Benjamin Hourigan

To everyone who I’ve recently been telling I planned to move into the CBD today: after a sleepless night worrying about the strain of paying $260 rent every week, I decided to withdraw my application for the place I’d selected. I’ll be inspecting another studio apartment in the city soon, for $180 a week, but I’m expecting it to be a shoebox in the dodgy part of town.

I’m loving being back in Melbourne, and appreciating tree-lined streets, good food, fragrant air, and my friends. But it’s disappointing that CBD rents here are so expensive. I know that in time they’ll drop, as more and more residential towers fill the myriad empty spaces in Melbourne’s skyline, and developers and estate agents look beyond the wealthy-international-student market to fill vacancies with workers who appreciate the city lifestyle. I think it’s going to be several years before that happens, though.

So now I’m looking further afield for accomodation. I’ll spiral outward, from Carlton and East Melbourne, searching for a nice place I can afford. I hope I find one soon.

And then there’s the search for work…

Here’s the text of an email I sent from Kansai International Airport to a few people at around 11:00 (Japan time) today:

Hi all,

Kansai airport has free wireless internet (one of the few good things about Japan!), so I thought I’d send you all and email. It’s just past 11:00am here, and I’m sitting in the departure lounge at gate 13, which you reach from the main terminal building by taking a ridiculously short train trip: probably about 1 minute or less.

It’s been an expensive day so far. My bags are massively heavy, and I wasn’t in the mood for the ordeal of walking them all the way to the Namba Nankai station and trying to get them up the escalators to the platform the airport train leaves from on the third floor. Kansai airport is not that far from Osaka, but the route there is very circuitous, and takes about 45 minutes. Including highway tolls, the ride cost me just under 15,000¥ (A$171.46), but it did take me right to the terminal doors, where the taxi driver helped me load my luggage onto a trolley. Driving on the elevated highways that shadow most of Osaka’s main roads is a surprising experience, feeling like a trip through a second city. The height of most buildings halves, and instead of highways above you, there is sky and sunlight. If not for the smog, at that level you could almost imagine Osaka was a liveable city. The highway to the airport passes Tempozan (where the aquarium is), the mass of factories at Nanko, some other areas I didn’t recognise, and finally passes over a huge bridge spanning out into the bay and to the island where the airport rests.

While waiting for the check-in counter to open, I met an interesting young guy from Phoenix, who works for United Airlines and can travel all over the world free of charge. He and his companion had spent most of the time between today and last Sunday shuttling between various American cities looking for a flight back to Arizona, before giving up and deciding to check out Osaka for a day. They weren’t impressed, and so I told them about how I hated living in Japan, which amused them and drew some disapproving glances from a middle-aged Western couple sitting nearby.

Returning to Australia, my suitcases are 7.8kg overweight, racking up a massive 34,000¥ (A$388.68) in excess baggage charges. It’s just as well I got all 50,000¥ of my apartment deposit back yesterday, and that having spent my time in Osaka earning A$3000-4000 a month, I feel like I can afford to pay for the luxury of returning in ease. Last night, there was little of the between-suitcase load-shuffling I went through when leaving, and none of the choosing what to leave behind. I’m coming home: I might as well do it properly and bring everything back.

The rest of my Japanese coins, which the money-changers in Melbourne won’t take, I spent on a copy of Malcom Gladwell’s Blink: The power of thinking without thinking (1040¥, A$11.89), a pack of aspartame-free chewing gum (elusive in Japan), and a bottle of green tea.

Beyond the customs and immigration gates, airports are strange places, mostly out of the country they sit in, but not quite. The Japanese ordeal is over. Leaving Australia, I felt relieved to break out of the rut I was in at home, but the overwhelming feeling was of excitement at starting fresh in Japan. Now, though I’m looking forward to coming back to Melbourne and doing new things, the dominant feeling is of relief that I’m finally out of Japan. It doesn’t reflect a lack of enthusiasm about coming back: rather, it shows just how much I loathed living in Osaka.

Time to board now!

A transcript of Australian Labor Party leader Kim Beazley’s reply speech to the recent Federal Budget appears in today’s edition of The Age. It’s clear early on that we’re in for a show of mediocrity when Beazley begins by saying: “this budget fails middle Australia and mortgages our kids’ future.” It’s not only vague and cliché, but appallingly sentimental: the sort of stuff for which Toby and Sam of The West Wing would excoriate junior speechwriters. It’s certainly not a fit phrase for a statesman: such bland, toothless attacks on Liberal policy are surely among the reasons Labor has failed to win a Federal election in Australia since 1996. Come on, speechwriters, stop the drivel. Do it for the kids.

