The Australia Way: Pressure in the melting pot

Australia is in the global spotlight over the armed showdown at sea with 460 asylum seekers. But who lives in the Australia of 2001? In the first of a three part series, Herald correspondent GREG ANSLEY goes in search of the people of the lucky country.

On a cold Canberra winter night, little Yanti Riyadi walked on to the stage of the Erindale Theatre to present a dance from her Sumatran homeland.

With her filed the other dancers from Melrose Primary School, bearing the names of the new Australia - Adriana Bajnar, Emily Kwong, Jessica Van Battum, Brianna Arioli, Amelia Sutherland-Saines ...

Down the road from Yanti's home, Karina Arnold, a fifth-generation Australian, and her new husband, Michael Raffaele, a first-generation Italian-Australian, have bought a house from an elderly Chinese widow moving to live with her daughter in Sydney.

This is the ideal of the 21st century Australia, a nation pumped by hybrid vigour, coloured by diversity and growing in harmony.

But in Sydney, the Jewish schools of Moriah College, Emmanuel, Masada and Mount Sinai this year increased security, installed electronic surveillance and hired guards after a spate of attacks associated with renewed violence in the Middle East.

And in the northern New South Wales town of Casino - named (but misspelled) after the Italian monastery pounded in the Second World War - clandestine racist intimidation and threats were given form when 51-year-old Ku Klux Klan member Colin Houston was arrested in white gown and hood outside a block of Aboriginal flats.

Yanti and her schoolfriends are increasingly the more typical snapshot of life in Australia's polyglot suburbs, but both pictures accurately reflect a culture undergoing deep and rapid change.

It extends beyond ethnic melding, mapping new distributions of age and wealth, family structures, evolving values, beliefs and priorities, and the emergence of a national identity that blends 21st century realities with the romanticism of Outback and Anzac mythology.

It is distinctly Australian yet global, equally comfortable with Blue Heelers and LA Law, Akubras and reversed baseball caps.

And it is a society where the basic unit of mum, dad and the kids is giving way to a nomadic blend of traditional, one-parent, gay, childless, group and solo homes.

Within 20 years, as the population ages and more young people delay parenthood until their 30s - or decide against it altogether - the most common household in Australia will be two people living together, without children.

Only four of every 10 families will be the couple-plus-kids ideal of suburban Australia. An increasing number of children will spend a greater number of their early years in childcare and more women will work and earn a greater proportion of the family income.

The three-bedroom brick-veneer home is being overtaken on one hand by large, four or five-bedroom ensuite houses, and on the other by mushrooming townhouses and units, expected to become even more prevalent because of the increasing number of people living alone or as couples.

And this is an affluent society. Helped in large part by more valuable real estate, the net wealth of the average Australian has in the past 30 years almost doubled in real terms - allowing for inflation - to about $A160,000 (equivalent to $192,670).

Australians live in a world of second cars, videos, DVDs, stereos and - for one in every two homes - a computer.

But, as in New Zealand, it is also a society in which the gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening.

Tonight, across Australia, 450,000 homeless people will queue for too few beds at emergency shelters, doss down on friends' floors or in squats, or sleep on the streets.

Their numbers have trebled in the past four years, and more families, young women and teenagers are among them.

The single most important problem facing Australia is the crisis of the burgeoning gap between the wealthy and the poor and the disadvantaged, the St Vincent de Paul Society warns in a report on growing inequality.

That gap is so wide that unless action is taken now to gradually reduce it, two nations with conflicting aspirations and cultures will emerge.

In the last five years of the 20th century, the weekly income of the nation's poorest 2 million people rose $A9 - 5 per cent - to $A160. In the same period, the wealthiest 20 per cent enjoyed a 23 per cent rise of $A343, to $A1996.

More than 5 million Australians live in poverty or at its fringes. One in five people of working age receives some form of income support.

Welfare agencies say official employment figures distort reality through reclassification and the definition of one hour's work a week as a job, forcing many families to cope with casual or temporary work that does not pay for the essentials of life.

In Australia today, says the Smith Family charity, having a job no longer guarantees that you or your family will not be in poverty.

But on the Gold Coast, where even in winter the days bask in the mid-20s, this Australia vanishes beneath the energy of a nation enthusiastically leaping into the new millennium.

