Archives for October 2008

Growing up, I used to think that there were just nine actors and actresses in Australia. They would begin their working days in the waiting room of The Country Practice, briefly pay a call on The Sullivans, launch into an afternoon pub crawl that would take in drinks at Bunny's Place and Happy Hour at Lassiter's, and then clock on for the night-shift at Wentworth Prison, the home of Prisoner Cellblock H.

It's not just the soaps. Aussie movies sometimes rely on the same revolving casts. Something is seriously amiss if you watch an Aussie film and don't catch a glimpse of Bill Hunter, who is as fabulous as he is prolific. He's the father of the bride in Muriel's Wedding, the increasingly irate major in Gallipoli, the Outback mechanic in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, the dancing impresario in Strictly Ballroom, and even the voice of the dentist in Finding Nemo. So it's reassuring to hear that he's going to pop up in Australia, Baz Luhrman's eagerly awaited new epic. Hunter is to Australian films what ravens are to the Tower of London. Without his portly presence, such films would be doomed to fall.

I mention all this because the Australian Film Institute has just announced its short-list of five all-time favourite Australian films, as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations. Here is the short-list, which was compiled after that most fashionable test of instant popularity, an online poll.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Gallipoli
Muriel's Wedding
Lantana, the Sydney-based thriller starring Anthony LaPaglia
The Castle

The AFI will announce the winner at its awards show in December.

You'll notice there's no room for Picnic at Hanging Rock, Mad Max, Storm Boy, Crocodile Dundee, Babe, Romper Stomper, Shine or Pharr Lap. Neither do the classics The Man from Snowy River or 'Breaker' Morant get a look in. I'd love to hear what you think of the list.

Watching Aussie movies has been a key part of my Aussie assimilation process, partly because they illustrate many recurring national themes, ideas, beliefs and sentiments. There's the veneration of the Bush and the Outback (Man from Snowy River, Croc Dundee). There's the fondness for the Aussie battler and under-dog (The Castle, Kenny, Muriel's Wedding, Priscilla and Strictly Ballroom). There's the strong sense of colonial and post-colonial injustice ('Breaker' Morant and Gallipoli). There's the celebration of chirpy larrikinism (Croc Dundee, The Castle, Kenny).

And what of the gaps in Australia's cinematic canon? With the exception of Rabbit-Proof Fence, the movie about two mixed-race Aboriginal girls who run away from a settlement to be reunited with their parents, is there are a truly great film about the indigenous experience? Similarly, is there a top-notch film about the immigrant experience?

In fairness, Australia does better with gritty social dramas, with Romper Stomper, Two Hands and Candy (for my money, Heath Ledger's best film performance as a heroine addict). Still, Australia cinema cannot boast a Mike Leigh or a Spike Lee.

The lack of really good recent films - Lantana came out seven years ago - speaks of other problems: talent flight and a lack of adequate funding. Australian cinema has served like a feeder team in baseball, or a lower division side in British football: the nursery of talent for actors, directors, designers and cinematographers, who then go on to greater success in the Hollywood major leagues.

I've love to get your thoughts, and your favourite films. For what it's worth, here are my top five:

1. Gallipoli
2. The Castle
3. Alexandra's Project
4. Lantana
5. Don's Party

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It is hard to go anywhere these days without seeing an Australian cricketer in his underwear.

The fast bowler Brett Lee has just launched his own range of designer knickers, while the batsman Michael Clarke has begun modelling for a well-known name in the Aussie undergarment trade.

The all-rounder Andrew Symonds can regularly be seen on television clad only in a towel, a bare-bellied move designed to boost the sales of fizzy lemonade, although his torso looks more like a six-pack.

Might this semi-naked trio have inadvertently provided a fitting visual metaphor as we enter this new era of Australian cricket: that of a threadbare national outfit.

Is it a case of advertising imitating sporting life, as Australia relinquishes its cricketing superpower status?

Ricky Ponting's men have just suffered Australia's most crushing defeat of the 21st Century - or put slightly less melodramatically, their worst result in nine years. They were thrashed by a bold and exciting Indian team by a lopsided margin of 320, and were outplayed from start to finish.

Before we start sounding the death knell of Australian cricket, it is worth remembering that this is only Australia's second test defeat since the 2005 Ashes, and that they are still the world champions in the 50-over variant of the game.

Earlier this year, the team also equalled the world record for the number of consecutive test victories - 16.

