty years, with record levels of people in the workforce.Australia’s ‘terms of trade’ with other nations, as economists call this measure of national competitiveness, are the best they’ve been since the mid-1970s.³ In April 2006, then-Treasurer Peter Costello announced that the government was completely debt-free.

Globalisation, it seems, has been good for Australia. Australian car manufacturers now export to places such as the Middle East, the United States, New Zealand, South Africa and Brazil.We lead the world in aluminium shipbuilding, the export of biotechnology, minerals processing equipment, and high-tech communications equipment. According to the management consultancy firm AT Kearney, Australia is the world’s fourth most technology-savvy country and the thirteenth most globalised country.⁴ Australian firms are leaders in the export of environmental technologies such as waste-water treatment, water-monitoring instrumentation, recycling and renewable energy to places such as the United States, China, Germany and New Zealand.While Japan remains Australia’s major trading partner, we have diversified, opening up new markets for our goods and services in North America, Europe, the Middle East, India and South America. We export Peking duck to China and chilli to Mexico, wine to France and Germany and bamboo products to Japan. In the decade to 2007, exports grew by an average 6.6 per cent per year, reaching $218 billion per annum. Exports of manufactured goods, led by high performers such as processed metals and motor vehicles, rose 7.9 per cent to $45 billion. Services exports, led by high performers such as travel, education, transport and communications services, rose 9.8 per cent to $48.2 billion. Imports, too, have risen. In 2007, $227 billion of primary products, goods and services were imported and $357 billion came in as foreign direct investment.⁵ We are in many ways the paradigmatic global economy, having reaped the benefits of the economic reforms espoused mantra-like by our politicians for the past three decades.

Yet, amid all this prosperity there is disquiet.

This disquiet is felt everywhere in Australian life, but most strongly in mainstream family life. Basic services such as child care are now financially out of the reach of many families, or unavailable. Health care is increasingly expensive, with many families unable to afford comprehensive health insurance. Public hospital waiting lists are long.The cost of sending kids to school has skyrocketed, and there is pressure to send them to private schools amid the perception that the public system is crumbling. Those with children in or about to enter higher education can choose between paying high fees and seeing their offspring burdened with debt.The elderly struggle to find adequate accommodation.Those caring for the chronically ill search frantically for respite. In rural areas, services have disappeared as banks abandon smaller towns and other businesses are forced to follow. Others worry that housing is no longer affordable.Young families, in particular, find it hard to break into the housing market either as buyers or renters.

People are also anxious about what has happened to their working lives. WorkChoices came and went, but jobs continue to be less secure than they once were; the idea of a ‘job for life’ has gone by the board. Australians now work the longest hours in the Western world. Part-time and casual employment is the only work available for many jobless, whether it suits their needs or not.This new climate of work is driven by fear. As the academic Bob Montgomery has observed:

Work practices these days don’t give people a choice. If you’ve got a job chances are it’s so over-demanding of you and your time that you have no chance to meet your social or emotional needs anywhere else but work… People are terrified of not having a job, because they see people everywhere losing theirs. But management is dumb. We now have 20 years of research that shows that shrinking an organisation does not make it more productive.There’s an initial cost saving from losing staff, but not a long term one. The people who are left work longer hours, but they are so over-worked and demoralised that they are less productive.⁶

These concerns aren’t the trivial worries of pessimists or malcontents, but the concerns of people who have felt the ground shift beneath their feet as parts of their lives that were once taken for granted have disappeared. Many feel abandoned by government and left to fend for themselves in the free market. Where government once provided insulation from life’s shocks, now only money does. Older Australians who grew up in the postwar welfare state worry that institutions that were once the mainstay of daily life, such as banks and government agencies, have abandoned ordinary people.Younger Australians, who never knew the welfare state, are concerned about what the future holds for them, given that finding decent work can be difficult, education is expensive, and things that their parents took for granted—such as home ownership—seem unattainable. Even established middle-aged, middle-class Australians with prosperous small businesses worry that a simple change in regulation, a growing burden of paperwork, or deregulation—of the sort that has opened up family farmers to threat from agribusiness, and independent petrol station owners, newsagents and chemists to threat from the big two supermarket companies—might destroy their livelihood.

