Why are most Australian cities and buildings so unremittingly bad? Our few superb buildings are almost entirely the major public monuments, the ‘Res Publica’ in Leon Krier’s terms. By and large, most of our cities, the ‘Res Economica’, are gimcrack ordinary.

Society* blames its architects and designers, but it’s the other way round: society is to blame for the poor quality of much of our cities. Society is the client, sets the briefs and governs the design criteria. And Australian society revels in the mediocre, hence our mediocre urban environment.

On the upcoming Australia Day we are going to hear a lot about how great Australia is; a lot of ‘fair go’, ‘mateship’, and ‘community values’. Any contrary view will be called ‘un-Australian’, but those old rubrics no longer hold. The evidence says we are heading in the opposite direction: increasingly selfish, unequal, and racist; whether it’s amongst the elites or the hoi polloi.

We are increasingly Greedy And Lazy And Hateful, the acronym spelling ‘GALAH’, the shrieking Aussie bird, a different national symbol for our times. Because we are GALAHs, our society not only accepts, but promotes, the mediocre. They disrespect design culture, and we get mediocre cities and buildings. Let me set it out here.

GREEDY

A just society is committed to equality; and one key method is using the tax system to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor; to provide for the community’s social good: education, health care, social services, pensions and wage support. One measure of this engagement is the tax/GDP ratio; our rate of 27% is way below the OECD average of 34%. And yet the rich and middle class want to lower it even further.

Over many years the LNP have entrenched a vote-winning mantra of tax reductions, which actually means less public money and more private wealth. Unlike European and Scandinavian countries, with rates of 35 to 40%, we have run our tax system down to the point where we just don’t have enough money for community services. The poor get left behind, while the rich get very rich.

And what an example those rich set. From the criminals like Alan Bond and Christopher Skase, to the miners Gina Rinehart (who won't share the wealth she inherited) and Clive Palmer (who uses workers’ money for far-right political causes).

If not mining, the path to riches is land speculation. Seeing eight of the top twenty richest Australians make their money from property has spurred us to be a nation of developers - one third of households own their home outright, and many are buying a second, or third, or tenth. Our tax laws encourage it. Another third borrows from the five most property-geared banks in the world to get their first.

And the other third? Renters. Rapidly declining government support for social housing forces renters to pay exorbitantly for homes owned by the first third. This is privatisation of a social need, all in the name of greed for the top third. This, the major driver of inequality, is not addressed in any meaningful way by any government.

How do replace the missing government millions? We turn to philanthropy. The USA with its low tax/GDP, has developed extensive philanthropy, but we lack any coherent policies for private social support, despite Dick Smith’s encouragement.

Our unions pioneered the 40-hour week, but the flip side is that Australians now want to work less hours, with more overtime and extra payments for holidays (Australia Day). Which the bosses assiduously refuse through tortuous IR laws, which Labor is trying to amend. The greed of our big firms has clearly been on display as profits soared whilst wages stagnated. Inequality writ large.

LAZY

The upshot of the bosses’ profits at workers’ expense is a backlash by the workforce that looks like laziness. Australians shun menial and hard labour jobs, leaving them to imported workers and backpackers. Fruit-picking is a particularly egregious example: seasonal workers often ripped off, underpaid, and vilified by greedy farmers. Laziness, greed, and hatred combined.

Australia is said to be devoted to sport: but watching, not playing. Participation rates have declined whilst obesity has soared; we are one of the most overweight peoples in the world, with shocking diet and low exercise rates. And the political and industry’s response? To oppose a sugar tax as if it was the new asbestos.

Then there’s alcohol. A nation that has revelled in drunkenness is finding it very hard to sober up. If there is one evil above all that we have inflicted on the indigenous population it is alcohol, and again the massive profits stall progress; establishing ‘dry communities’ is fiendishly difficult.

And right alongside alcohol is gambling. Australians are said to “bet on two flies going up a wall”, but they are more likely to be hoping a spin of cherries turns into gold on the ‘pokies’. The ultimate get-rich-quick scheme for the poor. We have more pokies than Las Vegas, almost as many as the rest of the world combined, even with none in WA. NSW Labor spinning a dodgy story, to avoid corralling their big-time gambling donors, verges on the obscene. Greed at every level to siphon from laziness.

Not content with bogan mediocre at home, we export our GALAH culture. We pay so much disrespect to the gorgeous, peaceful Hindu population in Bali that Kuta seems like one continuous Contiki tour.

