Post by Niemmy on Oct 7, 2007 3:02:05 GMT -5
In this extract from his new book, Ryan Heath, author of Please Just F* Off, It's Our Turn Now, writes about the generation of young Australians who live overseas - why they leave and why they really hope to come back and what it means if they don't.
More than 250 million people in India are aged 18-35. Imagine if 25 million of them - 9.7 per cent of them - decided to move overseas and spend their most productive years in England. What would happen to India? If that seems far-fetched, then imagine if you woke up tomorrow and Australia had an unemployment rate of 12 per cent or 15 per cent, instead of 5 per cent.
Why? Because the equivalent is happening in Australia right now. As you read this, 10 per cent of our 18-to-35-year-olds live overseas. Almost all of them are highly skilled, and only some of them plan to return. It's not a cultural cringe - we know Australia can be great when it tries. The problem is it doesn't try that often any more.
But instead of working hard to lure talented Australians back to their home - our institutions actively push them away. The week before Christmas I received a letter saying that I had 14 days to re-register with the Electoral Commission or be thrown off the voting roll. No email, no phone call (why did I provide these details in the first place?) and given the Christmas mail surge, no chance that the letter would make the stated deadline.
Like thousands of other young Australians, I love Australia but I can't even vote. Now I'm just a number: one of 1.2 million members of Generation eXpat.
So why do all these people leave? The actress Radha Mitchell thinks it's pretty simple: "In Australia there really isn't a lot to do. There aren't a lot of opportunities."
Liberal party heavyweight Richard Alston nods to the problem too: "We've got these skilled people. We have to give them a good reason to stay. We have to recognise that we are in a competitive global marketplace for skills."
Why did I leave? The suffocation. The dread of knowing that in early 21st-century Australia you get on by keeping in line and being grateful for what baby boomers give you. A 32-year-old woman I interviewed in Wales put it best: "I left in 2002. I just had the feeling that I was 'too' everything. I was too different. Too ethnic. Too outrageous. Too ambitious. I just couldn't do it any longer. In London being different is why people value you. In Australia it is used to stifle you."
Tens of thousands are thinking - "I am only in my 20s once. Do I really want to spend them being annoyed I can't own a house or get a promotion and putting up with that twat John Howard?" What drives this is economics, lack of opportunity and inertia in public life. We love Australia but not the "Southern Hemisphere Ceiling", or the tolerance of mediocrity that now comes with it.
Some of it is inevitable - the consequence of being a small country compared to global giants like China. But if a country like Australia isn't careful, the wonderful advantages of globalisation (like demand for skills and cheap travel) just generate human capital flight. Eventually all you are left with, in the words of demographer Bernard Salt, are "the old, the complacent and the ugly". The Adelaide-isation of Australia, you might say.
One 29-year-old interview subject was in raptures about Adelaide. "Don't you notice how all the best people are from Adelaide? They are always smart and funny and cultured. I've never met a bad one," she crowed. I asked how often she visited Adelaide.
"Oh, I don't", was the reply. That's because most of the good young people have left and she meets them in the places they have fled to.
But it's not fair to pick on Adelaide when the problem is nationwide: "Working in the public sector you have to wait for someone to die or have a baby to get a chance for the job you want."
Emily Mierisch, 27, London, England
"London puts us in a market where she and her partner can work in new ways. Before we left Sydney we were thinking two years. Now we are thinking between two to five."
Rannia Wannous, 28, London, England
"At the moment there is nowhere for me to go in Australia. It was too easy back home. I needed to be pushed. At the risk of sounding like someone on a journey of self-discovery I needed to be challenged because Australia was making me a bit complacent."
