“¢ healthcare, by a lo-ooong way the best in the world

“¢ software developers from brisbane and perth are head&shoulders more capable than any other region in the world. in particular, hire 1 of them for every 3 silicon valley coders.

Health and welfare systems
Medical science (6 Nobel prizes?), also ecological and agricultural science
Inventions and innovation
Tourism
Sport (obviously)
Cultural diversity
Arts & entertainment, for me it is mainly comedy & music
Political, legal and economic systems
Personal freedoms and opportunities, and overall quality of life for citizens

Australia is far from perfect, and has plenty of serious existing and potential problems, but we do very well by world standards at most things.

I think you are right about the intent of many of the Howard government ‘improvements’ to the welfare system, at least on the family payments side. While the official rationale for these has always been about promoting ‘choice’, I suspect that the subtext is that they want to promote one particular choice (the one that involves mothers working less rather than more). But that could just be my feminist paranoia.

However, if this is their agenda, they haven’t been very successful. Labour force participation of women/wives/mothers is still rising, albeit more slowly than in previous decades.

In another part of the government hive brain, there does seem to be a recognition that perhaps they will need to encourage more women to work to lift overall participation rates in the face of population ageing. It’s just that they don’t seem to want to put two and two together in any explicit way (for example, recognising that increasing labour force participation by women would almost certainly involve increasing participation by mothers), preferring to pretend that their policies can be all things to all people.

But all of this is distracting from the real subject of this discussion. However, I’m considering whether to write one or two posts on this specific subject in the near future, so perhaps we can revisit the topic again then.

On that I totally agree. Unfortunately I think the policy changes (and sometimes lack thereof) of the last ten years have been geared more at encouraging a male breadwinner model at the expense of a more gender neutral policy.

I think that he rise in the number of ‘waged poor’ in Australia is a strong demonstration of how welfare policy is failing to respond to need. At the heyday of this model, even the few women who were in the workforce were able to work and quite easily keep themselves from poverty - even though they were earning considerably less than their male counterparts.

The gendered wage disparity in Australia has fallen somewhat since the sixties/seventies, but I think it is definitely still large enough to provide a significant disincentive for women to enter the workforce where only one person in a couple will.

I will be interested to see what kind of policies both parties offer up to address this in the next election - I suspect childcare will be a reasonably significant campaigning point.

Having seen NYC’s for 16 years i can say we’re better at it. They are big, Colossal even but they have a huge domestic matrket to play with. And to be honest a lot of their inefficiencies gets covered up by the sheer size of the market.

Macquarie love them or hate them (I love to hate them) are being copied by the Goldman Sachs of this world- The Macquarie model it is called. Not just the infrastructure stuff they get into but the way they have set themseves up. As a bank they deveoped a great system of avoiding the use of their balnce sheet to become players in industry.
It is more a throw back to the old days when JP Morgan was around butr with a modern twis. Those guys are brillant. Very greedy but brillant.

The small market gave us a good education in not making mistakes too often or you go down the gurgler.

Hedge funds:

I believe we have the biggest growing segment in the world. Not quite up to US size but our hedge funds will be the biggest regional palyers.

Why did it happen?

I think the gambling streak, combined with a free thinking open bunch of people helped things along.

Lot’s of Ozzies running investment banking departments around the world. Gorman runs Morgan stanely private banking business world wide. as an example.

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Mining

We’re the very best.

I’m not sure what category is involved, but I also think that Henry Lawson’s poetry was better than that of anybody who wrote similar stuff (late Victorian colonial ballads?)

Re Yobbo on social security

Hong Kong’s is better because there is less of it and yet their population is hardly starving.

Well it helps when you have about 45% social housing (ie government funded). In a place where housing costs are high, subsidising housing is some substitute for cash transfers through social security system.

But we are both aware of the risks of perpetuating that - we think that the answer might lie in a home business but we worry that would actually impact even more negatively in the end.

I think quite a few couples are like this, though much less than up to the 1960s. If people want to make these choices, I’m not too sure what policy can do. It is of course very unfortunate that hierarchies in both government and private firms are not all that mobile. Despite all the excitement about downsizing etc, once you have a position it’s hard for you to lose it whereever you are, and the corollary is that those trying to move into the workforce (and perhaps efficiency and meritocracy to some extent) are disadvantaged.

I do know that there are some innovative firms that specialise in generating part and near full time jobs particularly for women who are looking after kids. I know this because I run one of them - though there are better and bigger firms than ours around doing this.

Of course it’s an OK model for people who choose it (though, I must say, I think opting for it for any length of time poses considerable risks for both men and women). The real problem is that policy makers seem to have great difficulty crafting policies that accommodate more than one model of how couples organise themselves in relation to work and family. For example, we have moved a little way from assuming that all husbands work and wives do not, to a model that allows that sometimes it will be the wife who works and the husband does not. But we don’t seem to be able to incorporate the concept that some couples actually prefer to share the load more equitably. So perhaps it’s the single breadwinner model I have trouble with, rather than the male breadwinner model per se.

Wage equality may be much higher in Norway if you look at total gross weekly earnings, since women in Norway are much more likely to work full-time than women in Australia. (That might also explain why more of them get further up the greasy pole too.)

But as far as I know there is no real difference between the two countries if you compare the gender ratio of average hourly rates of pay.

And you’re right about the absolute resilience of the male breadwinner model - it is damn difficult to eradicate. But perhaps that is because we still do subscribe to it at some broad societal level - or at least the modern-day version, which is one job for Dad and half a job for Mum.

I don’t think I’ll be moving to Norway any time soon, though - I kinda like it here.

I would perhaps, erect a tiny defence in that the policies were largely reactive rather proactive excepting perhaps the first decade of their inception.

In terms of poverty levels and access to healthcare they were stupdendously successful, for both genders I believe.

However, like you I would be equally happy to see the policies moving away from a male breadwinner model, but to be honest I’m not really convinced that they are (not in the last ten years, at any rate).

I don’t even know that we’re really moving away from a wage-earner’s system, so much as simply compromising it.

In terms of gender equity in the workplace, we really should look no further than Norway, where wage equality is much higher, corporations are legally required to ensure half their boards are female, one year of paternity leave is legislated (not too mention maternity leave of two) and gender representation in parliament is around something like 45% (I’m pretty sure not legislated, that’s just the way it worked out, which I believe is far and away the most realistic gender representation in politics anywhere in the world.