“Renovation” is a good word for what has been happening to Australia in the past quarter century, according to social researcher Hugh Mackay in his book Advance Australia … Where? People are getting married later, young people are using information technology to stay continuously in touch with each other, job insecurity and income disparity have grown, and household sizes have been shrinking.
Many things about the country still need to be fixed: the health of indigenous people is very poor compared with that of indigenous people in the US, New Zealand and Canada; our investment in education is inadequate; too many children suffer from chronic sickness and obesity; and the rate of serious assaults is far too high.
We have been passing through the gender revolution, the workplace revolution, the IT revolution and the identity revolution. Marriage and divorce have been reinvented, as has our attitude to parenting. Some issues that, according to the author, we need to talk about include global warming, politics, the monarchy, public education, poverty and arts funding.
Part Four of the book deals with the Howard era of government, which the authors describes as the Dreamy Period, because people turned away from engagement with the big issues and became more insular. In my view the author is mistaken; Australians have never been enthusiastically engaged with politics. His fond memories of former Prime Minister Paul Keating seem out of touch with the attitudes of most Australians who voted him out of office because they disliked him even more than John Howard. His optimism about the Rudd government and the 2020 Summit was misplaced although, to be fair, the book was written in the early days of that government.
The book is valuable not so much for the answers it gives as for the issues it raises. Some parts of it are already dated, less than three years after publication, and almost any reader is likely to find something to disagree with in what the author says. Nonetheless, the book provides an interesting and thought-provoking discussion of a broad range of important topics, and is well worth reading.