How Australia Compares

INTRODUCTION

‘Australia is the best country in the world.’ When people feel strongly about something, they often express themselves by making a comparative claim, but usually without taking the comparison seriously. Every country seems to invent myths about its own uniqueness (‘Australia is the most egalitarian country in the world’), myths typically based on an ignorance of others. Mostly such casual comparisons flatter the country they are describing. More occasionally they indulge in self-flagellation (‘Australia is the most over-governed country in the world, with the world's worst politicians’) or express a cultural cringe (‘We are always 10 years behind America’).

This book makes comparison its central purpose. It systematically compares Australia with 17 other countries, all affluent and stable liberal democracies, on a wide range of important social, economic and political phenomena.

Moreover, it seeks, whenever possible, not just to make snapshot comparisons from the present, but to chart trends. While there is value in presenting comparisons frozen at a single point of time, it is more instructive to trace common or contrasting trajectories – whether all these countries are experiencing greater unemployment, increased health spending, rising crime rates etc. There is an industry of politicians, journalists and market analysts devoted to intensively reporting short-term changes, and sometimes exaggerating their significance. There is much less public effort devoted to analysing the medium term and long term.

This book aims to go beyond the myopic preoccupation with the present that marks political controversies and most journalism to examine trends over the last decades and where possible even longer. Such a procedure allows us more perspective on the extent (and sometimes the limits) of the change we have already experienced. More cautiously it gives us some, although a very imperfect, basis for considering future developments. The future is rarely a simple extrapolation from the past, but charting secular trends is one tool for projecting future scenarios, and hence for planning and making policy decisions to give societies a greater mastery of their destiny.

The 18 countries chosen all share central socio-economic characteristics. All have conquered – at least for the majority of their populations – the basic struggle for life, so that the average life expectancy in them all is at least 75 years. The bulk of their populations has access to sufficient nutrition, safe drinking water and adequate shelter. All have close to 100% basic literacy. All are among the most affluent societies in the world. All have capitalist mixed economies, with a strong public sector. All have been stable liberal democracies since at least the late 1940s, with constitutionally governed, largely non-violent political competition with different parties alternating in power while central institutions remain stable, and where the government is by some minimal criteria representative and publicly accountable. In addition a further condition of minimum size was imposed – that the countries have populations of at least three million. This criterion excluded Iceland (population 270 000) and Luxembourg (population 418 000), which otherwise would have been included.

The comparative strategy chosen for this book can be labelled bounded comparison, selecting a fairly large range of countries with sufficiently similar political, economic and social characteristics to make comparison illuminating. This of course does not mean these countries are identical with Australia. (It is a common fallacy for people to say two situations are not comparable when they mean they are not identical.) Rather it means that the similarities are sufficient to make the pattern of commonalities and contrasts interesting, and to illuminate policy choices and institutional differences.

Why compare? Comparison serves three major purposes. Firstly it helps us to see ourselves more clearly. As Rudyard Kipling wrote a century ago – albeit in a somewhat different spirit – ‘What do they know of England, who only England know?’ In social science terms

it allows us to delineate the individual case more precisely, to make explicit what might otherwise have remained unexamined. What we imagine to be unique may be common to many societies, while what we take for granted as the natural or only way of doing things may in fact be unusual or even unique.

Secondly, comparison expands our universe of possibilities. It increases our knowledge that there are alternatives – alternative policies, different institutional arrangements, contrasting cultural assumptions. Most policy discussions take place within a restricted frame of reference. Domestic contention tends to focus upon our hopeless politicians, obstructive trade unions or rapacious corporations, looking only inwards when looking outwards can suggest policy and social alternatives beyond the framework within which domestic politicians are casting the problem. Equally, while the focus of comparison tends to concentrate on differences and contrasts, commonalities are often just as important and interesting. When trends and problems are broadly shared among a number of countries the causes are unlikely to be solely home-grown.

Thirdly, comparison is the social scientist's substitute for the experiment. We cannot subject whole societies to experimental testing, so disciplined comparison is our means for testing generalisations. The study of commonalities and contrasts allows us to be more disciplined in ascribing explanations and examining relationships. By charting similarities and differences, we can be more precise in our descriptions and more discriminating in our analyses.