To his credit, Beazley gets to make a few gestures towards making genuine improvements to life in Australia, but misses his target. Things start looking good when he commits to providing “real broadband for your kids and your business.” Yet when he announces that a federal Labor government will invest in a joint venture with telecommunications companies to build a fibre-optic network connecting Australian homes to the Internet, he’s backing one technology in a battle for dominance that ought to be solved by market forces alone. Not only are there cabled alternatives to fibre-optics, such as broadband over powerlines , but the market may eventually prefer wireless delivery of internet services, rendering the government’s investment obsolete. This is an instance where the best government is that which governs least.

Beazley is also right to highlight the insult to low-income earners of “Five budgets without a decent tax break. Then $10 [a week]”, but squanders the potential for outrage on an ockerism (“fair dinkum”) and an odd analogy between Treasurer Costello and playing the pokies. Further on, he veers into outright falsehood: “No tax cut can find you extra time to spend with your family.” It’s a fine argument for the leader of a party that’ll ridicule a minuscule tax-cut, then present an array of plans to spend your money better than it imagines you can, but the fact is that a larger tax-cut, of say, $50 a week, would potentially give low-income families some ability to reduce their working hours, move closer to their workplaces, or outsource some domestic work, to give themselves some more time to spend with each other.

So far it’s bad, but mediocrity and missing your targets are nothing like xenophobia if you really want to wallow in mud. Beazley stoops to blaming foreigners for the woes of Australian youth unsuccessful in their attempts to enter a trade:

We’re seeing Australians laid off while foreign workers take their places on conditions no one should have to put up with … These foreign apprentices are headed to regional areas where youth unemployment is already too high and wages too low. And to get their visas, foreign apprentices must accept whatever wages and conditions are on offer. And young Aussies have to compete with them. Over time, this will ruin the job prospects of young Australians. That’s why I announce tonight that a federal Labor government will abolish foreign apprenticeship visas.

Never mind that Australians are, like it or not, part of a global civilisation and that Australian businesses must compete in a world market to survive, drawing on labour and resources from across the world in their bid for success; no, foreigners are stealing your jobs and your chances in life, and it’s time to close up shop. This is exactly the kind of 1950s-style provinciality that is turning Japan (for instance) into a cultural and economic backwater. Rather than closing the doors on foreign apprentices, Beazley ought to be pressuring the Government to trade on our openness and have more opportunities made availble to Australian youth abroad.

If it wasn’t enough to inveigh against “the Ballarat apprentice welders back the jobs they lost to Chinese workers,” Beazley also attempts to lampoon Prime Minister Howard for taking overseas holidays. “Remember his annual family holidays at Hawks Nest?” he asks. “Not anymore. Now it’s Washington, Ottawa, Dublin.” The aim is to imply that the Howards think Australia isn’t good enough for them. Beazley ought to have considered that a trip overseas is a good way to remind oneself of the merits of home. Instead, he encourages the people of Australia to stay cozy at home and pretend they don’t have a global canvas on which to paint their lives. Its a far surer way to fail in life than to lose your apprenticeship to a Chinese immigrant.

Get with the program, Labor.

Update: The Australian has published an editorial calling Beazley’s speech unconvincing, while in the same paper, Dennis Shanahan tries to pass off the speech’s extreme banality as success.

Being in Japan for the last 8 months, where I’ve been not just isolated from the world, but cut off by language from most of the people here, has increased my sense of the importance of family and friendship. In the past I kept to myself, turned down invitations in favor of quiet nights at home, stewed in loneliness, and kept at bay the people I ought to have been close to. I wasted time on media escapism, time I should have spent on conversation, dinners, drinking and dancing.

When I left, I’d been stuck in life and love for a long time, and the only way of breaking free that I could find was to cut loose, to leave without a plan for coming back. Had I chosen a place worth living in, maybe I’d have stayed. But my old home is, from what I hear, among the best of cities. I chose my destination poorly, but my action wisely. Eight months in what may as well have been outer space cleared out my complacency, despair, and my reluctance to live boldly.

There are people I didn’t pay enough attention to while I was in Melbourne, and people I didn’t say goodbye to properly. There’s no excuse, but I’ll try to make amends. I’ll be back next Friday: expect to hear from me.