No Change? - Impossible!
A Pom's observations on Australia and Change
Article by David Steward-David
It may be pretty annoying for an Englishman to give his Pommy opinion on what Australia needs to change but with any luck it will make you think. Firstly it needs to add value. Selling iron ore to other people who use it to make things that have a value per tonne ten or twenty times higher is a bad idea. Process the ore into specialised steel, bend the steel into sophisticated hardware and you make more money and need fewer ships. This is a change which needs capital, and expertise, and not that much labour. It also needs the kind of belief that has enabled China to move from manufacturing in back yard furnaces to the export of precision engineering in very quick time. If Australia doesn't change to being a maker of sophisticated goods, it will need to dig more and more ore to pay for those it imports. In the same way it needs to add value to tourism. As visitors we had to use a lot of wit to buy tickets for the opera in Sydney. Someone should have been pestering us to buy those tickets - and a meal on the waterfront - for twice the price.
And another thing. It may now just be dawning on people that if you do not change your ways of dealing with the environment then the environment will change you. I like travelling by train, and found the "Queenslander" a charming way to get from Cairns to Brisbane, a bit like being locked in a mobile bar with a view that changed, now and then. But between Sydney and Melbourne, still more Sydney and Canberra, the train should be the dominant mode of transport. To do this it needs to leave the suave new station in Melbourne and get to Sydney in 3 hours, and do this every hour. Sydney to Canberra in an hour and a half. Britain is way behind France Germany, Spain and of course Japan for train speeds, but from Newcastle (on Tyne) we can travel to London 450km to London in a lot less than 3 hours, every half hour. Of course Australia will need capital, and the kind of imagination that has joined Alice to Darwin on the railway map, and QANTAS will have to find new business. Or you could go on in the same old way in which case your country's contribution will drown quite a lot of your neighbours whilst turning farmland into a dust bowl, as perhaps you have noticed.
And the third thing I noticed was a lot of not listening. Because its my business I noticed that a lot of university lecturers don't listen much to people in industry and I got the message that a lot of people in business thought that university teachers are all very well in theory. I also heard quite a lot of bosses not listening to workers, and I saw a lot of restrictive practices which suggested to me that some of the workers didn't think about listening to customers. All very much like Britain - thirty years ago.
Who am I to talk? Well in our working lives we moved from being poor enough to be uncomfortable to being rich enough to tour Australia in comfort and at length. I worked in a university and ran courses sold to companies that made a profit, sometimes. I learnt more from the ones that made a loss. I taught a lot of people who were far brighter than I will ever be, but very often lacked the confidence to make changes. One of the things I was good at was prodding them into believing that change was inevitable. They could either change for the better, by using their wits and their talents, or for the worse, by not using their abilities and in consequence becoming cynical and unhealthy. I did not tell people to "learn to love change" because I knew from experience that deliberately making things change is frightening, uncomfortable and full of the possibility of failure. But letting change happen is like being a steel girder in the wind and the rain, first the rust sets in and then the whole lot starts to collapse. And did I mention that I was once Malcolm Anderson's teacher? But I guess I learnt more from him than he did from me.