Topic: Ranting
Apparently, Australia is in the throes of a "man-drought". According to Australian demographer Bernard Salt, the country is short about 20,000 men in their thirties, ostensibly due to migration overseas in pursuit of jobs. New Zealand faces a similar demographic imbalance. I feel like its too bad that the blog author, Has-Been, seems content to settle for jokes about Amazons (in response to the notion that Australian women are going about creating a culture geared toward a single lifestyle) and Australia's history as a penal colony, rather than trying for a deeper discussion of globalization and migration.
Migration is fascinating. Since my classes this semester are generally focused on global-scale issues -- colonialism, globalization, international relations from a feminist perspective -- migration is something of a recurring theme. And it's a theme that I can relate to personally, which makes it that much more interesting. Just this week, my classes have dealt with transnational kinship ties, the various motivating and constraining factors that make women's and men's experiences of migration significantly different, and the aesthetic changes that societies experience due to interactions with migrants. For instance, large scale migration of men may open up opportunities for women, as is implied by Salt when he links the lower number of men in New Zealand to the fact that several national leadership posts are held by women.
Or could it be because he's Australian that Salt thinks that "missing men" has to be the answer to New Zealand's female leadership? Unlike Has-Been states in his follow-up post, I don't think that Australia has "an absence of obvious problems". Mainstream Australian society has similar issues around gender and sexuality equity as those found in American society, which I would argue could contribute to the perception that men would have to be "missing" in order for women to be found in a number of key leadership roles in NZ. The fact that the Australian left feels every bit as alienated from national politics and society as the American left does also seems to be a problem to me. (Explanatory note on the previous link for Americans: "Liberal"= the Liberal Party, which ideologically is more or less equivalent to the Republican Party. This situation has naturally led to much confusion when I forget myself and start talking about small-"l" liberal American politics with Aussies.)
Since I spend my days in the bastion of left-wing sentiment that is a typical postgraduate humanities program, my perceptions may be more than a bit skewed, but it seems to me that plenty of Australians see the situation of Aboriginal peoples, the detention camps for illegal immigrants, and prejudice toward non-white Australians and immigrants as obvious problems. These might not be majority perspectives, but I don't think that they're held by so small a minority as to be dismissed out of hand.
So I'm more than a little bit skeptical of Has-Been's proposal that the Democrats look into the "baby bonus" that the Liberal Party has implemented, although Has-Been does at least couch it in terms of supporting families, rather than posing breeding as a "patriotic duty" as he quotes Peter Costello, a leader of the Liberal Party, as having said. That sort of attitude veers perilously close to raving racism, and given the anxiety in the US about non-white immigration into a society that has been predominantly white, I think that a "baby bonus" could easily be seen (or spun) as a eugenicist policy. The Democratic Party has enough problems without involving itself in that sort of morass.
(Wow. I was going to try to write some sort of conclusion to tie everything together, but that just doesn't seem like its going to be possible without dragging this on for pages. So maybe its best to stop now, before I get any more tangential. Or spin off into a rant about immigration anxiety. Or get any hungrier, because that will just lead to crankiness. Little did the lovely DamselFish know what she was letting everyone in for when she sent me those links!)
Just can't let it go: This story is still bugging me. I've got some stuff on corporations and psychopathic behavior that I'd like to get to, but I keep turning these articles, and my response to them, over and over in my head. I guess I'm feeling like I've barely scratched the surface of the issues involved here: globalization, demographic shifts, migration -- all major issues that I barely understand, but find deeply intriguing. And I suppose that I'm also anxious that I'm painting very shallow picture of certain issues in Australian society. I'm no expert, to be sure, and it's maybe a little too easy to look at a situation here and say, "oh, that's like this in the States", rather than going to the effort of understanding it in its own context. Not to say that drawing those parallels is necessarily invalid, but it does run the risk of obscuring a more complete and locally relevant picture. I have a feeling I'll be coming back later to many of the topics that I've touched on here, because they deserve far more attention than I'm able to give them right now. So I shouldn't harsh on Has-Been too much for skimming over the surface of the issues when I haven't delved into them myself. There's just so much to talk about and so little time right now in which to do it.