At the heart of these varied concerns is a simple question. If the country is going so well, and if Australia is so fundamentally prosperous, then why are things difficult for so many? Why are so many scraping to get by, and why do even many of those who are doing well worry about the simplest setback? If prosperity is as boundless as Australians have been told, then why does even a small increase in interest rates cause such widespread anxiety, and why are so many Australians feeling overstretched and overworked, anxious and ill at ease? Why does so much of the present sense of prosperity rely upon the availability of cheap consumer goods and credit, and not deep, lasting economic security, proper time to unwind, freedom from the worries of work and health, affordable and easily available housing, accessible high-quality care and education for children, the sense of living in a safe, socially integrated society, or any of the other benefits that true national prosperity should bring?

These questions go to the heart of everyday life. Referred for some pathology tests to my local clinic, which is part of a privately owned national chain, I arrive at 8.30 a.m. and am immediately struck by how full the small waiting room is. Every chair is occupied, but there is no-one at the counter. Instead, there is a small box of numbered cards with instructions to take one and wait.The room we’re in looks as if it was once a small reception area connected to the main foyer of what was once a small public hospital, but it’s been cheaply partitioned off from the rest of the building, and what remains of the hospital is privatised.While I’m waiting, I watch as a steady stream of frail elderly people make their way into the clinic and to the window and take their cards. For almost an hour nothing happens.When a staff member finally shows up, the elderly couple who arrived first are pathetically grate-ful.We are all offered the most perfunctory service; no-one looks you in the eye, and no-one refers to you by name.What does it mean, I wonder, that in such a prosperous country, basic services are run this way? You couldn’t blame the staff who bustled in and out of the office from time to time; they were obviously working under conditions as difficult as those confronting the patients. Both staff and ‘clients’ were stuck on human production lines that seemed more like something out of 1950s Soviet Russia than a scene from daily life in a modern, prosperous nation.

Earlier that month, I came across the same thing at the local child-minding centre. Once owned and operated by the local council, it had recently been bought by a publicly listed company. Again, harried staff made do under difficult circumstances with old, worn toys, threadbare carpets, dingy mattresses and a plate of quarter-sliced vegemite sandwiches held out to kids for afternoon tea.What I saw didn’t strike me as being primarily about providing care or offering a service. It was about stock prices and market share, in a society where money has been allowed to become the measure of all things.

Something fundamental in Australian life has changed. Something beyond the reach of any single government. Something that goes to the core of how Australians understand themselves and their nation’s democratic project. It’s to do with the way the country has been managed over the past three decades, the orthodoxies accepted by both major political parties, and the damage they’ve done to traditions, institutions and ways of life. Many people feel that the way life is lived—too often harried, frantic, struggling with poor amenities—does not match the wealth of the country.

The present disquiet extends across the spectrum of social and cultural issues. Aborigines live lives too often marred by poverty, frustration and violence, with none of the formal reconciliation or treaties between colonised and coloniser seen in other settler nations.Young people find it difficult to gain a toehold in the cultural mainstream and often start their working lives deep in debt to the government for their university education—education that was free for their parents. In a climate where the pursuit of social justice agendas has stalled, bilious commentators advocate ever more regressive measures for dealing with Aboriginal claims for justice or women’s claims for paid maternity leave. Others worry that the government has ceded too much to globalisation, and, alienated by a political system in which there are few real choices, have begun voting accordingly. In the words of a One Nation supporter I spoke to in Queensland, ‘Now I just vote for whoever will do the most damage’. Others are concerned at the intrusion of corporate life into everyday life. Or at the treatment of the poor and the powerless. Or at the ethnic discord on Australian streets. Or that important environmental agendas are held hostage by sectional interests that are pandered to by both major parties. Or at the micro-management of political issues by government and political parties so that proper debate doesn’t take place even in the parliament itself.

There’s a saying in Australian politics—Paul Keating said it first —that when you change the government, you change the country.

