I have just returned from a break in Thailand and have found my self wondering if we are just fooling our selves.
Thailand is meant to be an emerging economy at best, but I found a very competent economy with well advanced social structure and community health standards. Beside this I also noticed the quality of the telecommunications infrastructure and the standard of the roads and bridges, even the country back roads compared to the rubbish I drive on here.
I commend the Thai people for their hard work and social unity, it puts us to shame. My visit there, complete with a trip to the dentist who was very professional, clean and cheap leaves me wondering if we are just kidding our selves. Are we simply suffering for a greedy government that wants everything? Thai people don’t have personal income tax only business tax, yet there is much development and quality of life is good. All the recent political trouble barely raises a comment from the general population and on the whole they felt embarrassed by it all. I am not suggesting that they have utopia but what do you all think?
Are we living a fool’s paradise? Could we operate with much less taxation and government support of the welfare sector? Could the social structure of Australia make the adjustments required to ensure social and economic support for all it’s community or are we really that selfish that we are only interested in ourselves?

Hi Nairbe

Well..depending on which way you came back..I suspect you have the same reaction I do when coming to Sydney or Melbourne Airports which is:

"Yikes...here I am back in 3rd world Vic" in my case.

We don't even have a fast train to the airport.. man have we been lefffft behind. Kuala Lumpur shames us.. Changi belittles us...

We are sliding down....down....down...

Oh wait.. some of us are not :) Builders Laborers, Electricians, Warfies..they are doing fine...by the outcome of brute force and cowardly Politicians.

Ohhh how I drank in the efforts of Peter Wreith as he bludgeoned the thugs of the MUA into submission. Still more work to do... we still have the builders laborers and construction workers to deal with.
A few more 'lashes' will be needed there.

Ask yourself this.. 'WHY' has our desalination plant cost blown out so far ?
Hmmmmm perhaps because it will be employing 450 electicians for the next decade and they were getting $150k/annum during construction...
Dean Mighell (ETU)has a lotttt to answer for to the Australian people.

Or is it that the Thai people are better managers than we are. Most things I touch in business and public life have the influence of crap, incompetent management about them.

AL,
Yes the Phuket airport was nothing to write home about but it was certainly no less a facility than any of the Australian airports i have traveled through.
I noted that without social security basically everyone had a job. Many tasks where done using man power that we would use machinery for. This was not because the machines were not available but rather because everyone needed a job. The result is lower wages and on the personal wealth stakes they are clearly running behind us, but this did not seem to effect the basic quality of life. I expected to find slums and poor villages as i traveled around further north from Phuket island but to my surprise there was a lot of new home being built in the villages. I didn't see any shanty towns like those everywhere in India.
In the end i was left wondering if we all could do a lot better with less individual focus and better facilities and infrastructure. The most notable was how does poor little Thailand manage to build a mobile phone system that works everywhere and i mean everywhere. I was on a two day jungle trek and had coverage the whole time, in fact i was never out of range my whole visit.
I feel you have a good point, Many are being over rewarded for the work they do leaving less money to be invested in the actual bricks and motar of the job. We need to find a better balance to our work places.

The Malaysian Airport that I went to was nothing short of a large shed. Our flight started boarding two hours early and wouldn't take anymore passengers on the stated boarding time. That left 28 people to either set up camp on the airport/shed floor or find your own way to a hotel.
KL city was friendly but the smaller areas around were underdeveloped, run down and foreign to the concept of westerners walking freely among the streets.

However Thailand was humble. I was humbled by being around the people. I was at a tattoo parlor, the tattooist was Buddhist, his lady friend was Christian, their buddy who gave us a ride home was catholic and his little lady friend was Hindu.

Bizarre right. I got to thinking about how graceful Thai culture is, the whole thing is practiced with respect, sure they have conflicting beliefs but they don't conflict because they accept and they are humble.
I think if Australian people were humble instead of forever seeking more then our economy would grow. The focus is on ourselves and not on what we can do to improve our nation (for the vast majority).

So
'Could the social structure of Australia make the adjustments required to ensure social and economic support for all it’s community or are we really that selfish that we are only interested in ourselves?'

We are really that selfish. What is practical in theory is not desirable in practice. I would give, you probably would too but how much and for how long?

