The hardest-working country?(demographic aspects)

IT HAS BEEN SAID that a conversation with a righteous person will leave you with a positive feeling, having heard your qualities being emphasised, whereas a conversation with a self-righteous person will leave you feeling negative, having heard your weaknesses being highlighted. The tone of conversation about Australia and its relationship with the rest of the world I hear these days seems to be more on the self-righteous end of the spectrum. The statistic claiming that Australians work longer hours than any other nation in the world, for example, seems misleading at best and arrogant at worst. Of course, we all know that statistics can be "damned lies" but this one in particular seems to be producing a rash of national self-righteousness that is central, and could be fundamentally misleading, to the current debate over industrial relations legislation.

There is no doubt that Australians have been a hardworking people since the establishment of our nation. The land is tough, remote, big and often waterless, requiring physical endurance, creative thinking, new technology and generations of hard manual labour to build the urban and rural environments in which we have come to feel comfortable. We have found a way to build our democracy around a multicultural population, focusing on our similarities rather than our differences. We have accepted an adversarial system of law and politics in which we can debate our beliefs and opinions without resorting to violence or war. We have been lucky, yet mostly honourable, in our dealings with our neighbours.

However, have we become such a wealthy Western democracy situated amongst a plethora of much poorer Eastern nations, because we worked harder than they did? I think not. It may have been due to our Westminster system. It could be simply because we were blessed with vast natural resources. It could be because we maintained influential Western alliances. Perhaps, even, because we separated church and state, or maybe because we were just lucky. However, I do not think that Australia's wealth has a direct proportional relationship, simply or only, to the number of hours Australians work.

We are paid sick leave, maternity leave, paternity leave, family leave, leave when our children are sick, annual leave, long service leave. We have fostered days off and a thirty-eight-hour working week. We are paid penalty rates for difficult and dirty work, and overtime rates. We are paid for smokos, lunch breaks and public holidays. We receive large payouts and packages when termination of our employment may be subject to unfair dismissal regulations. We have laws requiring employers to pay us superannuation, so we will continue to receive an income when we are too old to work. Our government is required to pay us unemployment benefits, caters' benefits, youth allowances, student allowances, old age pensions, disability pensions, and Workcare benefits at various times when, for one reason or another, we cannot work.

The statistics claiming that Australians work longer hours than any other nation on earth measure only paid work, and make no mention of the type of work. It is surely at least dubious to compare the work of a person who has simply to arrive at the workplace and monitor a computer screen or push buttons on a machine all day, with the rice paddy worker in Indonesia, or the factory worker in China. The work involved each day in the mere survival of an African or Ethiopian family caught in hunger and drought is massive and exhausting. The statistics, of course, refer to productive work, but do Australians read them as such, or have we started to believe our own spin?

What is work anyway? The dictionary and thesaurus have countless definitions, but, in general we are mostly talking about employment--working for money. This definition has become confused with the emergence of the term "unpaid work" which our sophisticated society and industrial experts have found in the activities we perform outside the awards and agreements between employers and employees. So workers can institute a "work to rules" campaign where workers will slow down production by ...