Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (73 page)

Australian government not only subsidized land clearance but actually re
quired it of lease holders. (Much agricultural land in Australia is not owned
outright by farmers, as in the U.S., but is owned by the government and
leased to farmers.) Leaseholders were given tax deductions for agricultural
machinery and labor involved in land clearance, were assigned quotas of
land to clear as a condition of retaining their lease, and forfeited the lease if
they did not fulfill those quotas. Farmers and businesses were able to make a
profit just by buying or leasing land covered with native vegetation and un
suitable for sustained agriculture, clearing that vegetation, planting one or
two wheat crops that exhausted the soil, and then abandoning the property.
Today, when Australian plant communities are recognized as unique and
endangered, and when land clearance is regarded as one of the two major
causes of land degradation by salinization, it is sad to recall that the govern
ment until recently paid and required farmers to destroy native vegetation.
The ecological economist Mike Young, whose job for the Australian govern
ment now includes the task of figuring out how much land has been rendered worthless by land clearance, told me of his childhood memories of
clearing land with his father on their family farm. Mike and his father
would each drive a tractor, the two tractors advancing in parallel and con
nected by a chain, with the chain dragging over the ground to remove native vegetation and replace it with crops, in return for which his father received a
big tax deduction. Without that deduction provided by the government as
an incentive, much of the land would never have been cleared.

As settlers arrived in Australia and began buying or leasing land from
each other or from the government, land prices were set according to values
prevailing back home in England, and justified there by the returns that
could be obtained from England's productive soils. In Australia that has meant that land is "overcapitalized": that is, it sells or leases for more than can be justified by the financial returns from agricultural use of the land.
When a farmer then buys or leases land and takes out a mortgage, the need
to pay the interest on that high mortgage resulting from land overcapitaliza
tion pressures the farmer to try to extract more profit from the land than it
could sustainably yield. That practice, termed "flogging the land," has meant
stocking too many sheep per acre, or planting too much land in wheat.
Land overcapitalization resulting from British cultural values (monetary values and belief systems) has been a major contributor to the Australian practice of overstocking, which has led to overgrazing, soil erosion, and
farmer bankruptcies and abandonments.

More generally, high valuation on land has translated into Australians

embracing rural agricultural values justified by their British background
but not justified by Australia's low agricultural productivity. Those rural
values continue to pose an obstacle to solving one of modern Australia's
built-in political problems: the Australian constitution gives a dispropor
tionate vote to rural areas. In the Australian mystique even more than in
Europe and the U.S., rural people are considered honest, and city-dwellers
are considered dishonest. If a farmer goes bankrupt, it's assumed to be the
misfortune of a virtuous person overcome by forces beyond his control
(such as a drought), while a city-dweller who goes bankrupt is assumed to have brought it on himself through dishonesty. This rural hagiography and
disproportionately strong rural vote ignore the already-mentioned reality
that Australia is the most highly urbanized nation. They have contributed to
the government's long-continued perverse support for measures mining
rather than sustaining the environment, such as land clearance and indirect
subsidies of uneconomic rural areas.

Until 50 years ago, emigration to Australia was overwhelmingly from Britain and Ireland. Many Australians today still feel strongly connected to their British heritage and would indignantly reject any suggestion that they
treasure it inordinately. Yet that heritage has led Australians to do things that they consider admirable but that would strike a dispassionate outsider
as inappropriate and not necessarily in Australia's best interest. In both
World War I and World War II Australia declared war upon Germany as
soon as Britain and Germany declared war on each other, though Australia's own interests were never affected in World War I (except for giving Aus
tralians an excuse to conquer Germany's New Guinea colony) and did not
become affected in World War II until the outbreak of war with Japan, more
than two years after the outbreak of war between Britain and Germany. The
major national holiday of Australia (and also of New Zealand) is Anzac Day,
April 25, commemorating a disastrous slaughter of Australian and New
Zealand troops on Turkey's remote Gallipoli Peninsula on that date in 1915,
as a result of incompetent British leadership of those troops who were joining British forces in an unsuccessful attempt to attack Turkey. The blood
bath at Gallipoli became for Australians a symbol of their country's "coming
of age," supporting its British motherland, and assuming its place among
nations as a united federation rather than as half-a-dozen colonies with
separate governor-generals. For Americans of my generation, the closest parallel to Gallipoli's meaning to Australians is the meaning to us of the di
sastrous Japanese attack of December 7, 1941, on our Pearl Harbor base,
which overnight unified Americans and pulled us out of our foreign policy

based on isolation. Yet people other than Australians cannot escape the
irony of Australia's national holiday being associated with the Gallipoli
Peninsula, situated one-third of the way around the world and on the opposite side of the equator: no other geographic location could be more
irrelevant to Australia's interests.

Those emotional ties to Britain continue today. When I first visited Aus
tralia in 1964, having lived previously in Britain for four years, I found
Australia more British than modern Britain itself in its architecture and at
titudes. Until 1973, the Australian government still submitted to Britain
each year a list of Australians to be knighted, and those honors were considered the highest possible ones for an Australian. Britain still appoints a gov
ernor general for Australia, with the power to fire the Australian prime minister, and the governor general actually did so in 1975. Until the early
1970s, Australia maintained a "White Australia policy" and virtually banned
immigration from its Asian neighbors, a policy that understandably an
gered them. Only within the last 25 years has Australia belatedly become engaged with its Asian neighbors, come to recognize its place as being in Asia,
accepted Asian immigrants, and cultivated Asian trade partners. Britain has
now fallen to a ranking in eighth place among Australia's export markets,
behind Japan, China, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan.