It’s true to some extent. Many people were surprised at how much the national mood seemed to change when the Rudd government was elected in 2007. But both major parties subscribe to the same myths—of market populism and aspirationalism— and the similarities between them are greater than the differences. A concern held by many is that all governments are subject to the same constraints, and that increasingly the role of government is simply to manage a consensus that remains resolutely in place and that is no longer in step with what people want. Governments come and go, but over the past thirty years the dominant ideas that drive Australian politics have stayed resolutely the same; only the style of management changes. Everywhere, government works hard to muffle rather than explore democratic possibility. But the concerns go beyond government; they go to a mediocrity and narrowness in the way things are run. Most of the powerful institutions that have dominated the past three decades—the media, economic commentators, think tanks, the public service— are tied to the same received ideas, the same cultures of mediocrity and acceptance of the status quo, when elsewhere, on the fringes, away from the commentators’ gaze, there is a hunger for change and a sense of possibility.

The disappointment many feel is that there’s so much more that could be done, so much that remains to be done, not only to tackle issues such as the environment, or social diversity, or managing economic reform and globalisation in a humane, just way, but in turning back the destructive legacy of the past thirty years.That what needs to take place is a proper thinking through of the failures of the postwar era and its dominant ideas so as to begin to set out a new agenda for the future even as we critique the ideologies of the past.

These anxieties and hopes, which seem disparate but are actually linked, are found across the broad spectrum of Australian life. They are held by people from widely different ethnic and religious backgrounds, of widely different political persuasions, and from widely different groups, urban and regional, young people and old, women and men. But what all share is a belief that something fundamental has changed in Australian life, that something has gone wrong. At base, what they share is a lament for a lost dream.

1. The Australian Dream

A new country that is merely an imitation of its predecessors, that discovers no new thoughts and forms, that contributes nothing to the meaning of the world—would it deserve to exist?

Nettie Palmer¹

Every house harbours a hard-working couple, and she doesn’t know any of them.They don’t know her.Where is the security in that? And what are they worth to any of us, really, she thought—these sparkling half-million-dollar houses? What do they actually cost?

Julienne van Loon²

There is an Australian dream that is collective. It goes to the roots of what it means to be Australian, since it’s imprinted in Australia’s history, the collective acts of its peoples, their attitudes, their gestures, what and how they eat, how they spend their leisure time, and the way such things reflect upon and derive from who they are.This ethos and its accompanying mythologies, which are distinctively Australian, are half-known, half-understood by all Australians, those recently arrived and of generations’ standing. At their heart is the belief that young nations like Australia offer the opportunity to transcend the inequalities of the old world. Egalitarianism and the idea of the ‘fair go’ are at the centre of the Australian social contract and are deeply embedded in the self-understanding of Australians, including those who come here because they are attracted by them. They are a banner to the world, the things that Australia is best known for.

Like most relatively young settler nations, Australia embodies hopes that reach far beyond its shores. Modern Australia was conceived as a relatively classless, properly democratic place, where ordinary people are able to live well, where there is steady and fair social progress, and where the ideas of collectivism and mutuality matter as much as the rights of the individual. These ideas come together in a unique democratic project that, while never fully realised, Australians have historically striven for.

Australians have always been dreamers and thinkers, who, over the past 200 years, have worked to make this one of the world’s innovative democracies. One of the world’s oldest continuous democracies, most Australians lived under democratically elected governments by the mid-1850s, and the nation as a whole has been a democracy since Federation in 1901. In 1856, three Australian colonies in Tasmania, South Australia and Victoria introduced the world’s first secret ballot, a system that was known as the ‘Australian ballot’ on its introduction in the United States in 1888. In 1856, Australian workers were among the first in the world to campaign for an ‘eight hour day’, a measure that was progressively adopted across various industries and states until it was formally granted to all workers in 1948. In 1899, Queenslanders gave the world its first Labor government, intended to represent ordinary working people rather than powerful vested interests. In 1902, Australian women became the second in the world to get the vote—New Zealand had led the way in 1893.³ American and British women had to wait until 1920 and 1928 respectively. In 1907, the ‘Harvester Judgment’ helped enshrine the principle of a basic wage, a world first that laid the foundation for the wages arbitration system.Wage arbitration, as Paul Kelly has eloquently said,

was the greatest institutional monument to Australian egalitarianism and its quest for social order. It was an heroic endeavour founded in optimism that man could defy the anarchy of the marketplace and impose a system of just prices to secure his material dignity.⁴

Progress continued through the twentieth century. In 1973, in another world first, the Whitlam government appointed an adviser on women’s affairs, a lead that was followed after 1975 by all state governments. In 1982, the Fraser government introduced freedom of information legislation, the first of its kind for a Westminster-style government. In 1993, in another pioneering move, the Keating government legislated to ratify the overturning of the doctrine of terra nullius, by which Australia had been considered untenured land pre–white settlement. In an innovative twist, white law was able to reach back before white settlement to recognise law that had come before.