Jo Fox, 31, London, England
The Senate analysed the views of overseas Australians in 2003. Here's a sample: "I am a television script writer. Before I left Australia, I worked for Home and Away and Water Rats. I found in the British television industry, people are employed on merit. Talented people get promoted. In Australia the television industry is ageist. As a 22-year-old woman, it was impossible to get work heading a script department. One friend was recently sacked from Channel Seven because her boss "felt like a change". Another friend was told not to wear trainers to work. This kind of thing would never happen in the British television industry. It seems to me you have to be older than 35 for anyone in the Australian TV industry to take you seriously, or a bloke."
Holly Lyons, East Sussex, England
"The opportunities we have (in Britain) are endless. Work wise, the money is so much better than home. You can even organise a job from Australia. I will not leave here until I have enough money to go home and put a deposit on a house."
Emma Oliver, London, England
"I live in Dubai. I am the regional manager for a multinational American company. On returning to Australia I decided to visit several recruitment agencies, and I was very disappointed to see the lack of opportunities available. I received messages that I was too over-qualified. This is the attitude that I feared from a Third World country, not Australia. I would come back in three seconds if Australia can wake up and see the light."
Kerry Koutsikos, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
"The smarter Australians are fleeing the country in search of better employment opportunities that they will never receive back home and challenges in their career. We are afforded opportunities that would take a lifetime to receive in Australia because of the prevalent 'old boys network'. God forbid a woman would speak her mind. In America (namely New York) you are encouraged to be your best, constantly challenge your abilities and train others in order to move upward."
Heidi Rybak, New York, US
"When we are certain that conditions are equally beneficial in Australia, we will be there. I need the employers of Australia to recognise the work experience gained in very challenging environments and senior roles in Britain."
Those are the feelings of individuals, but analysis of our public spaces and cities is just as instructive. The truth is that Australia doesn't really have a world city - and it's too deluded to realise what it needs to do to create one.
Reading the morning papers in the aftermath of the 2005 London bombings, I was struck by the faces of London. Thirty-two of the 39 photos of victims that stared at us that next morning were under 35 and looked like the United Nations. That's when I realised what a real "world city" is. It's not easy; it's not white; it's not old. It's crazy and colourful and out of control in a way I don't recognise in Australia. Sydney isn't the fifth column after New York, London, Tokyo and Paris. Behind even Cairo in air passenger travel and Nairobi in terms of NGO activity, Sydney is middle-ranking and miles ahead of its Australian rivals at that.
Indeed, it takes no great leap of the imagination to put Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro or Johannesburg on the same footing as Sydney. But it's a real challenge for white chauvinists to think that a Portuguese-speaking city might be more interesting.
It is easier to believe that hosting the Olympics was the last jewel in Sydney's world city crown, when genuine success is actually measured over the long haul. Yet we don't have a long-term blueprint because we are too busy looking in the mirror admiring ourselves. Primed for this self-indulgence by tourist boards, development agencies, and the society page editors, we flatter ourselves into believing that a good cafe latte makes us cosmopolitan.
Our self-satisfied attitudes are part of the problem but unfortunately not the sum of it. In the field of world cities geography really does count against us, making laziness about our future prospects a foolish approach.
But we aren't treading water - we're going backwards. Compared with five years ago the annual number of departures is up 40 per cent. Using the example of the education sector, of those who leaving in their 20s, 78 per cent held postgraduate qualifications and 97 per cent were employed as professionals before they left Australia.
"Better employment opportunities" was the reason for 42.6 per cent of Australians leaving the country, which the Business Council of Australia knows and fears all too well.
If you think we're all off chasing money, you're wrong. My income in Australia bought me a better lifestyle than it does in London. What money doesn't buy is the management development programme my British employers signed me up to, or the paid training leave, encouragement to do community volunteering on work time, or the choice to pick my hours and work from home when I need to.
And it doesn't buy the chance to work in an environment in which your peers write the best newspaper columns, advise the best politicians, make the best deals in the financial markets and open exhibitions at the best galleries.
Today we must create specific policies to lure talented young people back. And we better start implementing them fast. It's not a cultural cringe we're dealing with - it's a moral and economic imperative.