This is the sunbelt culture - a vast shift in population, industry and wealth to the coast and to the north, away from the bush and the inland, to southeast Queensland, to the string of suburbs racing up from Perth, to Sydney and the booming settlements of the eastern seaboard.

Property developer Eddie Kornhauser, worth $A220 million, lives on the Gold Coast. So does Billabong surfwear founder Gordon Merchant, also worth $A220 million, and any number of other heavily gilded glitterati.

The Gold Coast, says property analyst Alan Midwood, is becoming recognised as the ideal place to live by people who spend more than $A1 million on their home and who are happy to commute to Brisbane or Sydney to work.

Between the extremes lies middle Australia - still mainly of British descent, still mostly nominal Christians, but aware that one in four of its compatriots was born overseas, increasingly in Asia.

Mosques in Sydney and Melbourne, Hindu temples in Canberra and Buddhists in Perth chart the rise of Australia's fastest-growing religions. In the remote Northern Territory town of Katherine, the busy tables at the Mekhong Thai restaurant testify to the pervasive influence of migration.

This has been the path of Australia since the great cross-hemisphere waves began arriving from postwar Europe, accelerated by the demand for labour and skills for the vast Snowy Mountains electricity scheme and since cemented as a permanent, if controversial, part of the nation's life.

Britain, New Zealand, Indonesia, Hong Kong and China are now Australia's largest migrant sources, but the stream draws from a huge pool of other countries.

This financial year, 79,000 will be admitted, rising to 85,000 next year in a strategy designed to offset declining fertility and rising numbers of Australians moving overseas to lift the nation's population from the present 19 million to 24 million.

While it has a humanitarian and refugee programme of 12,000 a year - embroiled now in the bitter international dispute over the MV Tampa and the detention of boat people in remote camps - Australia wants the young, talented and ambitious.

Its requirements focus heavily on strong English-language skills and high-demand occupations such as information technology and accounting, competing aggressively against rivals such as Canada and New Zealand, and increasingly against Asia's rising tigers.

And there is a concerted bid to push migrants away from the magnets of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth by offering easier entry if newcomers agree to settle in other, skill-starved, areas.

But life is never easy for migrants.

Despite extensive multicultural, language, settlement and employment programmes, new Australians face a life in a country that speaks a different language, lives according to the unwritten rules of an alien culture, and expects newcomers to largely look after themselves.

Australia may not be racist as a society - although parts of it always will be - but more subtle forms of discrimination and the universal social and economic challenges facing any new arrivals have helped create significant ethnic pockets in the midst of the nation's big cities.

In the City of Fairfield ethnic, community and social workers meet every week to hammer out problems, large and small, that afflict a cluster of suburbs in western Sydney more populous than Dunedin.

More than 100 nationalities - 40 per cent of them from non-English-speaking countries - are large enough to be officially recognised here.

The city council prints its reports in Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Vietnamese, Lao and Khmer.

Two stops down the rail line, Cabramatta has become a Vietnamese city in which silk traders haggle next to restaurants serving Tom yum, Tun Nua and fish maw soup, and in which English remains a second language.

But behind the electricity of difference are the harsh facts of migrant life - Sydney's highest proportion of unskilled workers, stubbornly high unemployment, endemic problems associated with literacy and language, and higher-than-average cancer and heart disease rates.

Cabramatta has also become one of Australia's most notorious crime centres.

Triads, street gangs, violence and drug trafficking are so blatant that dealers work openly on the streets, prompting the State Government to introduce draconian laws to bust drug houses and anyone in them, possessing narcotics or not.

Law agencies have also worried about the organised crime slipping in with other migrant groups - the Italian Ndrangheta, Lebanese and Romanian gangs, Russian and similar mafia from eastern Europe.

Also appearing, with added incentives from tourism and trade, are Colombian cocaine syndicates and Japan's Yakuza.

In the past month, Sydney has been rocked by a series of appalling gang rapes by young Muslims, targeting white women and threatening the delicate racial harmony of the city's western suburbs.

But successive governments, supported heavily by economists, sociologists, community groups and public opinion, have consistently and overwhelmingly considered that the benefits of a multicultural Australia far outweigh the costs.

Yanti Riyadi and her friends are the face of the future.

Feature: The Australia Way