Nicnoto,
Having not been through Malaysia or indo i can't comment on things in those countries. I do though agree with you about the Thai people. They are humble and i know it had an affect on me and how i felt toward them. I feel it would be very difficult to effect social change in Australia. You only need to sit and watch the way so many Aussies behave over there to see the arrogance and selfishness. As to whether i personally could sustain such a change? Well i hope i live my life as best i can toward such goals. I am on a property, i graze my own meat and though not much of a gardener try to produce some veggies. I have no Television and until recently had only solar power. My cost of living and level of luxury are minimal compared to the suburban lifestyle. I could easily reduce my costs some more without it affecting my quality of life but there are limits to where it moves from being lifestyle choice to a struggle. I do also enjoy to travel and do so with my children when and where i can. The lifestyle choices i make are what allows me to do this as my income is modest.

Yes well their 'wants' are more in tune with their 'needs', whereas our people's wants are way above their needs, however, instead of doing something about it, our people (generalising) prefer to take the easier option of allowing someone else to provide it for them.

Stop the handouts!

Now while this may not provide an immediate solution, it's a pretty good place to start.

The sooner people are made accountable for their personal 'life choices', the sooner the rest of us can relax about having some sought of a decent retirement for our time after work.

Although with the recent suggestion of raising the retirement age for self funded retirees to 67, just so the handout brigade can continue their enjoyment, there may not be much to look forward to after all.

Yes, we are fooling ourselves, however, rather than dealing with the issues, we are simply applying band aid solutions without addressing the cause.

So long as there is a 'free lunch' available, there will always be those who take it.

We simply need to move from 'hand outs', to 'hand ups', whereby the monies taken must be repaid at some point.

Rehctub,
I don't know how you would go trying to introduce a system where the social security payments were repayable. I suspect though that at some stage it will be necessary to do something about the handouts as we have had it far to easy for far too long. We have riden the sheep's back through the 50's and 60's then the mining industry progressively to the mantle. The truth is mining is finite and we need to plan and consider where we are going and how we will get there.
Yes i support your handout crusade, but no i don't agree about retirement age. I commented on your thread about this. 65 was the retirement age when life expectancy was no more than 68-70 for most men. things have changed and we are living much longer so we need to work longer or earn more to retire. Plenty of people are able to achieve this but if anything goes wrong in life, like divorce, it's gone.
As a single parent running a small business i would loose significant benefits if your plan was introduced. This would impact my standard of living but not my quality of life. Fortunately quality of life has little to do with material asset.

Forget about retirement rehctub. The plutocrats are going to make sure you work till you drop and there will be no money in the cookie jar when you reach 65, 67, or 77. Watch over the next few years as wealth just vanishes into the hands of the robber bankers and their lackey's the plutocrats. We'll be left with nothing but worthless pieces of paper. And note how our Aussie money is now plastic, a further insult because it's even useless to wipe your arse with it :(

From the Cambridge Catalogue website:
"Power Crisis, by former minister and Labor historian Rodney Cavalier, is the latest volume in the Australian Encounters series (jointly published by Cambridge University Press and the National Centre for Australian Studies (NCAS), Monash University). It will be launched in Sydney by Senator John Faulkner, who may well have some words about the current plight of Australian Labor, and MCed by Dr Tony Moore, commissioning editor of Australian Encounters and Director of NCAS.“This is a forensic and penetrating analysis of the crisis facing modern Labor. Cavalier is unrivalled in his ability to identify the dilemmas of the present but locate them in historical context.”
– Paul Kelly, The Australian“Rodney Cavalier analyses the root causes of the crisis to explain why government in NSW has become a grim game of musical chairs. He reveals a bitter conflict between an elected Labor government and the party that created it. The problem for modern Labor is the hijacking of party and government by a professional political class — operatives on big salaries with minimal life experience or connection to the broader community”
– Dr. Tony Moore, Director of NCAS
I get the impression that Australia is no longer regarded as an advanced nation, but is subsiding into a “3rd world” country. I get this impression because of the wholesale selling of our national resources, and the import of all our required manufactured goods. The prices of our resources is determined by the purchasers in foreign countries, not by a responsible person in our own country and they accept that the negotiators in our country are persons of low intelligence and probably low integrity, which of course, they are, I doubt if people can genuinely disagree with that assessment. It has gone well past the stage of accusing the Labor, Liberal or the LNP, I can see no sign of intelligence in the manner of their pursuing – any of them, in what they consider, the path to a profitable successful future for our country.

Merv09,
Australia's policy of short term gain and selfishness is a major contributor to the slide of our position as an advanced country. We have reduced our funding of the CSIRO, sold off organisations such as CSL and seen the quality of our educational facilities slide to buy a degree. With the loss of most of the manufacturing sector due to poor planning and an over inflated view of our own value we are left hanging on to an economy based on the finite mineral wealth and deteriorating tourism due to the dollar.
We as a country need to start to rebuild our secondary industry and face facts about our standard of living. We live way beyond our means and have one of the most inflated house prices world wide. There is a need to take a step back and realise the need to take back all the government handouts and channel them into developing new industries that will again lead the world. Renewable energy would be a good one, if we took the risk and developed a workable system of sustainable renewable methods we could be supplying the world in 15 -20 years time.

