10 Dec 21st century is not the 20th century
“Australia is no longer an isolated nation that prospers or fails by it’s own successes and failures. Now we are a tiny part of a very large global community that permeates us to such an extent that national borders are nothing more than a line on a map.
There is no longer Australia’s economy and sovereign wealth– there is only Australia’s economic interactions with the world economy and how that creates or erodes our individual wealth. There is no longer Australia’s employment in isolation – there is only the current number of jobs available here and jobs filled offshore.
But we don’t yet think globally. We have built a little oasis on the bottom of the world, and content in our assumed isolation, we seek to make it as safe and rewarding as possible. This isolated view of the world should have died at the end of the 20th century. We fantasise and obsess about a million tweaks to legislation and who is most deserving of government hand-outs, and who is at fault for someone’s injury and how that might be prevented by a broad-scale rule of law.
Meanwhile, the world is changing dramatically around us, and our insular obsessions are preventing us from evolving as a nation. As thousands and soon millions of jobs disappear offshore to nations who are building their next evolution, we are still talking about minimum wages in isolation. The big danger with being concerned only with the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs is that the bottom gets pulled out from underneath us. Building a strong country to suit the 20th century world is not the same thing as building a strong country in the 21st century.”