Being Australian is an ethical project. It was in these pioneering moments that the specific combination of traditions and ideas that makes up Australian values—egalitarianism; the ‘fair go’; the idea that one person is as good as the next, irrespective of background—was founded.What all these reforms had in common was that they were levellers that sought to protect the small from the powerful.These ethics were to a degree oppositional.Australia, perhaps more than anything, offered the chance of an escape from nineteenth-century Europe and especially Britain, with its industrial squalor and workhouses, intractable class differences and rapidly worsening inequality, brought on by economic laissez faire. This colonial outpost wasn’t just a sunnier and more bucolic new beginning; it also gave a chance to a basic fairness and equality of opportunity at odds with the prevailing ethos at ‘home’. Nor did these reforms simply happen by themselves, as if the universal pursuit of fairness is an essential Australian national character trait. Rebelling miners, small farmers, unionists, feminists, judges, politicians, intellectuals and others all played a part in struggles for social justice that have rarely been doctrinaire. Australian people, on the whole, haven’t aspired to ideological purity. They’ve aspired to become middle-class.

The blind spot was race. As shown by the infamous White Australia policy, passed by the new Commonwealth Parliament in 1901, from the outset Australia’s ideal of the ordinary was racialised. Built on earlier colonial anti-Chinese laws, the policy wasn’t relaxed until 1966 and wasn’t formally abolished until 1973. Nor were Indigenous Australians included in the way the new nation was imagined. Aborigines weren’t granted the right to enrol and vote in federal elections until 1962. Land rights weren’t put firmly on the national agenda until 1966, when the Gurindji people, inspired by gathering momentum for black justice in apartheid-era South Africa and the founding of the Black Consciousness movement in the United States, staged a historic walk-off at Wave Hill station, where, having been dispossessed of their land, they were employed as workers on subsistence wages. It wasn’t until 1967 that a historic majority (80.8 per cent) of the Australian population voted ‘yes’ in a referendum to end constitutional discrimination against Aborigines that meant they weren’t officially counted as members of the Australian community. The same legislation also gave the federal government general power to legislate on matters affecting Aborigines, thus circumventing the states. It took until 1992 for the doctrine of terra nullius, by which European occupation of Australia was ratified on the grounds that the land was legally empty and belonged to no-one before white settlement, to be ruled invalid by the High Court in a case brought by Eddie Mabo and four other Torres Strait Islanders. The subsequent Native Title Act opened up non-freehold land to claims by traditional Aboriginal owners. A subsequent High Court judgment on a case brought by the Wik people allowed Aboriginal people to negotiate for dual occupancy of the huge pastoral leases that take up many traditional tribal lands. Neither Mabo nor Wik is land rights proper, but despite their minimal threat to established white interests, both were bitterly opposed.

Australia’s particular democratic ethos isn’t simply a matter of headline-making achievements. It extends through to the way in which day-to-day life is lived by ordinary people.The Australian home on a suburban block is its microcosmic version. It represents an egalitarian ideal where everyone can be a landholder of a block of more or less the same size. Australia has among the highest levels of home ownership in the world.The suburbs that stretch out from the centres of Australia’s cities are often criticised as a ‘sprawl’ by those who don’t understand that this is a price most Australians are prepared to pay to have a decent-sized block of land, equal to their neighbours, on which to do more or less what they like.The same ethos is reflected in the way that many Australians holiday. The thousands of tents and caravans set up each summer in the narrow strip of prime real estate, demarcated as public space, that encircles much of the coastline, epitomise the ideal that the best of nature should be available to all. Leisure is the same. Joining the crowd at a municipal swimming pool on a summer’s day, no-one knows or much cares about your social background. Rich and poor mingle under the same hot sun. A similar ethos has traditionally applied in sport.When you walk onto the court or onto the field for your local netball, football or cricket side, no-one cares what you left in the car park.