But it was the manner of the defeat that has the Aussie cricket cognoscenti worried, because it laid bare the weaknesses and gaps in the once-feared team.

"Is it a day of national mourning in Oz?" writes an old mate from India. "I don't remember Australia being so thrashed so badly in a long time and that, too, on a sporting wicket like Mohali!" Quite.

I woke up this morning looking forward to reading Malcolm Conn, the always punchy cricket writer of The Australian, and he has delivered. "The colossus which strode world cricket largely unchallenged for more than a decade is no longer. Australia is now finding that India is treating it in the same way that it confronted the West Indies to claim the world crown in 1995." The piece is headlined: "Australia's Reign Nearing End."

Superannuation, of course, is part of the problem; the recent retirement of the legends, Glenn McGrath, Justin Langer and my personal favourite Adam Gilchrist.

No longer the scourge of English batsmen, the great blonde one, Shane Warne, is about to become the subject of a new musical ("What an SMS I'm in," is apparently one of the songs). His natural replacement and long-time stand-in, the spinner Stuart McGill, has retired from international cricket to continue in his quest to find the perfect Pinot Noir.

The squad has also been depleted by problems of the body and the mind. The metronomic paceman Stuart Clark is on the injured list, while Andrew Symonds is taking a well-publicised break from the national team after missing a team meeting to go fishing.

Matthew Hayden is a week shy of his 37th birthday, and has been struggling with his fitness and form - though he's the sort of bloke to go out in the next innings and get a speedy double century. Brett Lee is dreadfully out of sorts, and had an on-field bust-up with his captain in Mohali.

Since Justin Langer's retirement, Australia have not settled on a dominant opening pair who can score their runs at the hurtling pace which was the hallmark of Steve Waugh's captaincy.

In the first innings of the second test in Mohali, Australia scored 22 runs in 13 overs, the most sluggish of run-rates. The charismatic Indian captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, was shocked. "I said to Rahul Dravid, 'look at the board, we won't see that again.'"

Without Warne and McGrath, the bowling combination that made Australia a cricketing superpower, the attack looks fairly listless. For the time-being, they appear to have lost the ability to bowl out sides on the final day, as the drawn first test match in Bangalore served to show. Where are the young spinners who were supposed to have been inspired by Warnie?

Once again in India, Australian batsmen have been shown to be vulnerable against top-class reverse swing bowling, their biggest problem (along with the freak injury to Glenn McGrath), during the 2005 Ashes. After the 5-0 whitewash, next year's series in England now looks very interesting.

Early in the Mohali test match, as the Aussies toiled in the hot sun, the former Indian player Ravi Shastri came up with the comment which neatly encapsulated the near future of Australian cricket. "They are going to be spending a lot more time fielding."

PS All this talk of semi-naked sporting underwear models reminds me of the time I bumped into the tennis star and all-round good egg Pat Rafter. We were chit-chatting away about Tim Henman's failure ever to win the Wimbledon crown, and I said that it was particularly sad in 2001 because all he had to do was beat Goran Ivanisevic in the semis and he would have faced a complete no-hoper in the final. Then I asked Pat is he had ever won Wimbledon.

"No," he said. "I lost to Goran Ivanisevic, in 2001."

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Not so long ago, Australian tourism chiefs decided to put together a TV advertisement trying to lure visitors to this far-flung corner of the planet.

A simple enough task - or so you would have thought. But they were presented with a mind-boggling problem: of how to promote a country in which individual states and territories compete against each other for tourism cash.

Confronted by this dilemma, they came up with the most unhappy of compromises. The advertisement would run, but it would not include any shots or footage which viewers could easily identify as being from, say, Queensland or New South Wales.

Under this formula, the Sydney Opera House was banned. So, too, Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef.

Australia was trying to promote itself without being able to deploy its most instantly recognisable landmarks.

It launched into a global advertising campaign with its hands tied behind its back. And they were bound with bureaucratic red tape that's a remnant from the time, 107 years ago, when modern Australia came into being.

This story came to mind after reading your comments on Lucky, Lucky, Lucky? - specifically the remarks from respondents like Carltonblue, Rolinator, paulcrossleyiii, klldbbydth and Aussiened about the rivalry between the states, and their often dysfunctional relationship with the federal government.

I've been meaning to blog on this for a while, because you can construct a fairly strong argument that this relatively small country is made even smaller by its fractured and fragmented system of government.

Victoria vies with New South Wales. New South Wales vies with Queensland. And everyone vies with Canberra.

