Lifeboat drill on Cruise Ship Australia

Today's Bulletin features an article by David Williamson in which he uses a recent cruise as a starting point for some trenchant criticisms of modern Australia.

http://bulletin.ninemsn.com.au/bulletin/site/articleIDs/19DB1992F58E0305CA25707D000CDC14

It didn't take him long to see underneath the veneer of shipboard glitz:

it soon became apparent... that all wasn't to be plain sailing. The ship was stacked to the gunwales [sic] with John Howard’s beloved “aspirational Australians”. The dinner conversation made this plain. They aspired to all manner of things: to holidays like this, to new cars, to kitchen refits, to renovations, to private education for their children, and to practically anything made of plastic, wood or steel. The one surefire topic of conversation that connected erstwhile strangers was price comparisons.

Bob Carr wasn't on board (Williamson couldn't identify any Proust readers) so the cultural deficit had to be made up by recollections of a cruise past:

A British cruise line took us from Hong Kong down through Vietnam, Cambodia and on to Singapore. Excellent lecturers from Oxford and other major universities gave talks morning and afternoon about the geography, history, culture and art of the places we were about to visit. It was like a floating university of the very best kind, and we had to arrive early and fight for seats as hordes of ageing but fit and mentally alert English jostled for front spots, many taking copious notes...In contrast to the mindless hedonism of the Australian cruise we were presented with a world of sharp and complex reality. Discussion at dinner was a lively examination of what we’d seen and its implications. The creative heights and the brutal depths of human potential resonated powerfully in our imaginations.

Cultural binge or cultural cringe?

Back on Cruise Ship Australia no one so much as mentioned the plight of the real aspirationals on board, the Indonesian and Filipino crew members who were away from their families on low-wage contracts for up to 10 months, or queried why they had one kind of lifestyle and we had another.

So the British cruise line vessel had an entirely British crew (and faculty)? We're not told.

Next Williamson shifts his focus to the environment. Australians have inherited [?] a very fragile ecosystem; probably after Iceland, the most fragile in the world .

He is pessimistic about the future but, somewhat oddly given his attitude elsewhere, endorses the economic rationalist view that farming should be shut down to buy time.

Then he concludes with a stirring rhetorical flourish

If you believe in a wider set of values than accumulating material affluence, wear it as a badge of honour next time some self-righteous journalist uses the word “elites” pejoratively against you. An obsessive focus on material acquisition, encouraged by governments who worship economic growth and little else, have locked us into a probable long-term disaster scenario for Cruise Ship Australia and for the planet as a whole.

This is all very highminded. It's difficult not to agree with many of his general points, though I'd have like to have seen him make them more subtly, and maybe even suggest how to change Cruise Ship Australia's (and perhaps Cruise Ship Earth's) course.