THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN DREAM IS DEAD

Sorry to break it to you.

The Great Australian Dream is different to the American dream.

I actually have no idea what the American Dream is, and none of my American friends can explain it either, no matter how erudite they may be, so I assume it’s something to do with eagles and freedom and bombing poor countries so they too can die for freedom. Or something. Americans know they have a dream, but they’re not quite sure what it is. How’s that for successful propaganda?

But the Great Australian Dream is different. It is a simple dream, for we are a simple people. It’s as simple as actually owning a home to live in. That’s pretty much it. That’s as wild as our dreams get. We’re not a country of big thinkers. We are the bottom-dwellers in Maslow’s theory, no further evolved than the humans of the Mesolithic age. Give us a cave, and we’re good, thanks very much. It’s a mindset that has kept The Commonwealth Of Australia free of political assassinations since its inception. As long as we have somewhere to live, we’ll pretty much keep our mouths shut and not complain too much.

When I grew up in the working class suburbs of Sydney, owning a home was almost your sole purpose in life. Meet a girl, get married, buy a house, get a station-wagon, inflict 2.3 kids on yourself and find some salvation in a shed with a beer fridge and a Labrador to lay at your feet.

There was a time when that house was on a quarter of an acre block with a huge shed, a vegetable garden and a yard so huge you actually grew to hate it because of the time you spent mowing all the grass. But the yard was great for the kids to play footy or cricket in. These days some of us are happy just to have a 35 square metre studio apartment in an overdeveloped soulless suburb full of people who walk past each other on the street without saying G’day. And it probably cost us the best part of a million dollars for that boring as batshit studio. Oh, and the quarter acre blocks? They all have 6 townhouses on them now.

Much has been written and spoken about the Australian housing market in recent years, particularly about how young people are being completely priced out of the market, especially in the capital cities, and how some cities are simply so expensive that young people have given up on the dream of owning their own place altogether. Forget Generation X, Y and the Millennials. The next generation will be the Drifters, because many of them will never know home ownership.

But it’s worse than that. The housing price crisis is simply a widening of the gap between rich and poor. Rich kids will get houses, because their parents will help them. Then they’ll inherit more houses when their parents cark it, and those houses are all rented to the poor kids. Poor kids will never get that help, because their parents can barely pay the rent on the house they are living in (which is owned by the parents of the rich kids), and the poor kids will inherit fuck all.

So there’s that.

But here’s what makes it all so much worse; it’s called Workforce Casualisation.

And Workforce Casualisation is quite possibly the greatest weaponization of class warfare we have ever seen. And we’ve seen some shit. Whenever the “left” of Australian politics proposes any policy change that does anything to redress the divide between rich and poor (franking credits, anyone?), the conservatives scream of “class warfare”, like that’s actually something that shouldn’t happen. No, racism shouldn’t happen. Misogyny shouldn’t happen. But class warfare, that should absolutely happen. The friction between rich and poor should always exist. People should always stand up for themselves and stop the abuse of the working classes by the ruling classes, for that is where real change in self-actualization lies.

There was a time in Australia, only 30-odd years ago, where the “average” working class family, with a couple of kids and a mortgage, could survive on one full time wage with a reasonable standard of living. Stay-at-home mums were a real and more common than not thing. Kids came home after school to a home with a parent in it.

Then we reached a point where mums were looking for part time jobs, because being a “stay at home mum” was no longer cutting it in terms of actually getting food on the table.

Before we knew it, many families became simply a set of people where both parents had to maintain their career and work full time in order to survive, and the first draft of every political party’s election campaign included a policy on child care, because it had become a prerequisite for any family looking to achieve their version of The Australian Dream. Then we gained paid maternity leave, because mums were under pressure to get back to work as soon as the baby could breathe by itself, because the bills have to be paid. Thirty years ago nobody ever imagined paid maternity leave could even be a thing. By the time Julia Gillard was Prime Minister it had become a serious policy.

And now we are at the point where a home in the working class areas of Sydney, the biggest city in Australia, costs more than most of the people who are currently growing up in that area will ever afford.

The average salary in Australia has just hit $90,000. The minimum wage, which many of the people living in the working class suburbs earn, is only a touch over $40,000. So the lowest paid workers get less than 50% of the average wage. But the house prices in the suburbs where those people live don’t reflect that. Why? Because the rich kids are competing to buy them all so they can rent them to the poor kids. Well, actually their parents are, but same difference.