After federation in 1901, the process which produced the Commonwealth of Australia, the six former colonies eventually agreed on things like a standard gauge system for the railways - although up until 1917, a passenger travelling from Perth and Brisbane had to change trains six times.

But there are still points of strong divergence between the states on a range of subjects, from how federal infrastructure projects should be distributed to the management of the vital Murray-Darling basin, which irrigates the country's food bowl.

The Murray-Darling has now been nationalised, but that has not stopped the inter-state squabbles over how its water is distributed.

I've spent much of this week with farmers in the Lower Lakes of South Australia, at the terminus of the Murray River, who blame mismanagement, even more so than the seven-year drought, for their vanishing supplies of irrigation water.

The environmentalist and former Australian of the Year, Tim Flannery, reckons that 130% of the Murray/Darling basin has been allocated to farmers, which demonstrates the extent to which individual states have plundered this great national resource with little regard for their neighbours.

Is Australia's nationhood sometimes a little stunted because its system of government encourages state-focussed provincialism? More comments on this please.

A final word, for the time being at least, on the economic front. The Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto has just announced that a slowdown in demand from China will last longer than expected, and had got noticeably worse over the past two weeks.

As Matthew Stevens writes in The Australian: Rio Tinto "effectively announced that the Great Wall of China that stands between Australia and the full force of global financial turmoil has been breached".

On the sledging front, PSHINOZ wins the award for the most gratuitous reference to Britain's medal haul at the Olympics ("yep Australia is economically sound so they should be able to pay for new Athletes for 2012").

This got me thinking that I should institute an award for the most tendentious and strained reference to the British medal haul at the Olympics, featuring a crate of Australia's finest beer as prize (Knapstein, since you ask). Or perhaps not.

On the cosmetic front, trinity47 complains about the "Clint Eastwood stare" in the byline photo that adorns this blog. Admittedly, I've been wanting to change that for a while. I was thinking of a picture of me on Bondi beach in a pair of budgie-smugglers, but have decided to save that for my Christmas cards.

Any other ideas are more than welcome. As Clint himself would say: the good, the bad or the ugly.

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Bondi was in full bloom over the weekend, packed with sun-seekers and chirpy little Nippers, wide-eyed trainee surf life-savers learning about the perils of the ocean.

ABC Radio crackled to the reassuring sound of commentators Jim Maxwell and Glenn Mitchell, reporting on Australian cricketing success in Bangalore.

Both marvelled at a century from Mike Hussey, the most reliable of men in these most unreliable of times.

Bathurst meanwhile basked in the full-throttled roar of V8 Supercars, another familiar sound of the early southern summer.

For all the signs of summer as usual, Kevin Rudd was hunkered down with his top economic advisers in Canberra coming up with his response to the financial crisis.

The headline is that the government will guarantee all deposits, however large, in Australian banks, building societies and credit unions for the next three years.

"The global crisis has entered a new and dangerous phase," said Mr Rudd, "with real consequences for growth, for jobs and therefore for the future."

The sunniest of Sundays followed the blackest of Fridays, a day when the Australian Stock Exchange lost over eight per cent of its value and saw its biggest single day slump in 21 years.

The Australian dollar has also tanked. A few weeks ago there was talk of parity with the the US dollar.

Last week it crashed to sixty-three cents, as it was targeted by short-traders who have started to prey on currencies because they are banned from targeting companies.

So, is it time to reassess that hope-filled blog from less than a fortnight ago, Lucky, Lucky, Lucky?, which suggested that Australia was better placed than most to weather the global economic storm?

Surely the slump in shares on the stock-market alone, which has now lost 42% of its value since this time last year, demands a reappraisal.

For all that, the basic thrust of the blog still holds true: that Australia is in better shape than most countries to weather the storm, but that while its insulated from the likely global downturn it is by no means immune.

Recent sharp falls in global commodity prices, combined with concerns that Chinese growth is slowing down, meant that shares in the mining giants, BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, were badly hit on Friday.

And that is a big concern for the Australian economy as a whole, because its 17-year period of uninterrupted growth has been built on the mining sector.

As The Australian reports, Mt Gibson, the iron ore producer, has revealed that almost three-quarters of its Chinese customers have asked for a delay in delivering their goods, which indicates a slow-down.

Still, even though China might not enjoy growth rates of 12% each year, it is still on the rise, and the Australian minerals sector will remain one of its main beneficiaries.

