Widespread pessimism is causing an increasing number of Australians to move overseas. Curiously, Israel, where the future is even bleaker, doesn’t have the same problem.
On Thursday I commented on X that there seemed to be a lot of people talking about leaving Australia lately, and asked if anyone else had noticed it.
I expected this would generate some debate, but even I was surprised by the response. The post surged past 400,000 views yesterday and is still being widely shared and commented on three days later, which by my standards on X is remarkably high.
I’d inadvertently struck a rich vein of pessimism. Apart from a sprinkling of leftists generously urging me to join the apparent exodus, the comments beneath the post were mostly from people whose friends or relatives had already moved and were glad they did; were seriously contemplating doing it themselves; and who wanted advice about the best countries in which to resettle.
And that’s where the debate becomes a little vague. If you look around, you still have to say Australia is a lucky country. Our prosperity and freedom are still high by world standards — we aren’t being locked up for posts on social media at nearly the same rate as people are in Britain; work is plentiful for those who want it; our towns and regional centres (if not our cities) haven’t been spoiled by Third World immigration; the climate is mostly wonderful even in winter; and, it goes without saying, we haven’t just embarked on a protracted war for our nation’s very survival, as Israel has (more on this later).
Some figures bear this out. Our average disposable income, for example, is $US37,433, which is 22 per cent higher than the OECD average of $US30,490. Unemployment is 4 per cent, and inflation is 2 per cent.
Why would anyone leave?
Well, the inflation figure, for a start, is bogus, as anybody who has shopped for groceries in Australia recently knows. Eggs are up 18 per cent in the past year. Bread is up 10 per cent. A cup of coffee is up 15 per cent, and some estimates predict the one-year increase will soon reach 40 per cent. Meat prices are supposedly steady, but decent-quality Australian steaks and lamb chops have become prohibitively expensive for most of us, although not, for some reason, in China.
And of course the most significant measure of inflation, house prices, are up 8.9 per cent. This is by far the biggest outgoing for any family trying to survive in Australia, but it is not included in the inflation calculation because to do so would expose Australia’s declining living standards, and the government can’t have that.
Speaking of declining living standards, the disposable income I mentioned is heading in the wrong direction. In the past two years it has decreased by 8 per cent while the OECD average increased by 2.6 per cent.
This isn’t an outlier. All the other metrics reveal a country in consistent, seemingly irreversible decline. Australia now has the lowest level of manufacturing in the entire OECD. Our education outcomes are appalling and getting worse, as anyone who has tried to hire a junior employee recently will attest. We are having fewer children. National debt is about to cruise past $1 trillion. The National Disability Insurance Scheme and workers compensation insurance schemes in general both offer enormous and easy rewards for anybody wanting to opt out of a productive life.
Mental health among young people is so embarrassingly poor that Labor actually offered free counselling sessions as part of its re-election campaign. In what sort of country is it considered a good idea to offer voters free mental health care?
The answer to that question is, according to many of the people who commented on my X post and can read the warning signs, is: the sort of country you want to leave.
Australia is changing in other ways, too. Our Foreign Minister Penny Wong has supported the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which harboured Gazan militants who joyfully participated in the barbaric rapes and murders on October 7, with tens of millions of dollars while this week ostentatiously imposing imperious sanctions on two elected members of the Israeli government.
She advocates for a “two-state solution” in Palestine, which would merely re-legitimise Hamas’s overt goal of annihilating Israel. In other words, she supports terrorism over democracy. This is an alarming position for a democratic politician to take, and it reflects a fundamental shift for the Australian government.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who made his Trump Derangement Syndrome apparent at a music festival eight years ago and has since shown no sign of recovering from the condition, is now nonchalantly jeopardising our military alliance with the United States by scoffing at a request from the US to contribute more to defence, and is reportedly indifferent about meeting Donald Trump himself at the G7 in a few days. This too is a fundamental shift for the Australian government, and one that makes many Australians feel significantly less secure.
But the biggest decline is in our demographic composition. Albo’s government is flooding Australia with peasants from Third World countries whose interest in Australia is economic, not cultural. These migrants move here to enjoy the prosperity of what is still, by their standards, an advanced nation while the government positively encourages them to contribute little while forming ethnic ghettos under the rubric of “multiculturalism”.
We have now lived under this naive fantasy for long enough to know that it is a euphemism for complete and utter social suicide. No society in history has ever survived without shared loves, values and habits. Without those, the social contract inevitably degenerates into competing interests, which then festers into distrust, hatred and violence. The countries that most enthusiastically embraced this fantasy a generation or two ago are now grappling with the advanced stage of this decline, and none has yet found an easy way to halt the process, let alone reverse it.
The people contemplating leaving Australia are doing so because they can see that Australia is next.
Which brings me back to Israel, a nation formed for a specific purpose: as a home for Jews and Jewish culture. Its government takes its primary purpose, to defend the Jewish people and their culture, seriously.
Referring to his decision to start another war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday: “We can’t leave these threats for the next generation. If we don’t act now, there won’t be another generation.”
You could say the same about Australia. The next generation of Australians will probably never know the prosperity and freedom we once took for granted, let alone the recklessly amusing larrikin culture that once made us both liked and admired. The only question now is: who will stay and fight for it?
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Fred Pawle is an independent journalist, author and filmmaker who has worked in the past at The Australian, Sky News, Menzies Research Centre and ADH TV. His world view is as much influenced by sensible conservative principles as it is by the ratbag surf culture in which he grew up. To access more of Fred's perspective and insights, please visit Fred Pawle on Substack.