The comments about employment and apparent happiness with life resonated with me. A little under a year ago, I spent some time in Vanuatu. I suspect that they make Thailand (a "developing" country) look positively developed and bustling. The schools were in a horrifying state, some of the villages looked like African shanty towns and the roads were a mess. That said, I felt perfectly safe there at all hours of day and night. The people were unaggressive, well-employed (again, often doing jobs done by machines here) and seemed happy. I had been worried that I would be treated like a "rich, arrogant foreigner" (a fair call, probably) but the people were so friendly and happy to have irritating Aussies poking around their neighbourhoods. I was so impressed that, despite the shortage of material wealth, the warmth and happiness exceeded anything I have seen in a developed, affluent, Western nation.

I love Thailand. It's standards in many areas are far higher than Australia. It's because the country is run so efficiently, and the people are so well educated, trained and efficient. Yes there's problems there, but name me one country that's perfect. We will always be held back while we have an incompetent opposition like we currently have: They desperately need to get rid of the Victorian era throwbacks like Abbott, Hockey, Pyne and a few others and become an actual "Liberal" party like they have been for most of their history.

Otokonoko,
I did a trip through the pacific some 20 odd years ago and found the people of Vanuatu to be warm and welcoming. I have no doubt that they would love to see their standard of living improve a bit, but i wonder if their roads are any worse than the ones i drive on. I am not kidding, the roads in my area are so bad i have not seen anything like them since India. They fell to pieces during the floods of 2008 -2009 and despite promises of money from government nothing happens. we still have bridges closed with no hope of repairing them as no one will pay, now that is third world.
I often wonder if wealth and an improving standard of living are such great things, When in India 15 years ago i found them to be happy, humble and at peace with themselves. Now the Indian people have become arrogant, angry and dissatisfied with the world since they discovered development and the western economy. I wonder if the same disease is infecting the Chinese.

In 1970 Australia spent 8% of GDP on infrastructure.
We have not spent more than 5% per annum in the years since 1970.
Rising demand, lower budget, and the results are evident in every decrepit state and territory we own.

> I wonder if the same disease is infecting the Chinese.
Sadly, yes, nairbe. I lived in China briefly in 2007 for several months - Beijing, Changchun, places beyond and between - and came away broken-hearted. Having spent a delightful and rewarding decade in Singapore, where I felt more at home than I've ever felt in Oz (and I'm fourth-generation Anglo-Irish) it was in many ways like going home, and in others like finding that home had become a frantic, filthy, alien place.

> become arrogant, angry and dissatisfied with the world since they discovered development and the western economy.
The same. You've put it concisely and exactly.

> I found them to be happy, humble and at peace with themselves.
I found the same thing when I lived in Bali decades ago; undoubtedly much changed nowadays.

I'm not a religious person, but have always had a strong interest in the spiritual (and the psychic, but that's a very different thing). In today's materialist world one doesn't like to attribute circumstances and events to psychic and spiritual causes, but all of the social evils spreading throughout today's world are described in the ancient Vedic literature as inevitable consequences of spiritual decay, both personal and social. Buddhism is essentially a philosophy, but is often practised as a religion, and it offers similar critiques. There's no doubt in my mind that the former happy, naturally healthy and contented lives of Asian peoples comes from their traditions, and that these disappear as soon as they embrace modern Western attitudes.

Beelzebub,
Spirituality is what led me to India in search of Guru to meditate with, i found him and then over time found it all no different to a religion. Buddism was always very attractive and above all peaceful. The problem i found with all these forms of spirituality is that either they are or have become religious. I just can't swallow church's of any type or form, once organised it always leads to control of peoples thinking and domination of the society.
I am sad to hear that China is suffering the same disease, unfortunately like all great empires the western world has become hell bent that their way of life is the only right one and that the rest of the world should do it too. Thankfully history tells us that the empire will fall and following will be some degree of cultural independence for the peoples of the world. For a while anyway we may be able to rebuild the community and family values and independence that seems to be the membrane that keeps some cultures still flowing with contentment and cohesion.
It would seem in the end that most folks on this site that have traveled don't view Australia with the teary eyed lucky country tale that keeps so many of our country men hypnotised. I can only hope for some kind of social revolution by the next generation as the last great one of the 60's only produced the "ME" generation and they are costing us dearly as a nation now and into their lavish retirement.