While the potential value of comparative work is great, so unfortunately are the obstacles confronting it. One problem, common to all social science research, is particularly pronounced in comparative research – namely many of the most interesting and subtle aspects of socio-political life defy quantification or the construction of valid indicators to summarise simply their trends and differences. There is often truth in the charge that comparative measures are too crude to be meaningful. We do not claim that the tables in the following pages exhaust all there is to say about the quality of social and political life in these countries, but they offer data that can offer the parameters in which such qualitative discussions can proceed in a more informed way.

In terms of data quality, the two most central problems of comparative research are reliability and equivalence. Different countries often measure the same concept in different ways (or in some countries with problematic accuracy), making apparently comparable data in fact incomparable. The problem of equivalence means that comparing some isolated measure of behaviour may have very different meanings when put in its larger social context.

Although these problems are still pertinent, fortunately they have been greatly reduced over the last few decades. Care must still be taken with problems of comparability, but today's scholar has access to many more, and more extensive and harmonised, data banks than used to be the case. International bodies such as the United Nations and its member agencies, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, as well as commercial organisations and academics, have laboured to produce valid and reliable comparative data. In particular the many sections of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have produced a range of high-quality data on the relevant countries. Their work is the central resource for all interested in the comparative study of these advanced democracies, and we would like to think this book is testament to the importance and value of their work.

Although as will be evident we have been the beneficiaries of the competent work done by the professionals in these organisations, the frustrations have still been considerable. Discrepancies in data between different organisations often seemed inexplicable. One always had to be alert to changes or inconsistencies in the basis of measurement. Missing data for individual countries, often for no apparent reason, was another frequent irritant. As far as possible, we have only included tables, where

data was available for all 18 countries, to keep the basis for comparison as constant as possible. However, we have often had to depart from this standard when the interest of the data outweighed its incompleteness.

This book differs from the two most common types of books calling themselves comparative, firstly in focussing consistently upon the same set of countries throughout and making comparison the key within each part. In academic studies, edited books calling themselves ‘comparative’ are more accurately described as ‘juxtapositions’, as different authors tackle different countries in different ways, and the genuinely comparative element is minimal. Or else there may be comparative work, but the comparisons are based upon convenience, without a consistent or theoretically bounded set of countries being compared.

While most academic studies focus intensively on one narrow area, our aim has been to produce an encyclopaedic source book. We have sought to provide a reference source offering comparative data on as many aspects of social life as possible, from taxation to traffic accidents, homicide rates to health expenditure, from interest rates to internet usage. We have tracked economic indicators, but also demographic and social ones, and where possible different institutional and policy settings.

The second major source of comparative data is found in compendia of statistical information. Most are done by international agencies (sometimes constrained by diplomatic considerations to present their data in a neutral and non-controversial way), or by individuals whose primary aim is to put on record comprehensive data. These compilations often provide valuable data. However, they are commonly not reader-friendly. Nor do they make any effort to explain for the non-specialist the value and limits of the measures they are reporting.

In contrast, in this book, we have very deliberately exercised an editorial hand in the presentation of data. For example, we have been selective not comprehensive about the years for which data is presented (trying to keep tables clear, and making judgements about when added detail would add more clutter than extra meaning). Similarly rather than invariably presenting tables with countries in alphabetical order, we have often listed them in hierarchical order according to the phenomenon being studied, so that the main ordering and differences between countries are more quickly apparent. (In such ‘league tables’ most people focus on rankings and differences, but, as indicated earlier, what is often at least as important is how they have moved in common.)

Most importantly this is not just a book of tables, but rather each table is accompanied by a commentary about the meaning of the data, including sometimes a discussion of its limits. In this way we have sought to provide the reader not only with reliable and pertinent data, but with some discussion of its interpretation and significance. We try to probe the meaning of different measures, look at both common trends and countries which have performed quite differently from the norm, and sometimes seek to see whether there are any patterns in the differential performance of countries. However, in these discussions, as the title How Australia Compares indicates, we have always tried to put Australian experience into comparative perspective, invariably returning to the implications of these facts for considering Australia's performance, policies and prospects.