Yet Australia is a place that, for all its achievements, is still dreaming of what it might become. As a shared project it’s only half-complete, and now finds itself facing a moment of uncer-tainty.As new pressures have been brought to bear—by economic reform and globalisation, by terrorism, by immigration, by Aboriginal demands for equality and reconciliation—a crisis of confidence has overtaken many Australians. No longer bold, adventurous or enterprising, the prevailing outlook has become wary and defensive. Longstanding principles of fairness and unique traditions of egalitarianism have been undermined by decades of reform. The idea that Australia is a bold democratic experiment has given way to a culture that doesn’t know how to make itself anymore, and that, hamstrung by failed orthodoxies, has lost direction, no longer sure of what it believes in or what it should be striving for.

In his book The Lucky Country, first published in 1964, Donald Horne opened with a description of the South Sydney Leagues Club. So far as Horne was concerned, that club was representative of everything good about Australia. Its 7000 members enjoyed only an average weekly wage, but had, in a city that in certain senses qualified as ‘the most democratic city in the world’, built up a club generating more than £300 000 profit a year. With these profits, bars, restaurants, squash courts, a swimming pool, bowling alleys, a roof garden, a library, a nursery and steam rooms had all been built for the enjoyment of the members. Dressed in casual clothes, they attended the weekly dances, played tennis on the tennis courts, and enjoyed the billiards room—the ‘most beautiful’ in the Southern Hemisphere—more or less oblivious to the possibility that they might have quite different incomes or backgrounds. For Horne, the club epitomised the realisation of a democratic dream; ‘the old ideals of equality and the pursuit of happiness: that everyone has the right to a good time’.⁵

Sporting arenas such as Melbourne’s Telstra Dome offer a no-less-impressive display of lifestyle and leisure, but are constructed along different lines, using different values and social assumptions from those that shaped the South Sydney Leagues Club of the 1960s. A symbol of the new prosperity that Australians have enjoyed since the first waves of economic reform of the 1980s, the Dome is symbolic, too, of the changes that have swept through Australian society in the past three decades. On the one hand, in terms of amenities, the Dome is undoubtedly a giant step forward. Unlike traditional football grounds with their ‘standing room only’ ‘outer’ zones, all patrons are seated under cover in the Dome, with its massive retractable roof. All are within easy reach of good-quality food and drink, and high-quality, family-friendly facilities. But take a closer look and fundamental differences between the Dome and traditional sporting venues become clear. What was once a straightforward division between general admission ticket-holders and members has been replaced by a carefully tiered system of entry and membership packages that enable access to dif ferent facilities. For $22, the general public can gain access to the prosaic plastic seats of the general admission section on Level 1 or high up in the stands on Level 3 to watch a football game. For a little more than double that amount, you can gain access to the reserved seating on Level 1. For around $2800 per year, plus a one-off fee of $500 per seat, you can join ‘Axcess One Premium’, which gives you your own permanent Level 2 reserved seat for all AFL premiership home-and-away matches (excluding finals), admission to pre-season matches, and access to restaurant dining facilities and to a members’ bar, plus the opportunity to jump the queue for entry into the MCC Members Reserve at the MCG for AFL matches and other events. For $6000 per year plus a per-seat fee of between $1000 and $5000, you can join the ‘Medallion Club’, also on Level 2, which gives you access to one of 5000 reserved seats, the more expensive of which have their own swing-out TV screen, and all of which have in-seat service, free access to all sporting events, access to four restaurants that include an exclusive fine-dining restaurant offering table service throughout events, bars and private lounges, and access to a dedicated parking area under the stadium, connected by lifts that go straight to the club. A mezzanine level between Levels 2 and 3 is devoted to the carefully sequestered exclusivity of the sixty-six 12-seat corporate suites, hidden behind smoked glass, that ring half of the stadium, which can be rented for upwards of $90 000 per year.

