The Idea of Home Read Online Free PDF Page A

doubt that anyone today would rather we’d taken that money in exchange for the heritage buildings and human-scale neighbourhoods, majestic old trees and preserves of urban bushland that the green bans saved.
    Then, in 1972, something really odd happened: after twenty-three years of conservative government, someone my parents voted for actually got elected. ‘It’s Time,’ Gough Whitlam had said, and it seemed that it was time, at last. It was time to abolish thedraft, revise a yes-man foreign policy, acknowledge Aboriginal land rights, give women equal pay, and end educational elitism by making uni tuition free. The Australian diaspora began coming home, and suddenly we stopped cringing about our culture. We had our own films, our own books, our own voices on the radio and television instead of the plummy pseudo-Pom accents that had once been de rigueur. Even our gardens got a makeover: out with the wilting hybrid tea roses, in with grevillea and callistemon.
    I was young, in those days, and change seemed an easy thing. It has been a grief of my middle years to recognise what that early, Australian-instilled optimism obscured from me: times of radical change are rare, and the forces of reaction are strong.
    Nowadays, when the brief spring of the Whitlam era is discussed, the narrative is a predictable one. The era is generally portrayed as bringing needed social reform at the cost of near economic ruin. I’m sure it felt like that to the big end of town. But it didn’t feel like that on Bland Street. Many of the peoplearound me, especially the infirm and the elderly, felt more prosperous because their pensions had become more generous. When I finally made that longed-for walk across the quadrangle as a first-year student at Sydney University, I felt rich. I had a generous living allowance. Free of the burden of future debt, I could contemplate the intellectual buffet in front of me without making calculations about the impact of my choice of study on my post-graduate earning power. It was a time for big dreams, and those around me had them. My fellow students from that era have gone on to enrich our cultural, intellectual and scientific life in myriad ways.
    I don’t understand why, as we have become more prosperous, we have become less generous. When the Hawke government decided it wanted more Australians to participate in higher education, that was a worthy goal, for even now, we lag comparable countries like Canada by a wide margin in this metric. Forty-two per cent of Canadians undertake tertiary studies, while only twenty-nine per cent of Australians do. But Hawke, unlike Whitlam,saw higher education as a private good, and not a public one. Since graduates stand to benefit from their education, he believed they should pay for it. Paying for increased participation through the tax system was, to the Hawke government, regressive, and succeeding governments have concurred with this. But to me that reasoning reflects an American individualist vision of how society works, and not an authentically Australian one. If a graduate earns more because of her degree, then she will pay more income tax and the society will be materially enriched. But her learning also enriches the entire society in non-material ways. An educated population is the medium in which creativity and innovation flourish, in which inspiration and prosperity are born.
    It was my great good fortune to have come of age in an Australia that extended to its children the freedom to dream those large, unfettered dreams. Yet my generation seems to be okay with tying down our own children, binding them up in a web of future debt. I am aware of the statistical studies that show the introduction of schemes like HECSand HELP have had no discernible effect on the tertiary enrolment of high school leavers from less economically advantaged backgrounds, and that’s a great relief. But it would take a very sophisticated statistical analysis to