The average house price in Penrith, a working class suburb of Sydney, is $775,000. That means a person on the minimum wage needs to work for roughly 33 years, give or take, to pay off the house (including interest), assuming they could even get a mortgage in the first place, which they likely can’t. And that also assumes they don’t want to eat, drink, have electricity, pay their council rates, or go anywhere or do anything for those 33 years.

Seeing a trend here?

But that’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem, the thing that will increase the class divide, the gap between those who have and those who don’t, is the casualisation of the workforce. The full-time permanent jobs that have always created the stable platform for people and families and allowed them to mortgage themselves to the eyeballs to achieve the Great Australian Dream, are disappearing. We live in an age where corporations, assisted by a business-centric Federal Government, are removing our full-time permanent jobs and the protections and stability that goes with them.

Families are surviving on 2, 3, or even 4 casual jobs shared between parents. Parents are trying to juggle jobs so that someone will be home to look after the kids at any given time, and sometimes the kids will just have to look after themselves, because the rent has to be paid. Single parent families do it even tougher.

The media and economists love to talk about a thing called the “gig economy” like it’s some great advancement and a source of freedom for young entrepreneurs, breaking out of corporate norms and building their own businesses. 95% of people working in the gig economy are driving Ubers and delivering your meals. It’s not entrepreneurship, it’s just fucking necessity.

Corporations love having their workers as casuals. You can have more people on the books to cover busy periods, but you don’t have to guarantee them anything. Change their shifts from week to week. Oh, they complained one of the managers was mistreating them? Cut their hours. Trade is a bit quiet? Send them home. Doesn’t matter that they’re only half an hour into a 4 hour shift and it cost them $16 to get to work. Decide you don’t like them? You don’t have to go though the process of sacking them, just take them off the roster, and never explain to them that they won’t get another shift. Businesses do not want to employ full-time staff unless they really have to, and with the changes to employment law in recent years, who could blame them?

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where the Great Australian Dream died. It will never come back. We’re done here.

And we all let it happen on our watch, because we let governments convince us it was all about some bullshit mythical thing called “flexibility”, and it was going to make Australia more “competitive”. It was supposed to be a trade-off of more money for more flexible conditions. But the money never came. And the flexible conditions were going to be good for you too, remember? How did that work out for you? How are your Sunday penalty rates looking these days? Oh, that’s right, they took them away because it would create more jobs, so that would be good, yes?

It never happened. They lied to you. They knew it was never going to happen, but they lied to you and did it anyway. And you let them. Because we are a nation of terrified children looking to suckle at the teat of the all-powerful economy, and whenever a government tells us something will be good for the economy, we bend over and take our medicine like good little altar boys, praying at the altar of Corporate Australia. Because we have been trained to believe that Corporate Australia is more important than Real Australia, which is us. My American friends could learn from that too.

That removal of Sunday penalty rates was just theft. Outright theft. It was Robin Hood in reverse. Take money from the poor kids and put it in the trust funds of the rich kids. That’s what workforce casualisation is all about. It’s also what workplace flexibility is about. It is the brutalisation of the working class for the financial gain of those who own the corporations. And don’t swallow the lie that it’s just the poor people’s Superannuation funds that own the corporations. It’s mainly the rich people’s tax-haven Super funds that own them. And the hedge funds. But let’s not start with that little chestnut.

And if you’re thinking I sound like a Commie, I don’t. I sound like a kid who grew up in Penrith. Because I am. I watched my parents struggle to achieve the Great Australian Dream. I saw what it did to them. To my family. The scars have never completely healed. And it shouldn’t have come with scars, because as Maslow says, shelter is the most basic of needs. We shouldn’t be a country where putting a roof over your head is so difficult that people commit suicide under the pressure of it.

I hold out hope that someday the working class in Australia will end their subservience and fight back. They are the cattle that fuels the dairy that is Australia, and without them, there is no milk. And the dairy needs milk. It’s about time the cattle kept the milk for their own calves and stopped giving it to the dairy. Just to square things up a bit.

I wonder what the catalyst for that will be? Do Australians have it in them?

Peace out.

Tug.