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THE
NEW AUSTRALIA
From the Olympic Games of Sydney it surfaces a country, young and ambitious,
that seems that will play an ever more important role in the world establishment.
Besides yielding to Italy an unused set of medals, the Sydney Olympic
Games have brought a little known nation-continent to the forefront.
A nation featured by a surface equal to the whole European Union but
with only 19 million inhabitants, neither three per square kilometre,
notwithstanding two metropolis: Sydney and Melbourne.
A nation that, even being independent since almost a century and being
inhabited not only by Anglo-Saxon, but also by Italians, Greeks, Chinese,
Vietnamese an thirty ethnic groups, has kept as Head of State the queen
of England that goes there yes and no once every five years. A nation,
finally, that after alternating fortunes seems has found a steady economic
balance, with a round 4% steady growth and the prospect to achieve an
ever more relevant position in the Pacific area. By organizing the Games
of the Millennium, Australia had the chance to show the great advances
she carried out as respect to 46 years ago, when it hold the games for
the first time in Melbourne, at the height of the cold war.
By
this chance, Australia has also proved, by entrusting the native athlete
Cathy Freeman the task to light the Olympic flame, to be able to reckon
with its 'original sin', that of having dealt with the native population
for almost two hundred years even worse than Americans with American
Indians: hundred thousands have been slaughtered, as much dead of privations
and diseases and only starting from 1962 natives achieved the rights
of other citizens. Last decade the behaviour toward them changed, many
lands have been returned to them, and it has been done the best to integrate
them in society: but, notwithstanding the early measures on their favour,
succeeding in bringing this population, got in the continent coming
from Asia 50 thousand years before the white and that kept for a long
time at stone age, to other's level will take still some generations.
Setting apart the behaviour toward natives, many other things have changed
in Australia between the two Olympic games held there.
Towns,
where the sizeable population lives, have renewed radically, and Sydney
with skyscrapers, Theatre of the Opera, the utmost modern infrastructures
is already rightly included among the most beautiful and agreeable metropolis
worldwide. Brisbane, Queensland's capital, is in the middle of a big
charm tourist region and it's in a high development phase as others.
Thousands
kilometres far from the throbbing heart of the country, Perth, after
achieving a world fame by hosting a sailing America Cup, has turned
into a first level trading and industry pole in a semi desert territory,
but rich of uranium, bauxite, gold, iron and any kind of the fat of
the land. While, till twenty years ago, immigration was limited to only
white, and even south European were not welcome, today, frontiers are
open also for Asians that in fact fill the almost totality of the eighty
thousand slot available every year.
It
is expected for example that the huge territory of the North, where
only 190.000 people live, gets within 25 years to a million inhabitants,
almost all from Indonesia, China, India and Philippines. More than the
fifty thousand students coming from South East Asia study in the Australian
universities, seven out of the main ten trade partners of the country
are from Asia and 3/5 of the two millions tourists that every year come
to Australia too. This is the interpretation key by which it must be
read the current debate between who would want to stabilize population
on current levels, by spinning the existing resources out, even deserving
greater spaces to natural resources and keeping the numerical supremacy
of whites for a foreseeable future, and who nurses instead a great multiethnic
40-50 million inhabitants Australia, featured by an economic but also
middle-big military power, equipped with financial means to carry out
the required investments.
The
clash is so hard to assume paradoxical aspects. While, till ten years
ago, Australia was mainly a country, exporter of agricultural products
and raw materials, today it has a quite technological advanced industry
that interacts profitably with the Asiatic Tigers, and mainly it shows
a surprising ability to conjugate new and old economy. A great surprise
for the rest of the world it has been the success of the Australian
wine, last year won a prestigious award till today assigned to France
and Italy. Thanks to globalisation, it has changed also population mentality.
Maybe due to the fact that the country developed at the beginning, as
a penal colony of the United Kingdom, Australians had never had that
fame of hard workers. During the Second World War, Australia, besides
fighting valorously with the allied forces, has turned to one of the
biggest suppliers of meat and wheat and by the times of the games in
Melbourne it was among the first ten countries with the highest pro
capite income.
The
time of reformations started 17 years ago, under the government of the
Labourist Bob Hawke by strongly devaluating the Austrian dollar and
it has been carried on - notwithstanding some reverse - also by the
Conservatives when the got back to power in 1996. During this period,
economy has been liberalized, the trade union power downsized, the fiscal
policy adjusted to the winning model of United States and Great Britain.
Even the biggest puzzle of the modern industrial society, the national
pension schemes, found a quite satisfying solution. The outcome is under
everybody's eyes.
Already
since eight years, the development rate is round 4 per cent, showing
decreasing unemployment, inflation under control, a public debt that
is laughable if compared with the European average. In the whole, Australians
are a conservative population that do not love great changes.
Constitution
is till that of 1901 that foresees a federal structure, composed by
six states and the capital, Canberra. Power sharing is like the one
on force in the United States, but the big differences and sometimes
the star geographic distances between states have produced problems:
for example railways were constructed with no homogenous gauges, making
difficult intercontinental communications and further there's no connection
between neither the north and south electric grid nor between the east
and west one.
Along
time it occurred the process, reverse to the one currently in course
in Europe: central power strengthened respect the regional ones, since
- even if bound to transfer nearly the half income to periphery - has
the full control of the fiscal machine. Notwithstanding, the secessionist
push of the past seems exhausted, and the national conscience has strengthened.
Some times, it surfaces instead a part of the public opinion wanting
to cut off all links with the Britain motherland (that for many inhabitants
early emigrated is neither a motherland), turning this way Australia
into a republic.
Last attempt dates back to past November, and all make believe that
it would have succeed. But surprisingly the referendum was defeated
by a majority of 54 against 46 and the determining vote of the province
and land. Republicans have already announced that, after a decent interval,
will try it again, and possibly the will succeed in winning it out;
but all that is telling how still strong are the sentimental links with
Europe, that instead is getting even more far both politically and economically.
If the preferred destination of the Australians that can afford travels
is still London, their government must reckon with every day another
reality.
The
country sided the United State in both the Asiatic conflicts of last
fifty years, the war in Korea and the war in Vietnam, and when it burst
the Timor East crisis, what's more, it led the international expedition
that must have brought back order to that martyred island.
Anyhow things go, Australia will stop soon being the land of kangaroos
in the public imagination: it's an emergent country, with a great potentiality,
that by the Olympic Games of Sydney have stepped forward to the world
set.
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