And laziness infects sport: if you can’t get wickets legally with effort, why not try a little sandpaper to speed things up. The captain of the Australian cricket team, said to be the second most important job in Australia, turns a blind eye. And the instigator thinks he can captain Orstraya again? Come on. The ‘chirping and niggles’, (to gain an advantage) are celebrated in the centre, but two years ago led to six of the Sydney crowd being ejected for racist taunts about the visiting Indian team.

Which leads to our third topic: racism ‘in extremis’, which is hatred.

HATEFUL

Australia often goes beyond racism to an inexplicable level of hatred. It started on day one of the invasion. Founded on a myth of ‘Terra Nullius’, the hatred of the indigenous hardly abated. It took 179 years to be recognised as citizens, and now the Liberals, Nationals and even the Greens want to sabotage the ‘Voice’ for the indigenous. That’s long-term hatred.

We claim to be a successful multicultural nation, but waves of immigration have met with resistance, high and low. Old schoolyards abounded in slurs like wogs, wops and slant eyes. Alan Jones incited hatred of the Lebanese at the Cronulla riots. The dark-skinned are named and shamed in the COVID reports; with whites got off.

The far right, small but noisy, hates ‘the other’, whoever that might be at the time. Pauline Hanson vilified Asians in her early political life, adding Muslims later. Racism, hyped to hatred, flourishes with surprising endurance in FNQ and other red-neck parts.

There is violence in our streets, often fueled by alcohol. Strangers are king hit from behind in random acts. The measures applied in Kings Cross will soon be argued for in Alice Springs. Again, high to low society, who can forget multi-millionaires James Packer and David Gyngell publicly brawling in Bondi. Nice leadership, your honour.

Sport is not spared. Take Collingwood (please, take it). Indigenous greats like Nicky Winmar of St Kilda and the Swan’s Adam Goodes are racially abused with vile bile from the ‘black and white army’, and President Eddie McGuire calls the latter an ‘ape’. Then they hire an assistant dismissed from another club for racism. Now that’s 100% galah. Oh, and a dishonourable mention for Melbourne Victory’s pitch invasion and goalkeeper assault.

Australia raises hate to an art form not found anywhere else. We tell ourselves we are “cutting down tall poppies”, but really, it’s a huge pile of racism, misogyny, and hatred. And one Australian has done more than any other to take that hate world-wide. Rupert Murdoch. Every inch an Aussie even if he now lives elsewhere. What was said recently about Jacinda Adern in the Australian, was stomach-churning misaligned anger and misogyny.

Speaking of whom, remember it was one of us that committed the massacre of 51 people in Christchurch, that Jacinda handled so adeptly and with such empathy. If only Rupert’s rags could show one ounce of that elan. PM Howard may have removed the guns following the Port Arthur massacre, but not the hate.

Exported world leaders in hatefulness? Rupert’s not alone. We were not the only country to be blighted by sexual abuse by Catholic priests. But in Cardinal Pell we had world class denial, obfuscation, petty legalese, and ultimately further abuse. My high school, not Catholic, had eight teachers alleged or convicted of paedophilia, yet its status remains intact with money being poured into its extensive new buildings by the federal government.

GREEDY AND LAZY AND HATEFUL

There are other countries that are individually more racist, or lazier or more hateful than Australia, but we combine all three to create a culture of GALAHs, a people who hate the other, wanting to exploit them in the easiest way possible. There are thousands of examples but this one really sticks in my craw.

On 29 July 2014 at Coppa Creek, an elderly farmer shot and killed Glen Turner, an environmental officer for the local Council. The farmer thought Turner was inspecting the illegal tree clearing the family was undertaking. Everything about this is GALAH, from the greed in the environmental vandalism of illegal tree removal to make farming cheaper and easier, to the hatred of officialdom. The farmer was sentenced to 35 years in gaol and died of a heart attack in 2017. The family still own the cleared farm. Barnaby Joyce and others have sort to portray the farmer as the victim, pushed under by government pressure. A most shameful episode.

GALAHS AND MEDIOCRE DESIGN

Next week I will show how GALAH culture sucks the life out of good design and gives us our mediocre cities. Why our housing, largest in the world, is amongst the worst. Our schools betray inequality: private schools, the greatest percentage in the world, exude excess, whilst public schools languish. We have mediocre shopping malls surrounded by boiling bitumen, and pubs with pokies in ‘VIP’ rooms of unspeakable design squalor. All that next week.

*Note: By society here I mean those who hold or are entitled to an Australian passport.

Tone Wheeler is an architect / the views expressed are his / contact at toneontuesday@gmail.com.

Tone Wheeler

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