Strong support for a belief of mine

For years, I have been curious as to why Australia - undoubtedly the most socially conservative nation in the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development - is not greatly more overt in its religiosity than it actually is.

Australia's basic social characteristics strongly suggest a culture where religious attendance is at least twice as high as it is even among the most conservative sections of society. For one thing, my RMIT minder, though very conservative and supporting most of what the Politically Incorrect Guides say (when I bought him the Guide to English and American Literature he said he agreed with over ninety percent of it), never said anything to me about attending religious services. Nor are people in the ultraconservative outer suburbs noisy about being religious even if the occasional crucifix does suggest some indeed are religious.


It has long been known that big government tends to erode religiosity, and having my knowledge of astrology and basic personality theory it makes sense that people with a very committed and devout faith would support small government because they tend to be highly feeling (in astrological terms "watery") in their orientation. This recent study (though its results are quite old) by Anthony Gill and Erik Lundsgårde confirms this, by showing how welfare spending makes people less religious.

However, what is striking about the two diagrams shown in this post is how much less religious Australia is than its low level of welfare spending suggests it would be. Judging by other nations shown, Australia's rate of church attendance should be around forty percent, more than twice what it actually is and far above even attendance levels I imagine exist in the most Catholic-dominated sections of outer suburbs.

The explanation I favoured before reading these articles and still favour afterwards is a founder effect whereby the character of the first settlers of Australia, who were quite secular Protestants, have distorted the high religiosity favoured by Australia's extraordinary abundance of minerals and usable land. I imagine that in the future the likely failure of big government in Europe, Asia, North America and New Zealand could well cause so much downsizing in Australia (the only developed country whose people can accept it), which, if Gill and Lundsgårde are right, will see religiosity in Australia far ahead of any other country outside Africa or the Middle East, as simple resource models would predict for an industrialised globe.

A voluntary utility-free month, then year?

Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newtown have in recent days both been writing about special projects by which people volutarily go without utilities for a certain period. Having experience studying the Amish, I am aware that properly done this can be a very valuable personal experience for people.

Sharon Astyk is very right, however, that to be a serious test people would have to live without utilities permanently as the Amish do, or for a very long time so that they would become skilled in living without them and learning how to conserve water and heating, as well as to eat fresh foods not dependent upon refrigeration. For many Australians this is very difficult because in the exceedingly hot summer days that the new climate will bring, food would not survive the week between readily available days on which to shop. Moreover, most families do not have the time I possess to shop for food almost every day.

Therefore, the skill required in shopping to achieve the kind of lifestyle that Sharon Astyk is very worthy in suggesting and which Australia’s ecology in fact dictates would necessitate major changes in what people buy.

Fruit, meat and milk would have to be dried or otherwise modified in order to allow keeping for the period between shopping days, which I know from experience to affect taste but in a way I imagine people can adapt to. It is of course true that short practice will help, so why not develop a plan to voluntarily go without utilities for extended periods of gradually increasing length up to a year, which would allow people of course to understand most conditions they are likely to experience. Given that Australians are quite accepting of discomfort - at least judging by the lack of protest against runaway climate change and gradually tightening water restrictions from Melbourne’s population over the past decade - they ought at least to be willing to try to live without utilities and yet with minimal disturbance to their daily life. I admit my house is no likely candidate with its leaky doors and shoddy plasterboard construction, but for even marginally better-made houses it should be worth a try for anybody serious about saving Australia’s fragile and diverse environment.

The issue of whose side the public is on is too important

Today in the Age, Penny Wong appears to be complaining about the Coalition's refusal to sign up for totally unacceptable greenhouse emissions reductions.

Whilst, as I have said way, way too often, Wong is herself ludicrously half-hearted, the real issue of what the ultraconservative, poorly-understood Australian public wants and thinks is unfortunately never mentioned. The mere fact that polls suggest support for emissions reductions - though surveys are not done in a manner such as to create what I feel is necessary - is hardly sufficient when evidence from abroad suggests those who are most sceptical of global warming are likely to have the largest families. Moreover, the Coalition may well sense (and in my opinions they have every right to) that the apparent recession provides, as the one in the early 1990s did, an opportunity for radically downsizing public services and quite possibly for much more thoroughgoing deregulation than carried out by Kennett and Howard.

The failure to realise the possibility that Australia's next generation will be greenhouse-sceptic to an extent unforeseen abroad has another side: that, as Dennis Prager said, Europeans really care about little apart from their own leisure and pleasure. If they really did care about global warming, they would be trying as hard as they could to nullify Australia's immense advantage in cheap land by conscientiously refusing to ever buy food grown in Australia and to use as little as possible of materials from Australia.

Even if such a move does not reduce Australia's wealth to the level of the rest of the world, it would at least increase the wealth of Europe, East Asia and New Zealand above absolute zero. That of itself would enhance their culture's chance of survival and reverse the masculinisation (secularisation) that is leading to problems like lowest-low fertility and collapsing pension systems.

Yet another list to be found

Today's web browsing has made me realise that there was actually much more work in compiling the 50 greatest footy players than just that of judges Bob Davis, Ron Carter, Tom Hafey, Ron Barassi and Ken Hands. In addition to the list I described in my previous post, there was another list by Scott Palmer of the legendary "Palmer's Punchlines" during my childhood.

Although Scott Palmer's list is not so similar to the one of Hafey et. al., it still displays marked similarities, so much so that the top seven players are all among the top ten of the list published in the Age last June, and there is no surprise in the entire list apart from perhaps inaugural Brownlow Medallist Edward "Carji" Greeves and Des Fothergill, who in 1940 carried Collingwood almost single-handedly through a terribly tough year.

My mother, responding to the list as I described it properly, said that she could not agree with the way in which Wayne Carey had come to be seen as perhaps the best player ever. Knowing as she does some of the stars of the AFL through working at school with their children, she said Wayne Carey was a "horrible" person and that he did not deserve to be near to the top of such a list!

A peek inside the mind of another judge

Last year, I noted that The Age has been making a list of the 50 greatest footy players of all time, based upon the opinions of Bob Davis, Ron Carter, Ron Barassi, Ken Hands and Tom Hafey. Because I love lists of any sort, I have been really curious about this one, because like the list of John Woodcock in the 1998 Wisden, it shattered preconceived notions I had possessed.

Today, searching for comments on that list (I am wont to see what people think about every list that seriously garners my attention), I found this list by longtime footy commentator Mike Sheahan. The surprising thing is that with three exceptions it is the same as the Top 50 of the others. The three players Sheahan included that were omitted later were:

- Len Thompson
- Syd Coventry
- Albert Collier
- Robert Harvey

Three of these were Collingwood players, which leads one to think there might have been bias detected in Sheahan's list by Davis, Carter, Barassi, Hands or Hafey. The players omitted were:

- Horrie Clover
- Reg Hickey
- Allan La Fontaine
- Dave McNamara

This suggests that the judges realised Sheahan's older players were too focused on Collingwood, so that some correction had to be made. Neither Len Thompson nor Albert Collier were even listed as "Near Misses" in the later Top 50, though a few readers thought "Big Len" deserved inclusion with one saying he was the best player from 1971 to 1975.