I'll say this for the roads in Vanuatu. In December last year, quite late at night (the only time such an experiment is safe in a city with no speed limits, traffic lights or pedestrian crossings), I "measured" a pothole in the main street of Port Vila by lowering my leg into it. I sank knee-deep.

That said, I can't speak very highly of our own roads. When I lived in Brisbane, I lived on top of a one road up, one road down hill. During the "storm of the century" (a roughly biennial occurrence according to the Courier-Mail), water gushed down the hill for several hours, resulting in a road corrugated so badly that it was like driving over a couple of hundred metres of cattle grid. Two years later, nothing had been done about it. Now, back in Townsville, the roads are no better. Flooding is an annual occurrence in my neighbourhood, and the attitude to damaged roads seems to be "why fix them? They'll only be wrecked again next summer".

The difference is that the people in Vila learn to cope with it, don't care so much when their cars get a nasty jolt and get on with life. They seem to remember all those wonderful things that make life special. We, here in Australia and elsewhere in the "better" half of the world, seem to have an incredible ability to let a single pothole wreck our entire day.

> The problem i found .. have become religious.
Your one of the few people I've come across who can make that distinction.

> I just can't swallow .. once organised .. control
One of the hardest concepts I had to learn to accept in my middle years was that, at this stage of our evolution, ALL traditions will fail and we'll be forced back on our own inner strengths. I couldn't see why, especially as, like yourself, I had a great veneration for the old teachings and traditions, and I owe them a great debt of gratitude for what I've learned from them. It was like losing a family member. I now understand the why and the wherefore, and although it saddens me, I realize the necessity of sweeping away the old before the new can arrive.

> the western world has become hell bent that their way of life
I was also deeply enamoured of science, so you can imagine the conflicts I had to work through. As with the spiritual traditions, I learned a great deal and retain my own inner understanding, but since I hold Western science largely responsible for imposing positivist materialist philosophy on the West (the Devil's own invention, IMO) I find myself bitterly opposed to what is taught as 'science' today.

> we may be able to rebuild
I'd like to be more optimistic, but I don't believe that the time for rebuilding has yet arrived. I've no doubt that it will, but in the interim I think it unwise and a waste of energy to try rebuilding anything. We're going through a destructive phase; the spiritual children have to burn themselves by playing with matches and watch their houses burn down around them - it's the only way they'll learn, unfortunately.

> I can only hope for some kind of social revolution
Of the information that's come my way, the most useful suggests that's not too far distant; but since it depends on a crucial nexus in collective consciousness rather than in time or planetary events, no date can be given.

Thanks everyone for the input. This has been an enjoyable thread that i got a lot from.

Otokonoko that sound like one scary pot hole, we don't have any quite that deep but we have had the same pot hole fields for many years now.

Somehow i wonder if there is any way to get a broader education of life and the world out to the general population. My recent visit to Thailand came because the itchy feet had got so bad after years of raising little children, i just had to go traveling abroad. It has fired me up and am looking for somewhere amazing to take the children next year. Amazingly though many people i know around my area have barely traveled much more than a few of hundred klm from home there hole lives. Certainly it is their choice but i wonder how they can develop informed decisions about a whole range of issues, particularly come voting time.

you are not fooling yourselves. You are allowing everyone else fool you. follow your instincts, not what others want you to believe, not what others think is right. Do what you heart tells you is right. Don't listen to what anyone else tells you is right or wrong. Then you will not be fooled.

I am lucky to be born and bred Asian. I have lived in a few western countries. I know everything you all have posted. I know because I lived it. These people u speak and envy of are my family, my friends. I think I am just unfortunately unlucky meeting the wrong kinda Aussie. I said aussie english should be defined as BS, period.

I have met a few who I do look up to. The older generation. The 2nd-3rd generations Europeans who have not forgotten their heritage, I get along well with their way of lifestyle.

The ugliness I see everyday here, which I always try to reason with. The lady rushing to work, almost knocking down the other lady who helps kids cross the road. So many things I see everyday, till I rather not see. I rather stay at home and wait till I can go back again.

Many of the younger generation(under 40), I reckon do not know the meaning of the words selflessness, consideration, love, understanding. I do not want to see anymore because it is too painful to watch.

Yes, it is a lot better in asia. Because in asia.. people actually care because they know how to. Here they care only when it benefits them.

I rather, spend my time with real friends, who do not take advantage of me, who know me, whom are all over the world. Then spend time in the public here.