Important in the armoury of 'fortress Australia' is its banking system, which is strictly-regulated and well-capitalised.

Its comparative strength was indicated last week, when the Commonwealth Bank snapped up Bank-West, part of the troubled HBOS group.

Mr Rudd has announced guarantees to deposits not because he thinks the banks will fail but because he wants to protect them from foreign competition.

With other governments offering guarantees, Australian institutions would have been placed at a competitive disadvantage.

Given its huge budget surplus of over $A20 billion, the Australian government is well positioned to 'prime the pump,' the spending strategy deployed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to get America out of the Great Depression.

Sure enough, the Rudd government has brought forward an announcement on its major infrastructure projects, that great mainstay of FDR's New Deal, which will pile billions of job-creating dollars into the economy.

The banks are still predicting growth. NAB reckons the economy will grow by 1.25% to 1.5% for 2009, while the IMF predicts 2.25 growth. Still, most commentators expect unemployment to rise - possibly to 5.5%, which would mean the loss of 300,000 jobs.

On the housing front, Australia does not have much of a sub-prime sector to worry about (about one per cent is the estimate of Shelter NSW), but there is a problem of indebtness in the suburbs, from people who borrowed against the inflated value of their homes.

I was in the Western Suburbs of Sydney last week, which have the highest repossession rates in the country. There, property values have fallen by 30%. Last week, the IMF identified Australia as one of the countries which might see its property bubble burst.

Caravan parks are doing a roaring trade, as people are forced to consider what are called 'last resort housing options,' a new euphemism in the housing market.

I visited one last week, which is already full and reckons it could double its occupancy overnight if it had room to expand.

These past few weeks have seen lots of credit crunch-related stories.

From bordellos reporting a down-swing in business to corporate entertainers at the Melbourne Cup bracing themselves for hospitality tents littered with tumbleweed.

But the saddest I have heard so far came from a woman who markets apartments for retirees. Couples on the verge of retirement who had paid their deposits were ringing her all last week saying they could no longer afford to buy.

This past month has reminded me of my student days in 1989, when history professors and political scientists would theatrically rip up their pre-prepared lectures because communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe at such a hurtling pace, and their long-held theories about the Cold War were fast becoming obsolete.

Now, as capitalism comes in for a hammering, the tumble of events is equally disorientating..

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It is turning into something of an annus horribilis for Qantas, Australia's fabled Flying Kangaroo.

Things started to go badly awry back in July, when one of its Boeing 747-400s, flying from Hong Kong to Melbourne, was forced to make an emergency landing in Manila after an exploding oxygen cylinder opened up a terrifyingly large hole in its fuselage.

Just days later, a domestic flight from Adelaide had to turn around mid-air because the flap covering a wheel bay would not close - admittedly, the sort of incident that would have gone unreported in normal times, but which quickly came to embroider the unfolding narrative of the airline's week of woes.

Then, in August, a Boeing 747 bound for Manila, ironically enough, had to return to Sydney after developing a hydraulic fluid leak.

Now, as you no doubt will have read, there's been a mid-air drama involving a Qantas Airbus 330-300, flying from Singapore to Perth.

Some 36 passengers were injured, 15 of them seriously. Many of the injuries - broken legs and noses, severe lacerations - appear to have been sustained as passengers and crew were slammed against the ceiling and luggage racks of the cabin.

As the testimony of passengers has revealed, it must have been the most frightening of ordeals.

Government safety investigators are looking into the most recent incident - what's called clear-air turbulence is one theory for the sudden loss of altitude. Another is a possible computer problem. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau said it needed to analyse flight data recorders to determine the exact cause.

Qantas itself may not have been at fault. But it brings more unwelcome publicity for an airline which started life as the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services (hence the acronym Qantas) that has always prided itself on its enviable safety record.

On this front, Qantas has been the beneficiary of one of the most generous plugs in movie history: the moment in Rain Man when Tom Cruise, playing Charlie, turns to Dustin Hoffman, playing Ray:

Tom: 'Ray, all airlines have crashed at one time or another, that doesn't mean they are not safe.'

Dustin: 'Qantas. Qantas never crashed.'

Rain Man was only partly true. Qantas has experienced eight fatal accidents, though never lost a jet airliner nor suffered a jet airliner-related fatality.

Qantas has also benefited from one of the most emotive 'feel good' corporate brand campaigns that I have ever seen: the tear-inducing 'I Still Call Australia Home' ads, which feature Peter Allen's famous ballad about an ex-pat's yearning for home.

