Post by pim on Sept 28, 2012 1:45:59 GMT 11
www.theage.com.au/world/european-unrest-as-cuts-hit-home-20120927-26nx4.html
I can't blame ordinary Greeks and Spaniards for being pissed off. The piece mentions a 58 year old lady who's a pensioner and has just had her pension slashed by a third.
Just reflect on that for a moment: how many of us are retirees? How would we cope if our retirement income was reduced by 33ยจรท%, just like that! Would we accept meekly that this was necessary for the good of the economy? I doubt it!
Lenore Taylor wrote a Quarterly Essay three or four months ago about the "culture of entitlement" in Australia and how this informs our politics. Imagine if a government were to announce that henceforth all middle class welfare was to be abolished. So that private schools would have to become 100% self-funding, no more government subsidy for private health insurance premiums, and self-funded retirees would have to start paying income tax again. The result would be political Armageddon for whatever Government was crazy brave enough to embark on such measures. And so it is in Europe.
And yet ... what choice do they have!
There's no scope for Australians to indulge in hubris and schadenfreude at Europe's expense on this either. When we talk of the EU we're talking about (still!) the largest market in the world. What happens there matters. We don't want them to go belly up.
In 2014 we mark 100 years since the outbreak of a world war whose principal battleground was Europe. It started, as Winston Churchill said, over a "damn fool thing in the Balkans". Who in Australia had ever heard of Sarajevo back in 1914? And yet a shot fired in Sarajevo unleashed a war that cost 60 000 Australian lives over 4 years.
Europe mattered back then. It still does, 100 years later.
I can't blame ordinary Greeks and Spaniards for being pissed off. The piece mentions a 58 year old lady who's a pensioner and has just had her pension slashed by a third.
Just reflect on that for a moment: how many of us are retirees? How would we cope if our retirement income was reduced by 33ยจรท%, just like that! Would we accept meekly that this was necessary for the good of the economy? I doubt it!
Lenore Taylor wrote a Quarterly Essay three or four months ago about the "culture of entitlement" in Australia and how this informs our politics. Imagine if a government were to announce that henceforth all middle class welfare was to be abolished. So that private schools would have to become 100% self-funding, no more government subsidy for private health insurance premiums, and self-funded retirees would have to start paying income tax again. The result would be political Armageddon for whatever Government was crazy brave enough to embark on such measures. And so it is in Europe.
And yet ... what choice do they have!
There's no scope for Australians to indulge in hubris and schadenfreude at Europe's expense on this either. When we talk of the EU we're talking about (still!) the largest market in the world. What happens there matters. We don't want them to go belly up.
In 2014 we mark 100 years since the outbreak of a world war whose principal battleground was Europe. It started, as Winston Churchill said, over a "damn fool thing in the Balkans". Who in Australia had ever heard of Sarajevo back in 1914? And yet a shot fired in Sarajevo unleashed a war that cost 60 000 Australian lives over 4 years.
Europe mattered back then. It still does, 100 years later.