At the Dome, admission is no longer structured according to egalitarian principles. Rather, the Dome is in fact a carefully organised set of social filters, organised on demographic lines, designed to separate different groups according to their willingness to pay. Different groups recognise immediately which areas are designed for them, from the neon signs and takeaway food outlets on one level to the linen napkins, table service and upholstered lounge chairs on another.The carparks and lifts to different levels are organised so that different groups need not mix. It’s possible, of course, for the same person to go to one section one week and a different section another week, depending on the occasion. But instead of being a leveller, sport, here, nevertheless provides an occasion on which displays of wealth and exclusivity can be made, and where the new importance of money to Australian society (and to football clubs) and the centrality of corporate culture in everyday life are laid bare. At the Dome, money talks, whereas in the South Sydney Leagues Club or standing in the outer at the footy, it made little difference.

For all about it that’s a forward step—no-one wants to go back to the old days of standing in the freezing outer vainly waiting for the pie-vendor to show up—the Dome reflects a fundamental shift in Australian life and social values. Its internal demarcations reflect structural changes that have taken place in Australian society, which is increasingly a tiered society where different groups have different levels of access to basic services such as health and education, and even different classes of rights and citizenship. Like the wealthy people parading on the silver-service levels of the Dome, Australians aren’t so interested as they once were in being the same as each other.They want to show off their differences, or they are liable, if less well-off, to have such differences forced upon them. The same changes are reflected in the management of the Dome itself.Whereas traditional sporting venues are home to a sporting club, provided by a local council and improved as fundraising allows, the Dome is a separate commercial entity. It is privately owned by an investment consortium, with ownership passing to the AFL after twenty-five years, and is home to a number of clubs that each pay a fee to use it. Rather than being used to the advantage of its members, part of the profits are siphoned off elsewhere, to private companies.This shift in emphasis to business, because that’s where the money needs to come from, no less than the smoked-glass windows of the corporate boxes that ring the Dome, ultimately reflects a society that has shifted its priorities to suit the corporate world and the values of the market. If the Dome was built to showcase the one sport that’s unique to Australia— Aussie Rules football—then its layout quietly mitigates other traditions that are no less distinctive.

The same shift in emphasis is reflected in the siting of the Dome. When the AFL, then known as the Victorian Football League, built a new flagship stadium in the 1970s, it located it in the eastern suburbs at Waverley, then projected to become the demographic centre of Melbourne. The Telstra Dome, however, isn’t at the demographic centre of Melbourne but at its commercial centre.This shift in emphasis from public utility to private wealth is reflected in the precinct surrounding the Dome. Adjacent to the Dome is the newly rebuilt Southern Cross Station, home to a railway service that was sold off by the state government in the 1990s and privatised in moves that were touted as improving the efficiency of services and making them more cost-effective by opening them up to competition, but which have since cost the Victorian people millions of dollars in annual subsidies to private corporations.Across the road from the station looms a multistorey edifice that once headquartered the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works, a public body that managed Melbourne’s water and sewerage until it was rebadged and corporatised in 1991. Down the road is a magnificent sandstone building that was once the administrative offices of the publicly owned Victorian Railways. It, too, has been privatised, and converted into an exclusive hotel. Surrounding the Dome is the massive urban renewal project of Melbourne’s Docklands, with its dozen or so new high-rise residential towers and corporate headquarters, plazas and restaurants. Originally envisaged as a no-cost-to-the-taxpayer development and held up as a shining example of how the economy would henceforth be run— ‘public-private partnerships’ between ‘small government’ and developers—Docklands has since soaked up millions of dollars of taxpayer funds in subsidies and bail outs.The lesson is exquisite. Even as the public has been subsidising private developers, the buildings, built on land that was once publicly owned, remain in private hands.

The Lucky Country was written at a crucial moment in Australian history.At its heart was the question: how would Australia shed its hidebound provincial skin and move forward after fifteen years of increasingly stultifying Menziesism? The early twenty-first century, too, is a crucial moment. After almost thirty years of ‘economic rationalism’, many of Australia’s institutions and much of its infrastructure are run-down, and many Australians feel a sense of disquiet about their future and about the institutions that once protected them.Whereas the principle problems then concerned provincial insularity, political stasis and a lack of intellectual depth, the principle questions now concern