That discussion of Australia's self-image as a British country or as an Asian
country raises an issue that has recurred throughout this book: the impor
tance of friends and enemies to a society's stability. What countries has Aus
tralia perceived as its friends, its trade partners, and its enemies, and what
has been the influence of those perceptions? Let's start with trade and then
proceed to immigration.

For over a century until 1950, agricultural products, especially wool,
were Australia's main exports, followed by minerals. Today Australia is still
the world's largest wool producer, but Australian production and overseas demand are both decreasing because of increasing competition from synthetic fibers to fill wool's former uses. Australia's number of sheep peaked
in 1970 at 180 million (representing an average of 14 sheep for every Australian then) and has been declining steadily ever since. Almost all of Aus
tralia's wool production is exported, especially to China and Hong Kong.
Other important agricultural exports include wheat (sold especially to Rus
sia, China, and India), specialty durum wheat, wine, and chemical-free beef.
At present, Australia produces more food than it consumes and is a net food

exporter, but Australia's domestic food consumption is increasing as its
population grows. If that trend continues, Australia could become a net im
porter rather than exporter of food.

Wool and other agricultural products now rank only in third place
among Australia's earners of foreign exchange, behind tourism (number
two) and minerals (number one). The minerals highest in export value are
coal, gold, iron, and aluminum in that sequence. Australia is the world's
leading exporter of coal. It has the world's largest reserves of uranium, lead,
silver, zinc, titanium, and tantalum and is among the world's top six countries in its reserves of coal, iron, aluminum, copper, nickel, and diamonds.
Especially its reserves of coal and iron are huge and not expected to run out
in the foreseeable future. While Australia's largest export customers for its
minerals used to be Britain and other European countries, Asian countries now import nearly five times more minerals from Australia than do European countries. The top three customers are presently Japan, South Korea,
and Taiwan in that order: for instance, Japan buys nearly half of Australia's
exported coal, iron, and aluminum.

In short, over the last half century Australia's exports have shifted from
predominantly agricultural products to minerals, while its trade partners
have shifted from Europe to Asia. The U.S. remains Australia's largest source
of imports and (after Japan) its second largest export customer.

Those shifts in trade patterns have been accompanied by shifts in immi
gration. With an area similar to that of the U.S., Australia has a much
smaller population (currently about 20 million), for the obvious good reason that the Australian environment is far less productive and can support
far fewer people. Nevertheless, in the 1950s many Australians, including
government leaders, looked fearfully at Australia's much more populous Asian neighbors, especially Indonesia with its 200 million people. Aus
tralians were also strongly influenced by their World War II experience of
being menaced and bombed by populous but more distant Japan. Many Australians concluded that their country suffered from a dangerous prob
lem of being greatly underpopulated compared to those Asian neighbors,
and that it would become a tempting target for Indonesian expansion un
less it quickly filled all that empty space. Hence the 1950s and 1960s
brought a crash program to attract immigrants as a matter of public policy.

That program involved abandoning the country's former White Aus
tralia Policy, under which (as one of the first acts of the Australian Com
monwealth formed in 1901) immigration was not only virtually restricted
to people of European origin but even predominantly to people from

Britain and Ireland. In the words of the official government yearbook,
there was concern that "non-Anglo-Celtic background people would not be able to adjust." The perceived population shortage led the government first
to accept, and then actively to recruit, immigrants from other European
countries
—especially Italy, Greece, and Germany, then the Netherlands and the former Yugoslavia. Not until the 1970s did the desire to attract more im
migrants than could be recruited from Europe, combined with growing
recognition of Australia's Pacific rather than just British identity, induce the
government to remove legal obstacles to Asian immigration. While Britain, Ireland, and New Zealand are still Australia's major sources of immigrants,
one-quarter of all immigrants now come from Asian countries, with Viet
nam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and (currently) China variously predomi
nating in recent years. Immigration reached its all-time peak in the late
1980s, with the result that nearly one-quarter of all Australians today are
immigrants born overseas, as compared to only 12% of Americans and 3%
of Dutch.

The fallacy behind this policy of "filling up" Australia is that there are compelling environmental reasons why, even after more than two centuries
of European settlement, Australia has not "filled itself up" to the population
density of the U.S. Given Australia's limited supplies of water and limited potential for food production, it lacks the capacity to support a significantly
larger population. An increase in population would also dilute its earnings from mineral exports on a per-capita basis. Australia has recently been receiving immigrants only at the net rate of about 100,000 per year, which yields an annual population growth by immigration of only 0.5%.

Nevertheless, many influential Australians, including the recent Prime
Minister Malcolm Fraser, the leaders of both major political parties, and the Australian Business Council, still argue that Australia should try to increase its population to 50 million people. The reasoning invokes a combination of
continued fear of the "Yellow Peril" from overpopulated Asian countries, the aspiration for Australia to become a major world power, and the belief
that that goal could not be achieved if Australia had only 20 million people.
But those aspirations of a few decades ago have receded to the point where
Australians today no longer expect to become a major world power. Even if
they did have that expectation, Israel, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Singapore provide examples of countries with populations far less than that of Australia (only a few million each) that nevertheless are major economic
powers and make big contributions to world technological innovation and culture. Contrary to their government and business leaders, 70% of