A Letter from Australia: Changing attitudes toward work

Dear friends,

Summer officially begins in Australia on Dec. 1, and with the new season comes Christmas, school holidays, the Parliamentary recess, and for many Australians, hope of lying around on or near a favorite beach listening to the cricket on the radio.

Doing any of this in January must seem bizarre in most other countries of the world. It is behavior that marks a southern hemisphere country like Australia with a different climate to equatorial Indonesia, and tags us with a number of European cultural habits that are also unusual among our APEC friends.

Not so long ago Australia literally closed down between Christmas Eve on Dec. 24 and the Australia Day holiday on Jan. 26. Australia was literally the "land of the long week-end". [In Australia a long weekend is not working on Saturday, Sunday and having a public holiday on a Monday].

The summer was traditionally the longest weekend of all.

That is not the case any more. Australia Day, our national day, is of course a public holiday but it is taken on the day that it falls, not on the nearest Monday. And Australia goes back to work after New Year's Day.

Even school holidays which I can remember stretching from the middle of December to the first or second week in February are now just five weeks long for most government schools in Australia.

I think Australians used to take a sort of perverse pride in our endless summer, but in truth it was never a uniquely Australian habit.

Australians liked to believe in a funny sort of way that we were luckier and lazier than most, but an examination of holiday practices in Europe at least, reveals that we are not so unusual.

Most northern hemisphere countries still seem to close down for the summer, have plenty of public holidays and short working days -- even the most supposedly economically efficient. Australia's fortune is that the summer coincides with Christmas.

Attitudes in today's Australia have changed to a large degree towards a more rational and competitive attitude to both work and leisure. Active life does not stop altogether after Christmas anymore -- especially for workers in retail and service industries, as well as in manufacturing.

But there is no way that the climate is going to change so much that there will not be a perceptible slowing down in the hotter months.

To anyone living in an equatorial climate such as Indonesia, this probably doesn't make sense. The Indonesian climate is hot all the time, it is just that some months are hotter and wetter!

For European-based societies the warmer months used to mean harvest time, and after the effort of getting the crops in, a period of less work -- and the August holiday season.

This relationship of work to season is the pattern on which school, legal and parliamentary sessions are still based in Australia -- but it doesn't make much sense when the climate is quite different, or when the economic demands of a free trading world will eventually result in more flexible working arrangements.

Different attitudes to what we do in the month of January are the least of what we will develop in the closer economic relationship between Australia and Indonesia and the other APEC nations after the achievements at Bogor.

But the competitive trading Australia that has emerged in the past decade is the result of changes in attitudes to such long cherished cultural habits as taking January off.

As we move along the track of full implementation of the APEC free trade principles by 2020, Australia already has a more open and competitive low tariff economy.

That is, many of our European centered cultural practices have already changed.

In the final week of Parliament the Prime Minister Paul Keating delivered an important report on the achievements at Bogor. He said "it required great leadership and vision and President Soeharto provided that".

The Prime Minister also discussed some of the practical steps being undertaken in Australia.

Keating said, "There was nothing inevitable about the Bogor Declaration. It was an act of will by regional leaders -- and an act of goodwill. It was the result of imagination and co- operation."

Keating announced that the Australian government would establish an APEC committee of the Cabinet, chaired by himself to co-ordinate a government response to APEC, thus elevating implementation to the highest level in Australia.

Already much has been achieved.

By 2020, a decade before Australia is committed to achieve free trade, Australia's trade weighted tariff will be just 2.9 percent, compared to 10.7 percent on 1986-87.

This is the same decade in which what statisticians call "elaborately transformed manufactures" have increased by 17 percent per year.

Our enthusiasm for APEC, like Indonesia's, is not just because if the economic benefits free trade in our region will bring, but because it recognizes the importance of the Asia Pacific region for our countries.

What Keating said applies to Indonesia as well as Australia: APEC means a seat at the biggest table in our region.

While recognizing the importance of enmeshment in Asia through APEC and the bilateral relationship with Indonesia, Australia still bears the marks of its European inheritance, not least in what we do at Christmas.

Multi-cultural Australia is at least nominally still a Christian country, but one with growing groups of Moslem, Buddhist and other religions.

An important aspect of summer in Australia is, of course, the celebration of Christmas. For most Australians Christmas means that families who might be separated for the rest of the year get together for the exchange of gifts and a special meal.

Of course there is a religious aspect to Christmas for many Australians.

They attend church services in the various traditions of the different Christian churches. For some, special Christmas carol services are popular the night before Christmas and for others, services held at midnight on Christmas Eve, or the morning of Christmas Day.

But perhaps the biggest tradition is the family meal on Christmas Day. This is where the European tradition in the food served seems especially bizarre in the climate "down under."

Traditionally the meal is roast turkey of even goose with a plum pudding that has been prepared months before. A plum pudding is a very rich boiled pudding of dried fruit prepared a couple of months before and hung in a dark place until boiled up again.

In the days before decimal currency was introduced in Australia, we had coins made from silver, and small ones would be included in the pudding. Our newer coins are not suitable for boiling, so traditionalists have to put them in later for their children.

This sort of Christmas meal derives from nineteenth century Europe and particularly British traditions. A menu more inappropriate for the Australian climate could hardly be devised but its continued use shows the strength of the European tradition in Australia.

But I am breaking this tradition -- in the spirit of APEC and free trade, of course!

For the first time I am preparing a huge Christmas lunch for my extended family on Christmas Day, but we are not having roast turkey -- we are having a feast of seafood instead.

More appropriate I think to our climate, and to our place in the world.

May I take this opportunity of wishing staff and readers of the Jakarta Post the compliments of the holiday season, looking forward to peace, prosperity and greater understanding between Indonesia and Australia in 1995.

-- Ros Kelly