(When a foreign-backed consortium launched a take-over for Qantas, which raised regulatory concerns about the legal requirement for the airline to be Australian-owned, the Chaser Boys memorably performed their own variant: 'I Still Call Australia 51% home.')

But in some respects that campaign has boomeranged. It has created among Australians a sense of ownership over their national carrier, which means everyone has an opinion, and often they are not particularly favourable.

Qantas is very much part of the national conversation. And for some, having an unhappy experience with the Flying Kangaroo is akin to being maligned by a trusted friend.

After the Manila incident, Qantas received received a slap across the knuckles from Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority. While the CASA did not uncover any 'direct links' between the safety incidents earlier in the year, it called upon the airline to 'address deficiencies in meeting some of its own maintenance performance targets' and announced two additional intensive audits on its fleet and maintenance systems.

So Qantas executives could be in for a bumpy ride, and may wish to take the same advice as their flight crews dispense to passengers: 'Keep your seatbelts firmly fastened.'

PS: I've been distracted by Qantas, and had been meaning to get back to you on your comments about the economy. I'll be sure to do that next time. But ahead of that, I'd love to hear what you all make of the 1% drop in interest rates, the biggest single drop in 16 years.

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Flying back into Australia this morning after a short sojourn in Europe felt like returning to a fiscal safe haven and a veritable economic oasis.

The southern spring has well and truly sprung, no banks or savings institutions have been nationalised and even the normally nervy Treasurer Wayne Swan is starting to sound like an Iron Chancellor compared to some of his counterparts elsewhere.

Last month, the IMF decided that Australia was well placed to weather the financial storm.

It also commended the Australian authorities on 'their impressive economic management in the fiscal, monetary and structural areas, which has spurred a sustained and long- lasting economic expansion."

What other countries would give right now for a similarly clean bill of financial health.

To quote the great Kylie Minogue - if only to juxtapose her words against those of the big brains at the IMF - is Australia "lucky, lucky, lucky?"

At times like this, it's tempting to fall back on the old Lucky Country argument: that Australia's economic growth is almost preordained because of its rich supply of natural resources, like coal, liquid natural gas, iron ore and uranium.

Certainly, the flourishing mining sector has stimulated a massive investment boom in Australia. That also helps explains why the federal government is flush with cash at a time when other developed nations are mired in debt. The government has forecast a surplus of A$22bn (US$17bn).

Still, there's more to Australia's comparatively strong position than luck. I'm usually one of the first to have a moan about this country's bureaucratic overkill and official petty-mindedness. But the strict regulation of the banking sector is one of the main reasons why Australia has had no Lehman Brothers or Northern Rock.

It is no coincidence that of only 20 banks in the world with a top-line AA credit rating, four are Australian.

This is one of the few OECD countries which does not guarantee bank deposits. But arguably it does not have to, because the regulatory framework is so strong. As a result, the banks are sound.

"The bottom line is this," boasts Kevin Rudd. "Strong regulation, the best regulatory system in the world, strong balance sheets on the part of our banks, as well as a strong budget situation on the part of the Australian Government means that Australia's situation in this period of global financial turbulence is the best that you could have."

It would be wrong to gild the lily. Australia has its fair share of economic problems. The turbulence on the markets is a huge concern for those approaching retirement, whose pensions are bound up in stock portfolios.

Rising fuel and food prices remain a problem. Mortgage payers are struggling still with high interest rates, which the Reserve Bank looks set to drop by 0.5% next week (although the banks will not necessarily pass the full cut on to consumers).

Growth is negligible, at 0.3% in the last quarter, but predicted to be 2.7% for the year overall.

Rather like Gordon Brown, Rudd is positioning himself as a serious man for serious times. As your comments on After the Honeymoon demonstrate (see paulcrossleyiii, BrightonStevie) many of you are happy with a fairly boring leader.

Others clearly hope for an end to what some journalists have taken to calling Rudd's policy constipation.

Many thanks to klldbbydth for providing some rich historical context, and to Carlton Blue for coming up with an enviably deft line: "The honeymoon is definitely over for Kevin 747 and what have we got? Symbolism and jetlag."

Australiana also pre-empted this blog. "Well capitalised financial system, interest rates threatening to go down, unemployment rate low and apparently going nowhere, large budget surplus, summer almost upon us." Australiana, you seem to be channeling Kevin Rudd.

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