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Why the Australian experience is relevant to Filipinos |
 benign0
Peyups Addict
Joined: Aug 2001
| 2009-10-12 20:38
9th October 2009:
Being Australian is about driving in a German car to an Irish pub for A Belgian beer, then on the way home, grabbing an Indian curry or A Turkish kebab, to sit on Swedish furniture and watch American shows on a Japanese TV.
Oh and....
Only in Australia...
can a pizza get to your house faster than an ambulance.
Only in Australia ...
do supermarkets make sick people walk all the way to the back of the shop to get their prescriptions while healthy people can buy cigarettes at the front.
Only in Australia ...
do people order double cheeseburgers, large fries and a DIET coke.
Only in Australia ...
do banks leave both doors wide open and chain the pens to the counters.
Only in Australia ...
do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and lock our junk and cheap lawn mower in the garage.
NOT TO MENTION....
3 Aussies die each year testing if a 9v battery works on their tongue.
58 Aussies are injured each year by using sharp knives instead of screwdrivers.
31 Aussies have died since 1996 by watering their Christmas tree while the fairy lights were plugged in.
8 Aussies had serious burns in 2000 trying on a new jumper (jacket) with a lit cigarette in their mouth.
A massive 543 Aussies were admitted to Emergency in the last two years after opening bottles of beer with their teeth.
and finally.........
In 2000 eight Aussies cracked their skull whilst throwing up into the toilet.
Okay. In posting the above;
(1) There are a handful of pertinent points I wanted to make; and,
(2) Those points are relevant to Filipinos (recognising that we are, as a matter of fact, logged on to a forum populated primarily by Filipinos).
But in the split second between the time I right-clicked on my mouse and left-clicked on it to select "Paste" on the menu that appeared, I had a major brainwave (yes, my mind works that fast). I realised, in that millisecond, that spoonfeeding everyone here with the points I wanted to make in posting the above and their relevance to Pinoys would be, well, too easy and, quite frankly, a bit patronising.
12th October 2009:
As expected, sifting through the responses to the above challenge to identify the possible points I intended to make in FilipinoVoices.com where I posted it was a no-brainer. Only a few stood out as noteworthy, and as usual, I had to rely on, well, primarily myself for an injection of true insight into the matter.
Some of what I articulate below are the results of a synthesis across several of the more insightful comments I received, while those I quote verbatim are, of course, brilliant in themselves (and therefore better left unparaphrased).
So here they are:
Point 1: Every society has their unique sets of cultural quirks.
What sets the men apart from the boys, however, is how the hand that is dealt them is played. Just three or four letters differentiate the words "resource-rich" and "resourceful". The Philippines is a resource-rich country yet it is amongst the worlds most chronically impoverished. Compare that to resource-poor Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, and it becomes obvious which between our lot and those societies is the more resourceful.
Ben Kritz in his usual excellent form put it quite well in this comment:
Apologists for Filipino society seem to have forgotten that cute quirks only can be regarded as such when they are not the ordinary pattern of existence and development. When everybody does them, they stop being cute or quirky or worth defending, and become crippling social flaws.
Indeed, Australians (and other societies with extensive trackrecords of achievement) embrace their cultural quirks while we Pinoys (who utterly lack the least bit of commendable collective achievement) lament ours.
Point 2: Prosperous societies build upon while degenerate societies are stuck with repairing.
Do it right the first time, and you spend a lifetime building. Take a pwede-na-yan approach and you spend a lifetime repairing.
As evident in the sorry way Filipinos "coped" with the multiple disasters that hit us, we cannot even catch up with the repair work! Yet we continue congratulating ourselves for the "bayanihan" spirit we imagine ourselves to possess. Worse, we so pat ourselves on the back for a misguided notion of what it means to be "doing something" even as we regard the poignant sight of our society merely stumbling from one crisis to another.
Efficiency and sustainability in what one "does" is a point often lost in that common rejoinder "What have you done?".
Let's step back to an example more real to us here who inhabit this corner of the blogosphere.
A person who lectures a class of, say, 20 or leads a picket line of, say, a hundred-odd protestors is seen to be "doing something".
On the other hand, you write one insightful blog, one insightful essay, or one insightful article, or even one insightful book, publish it once and then get even just 40 to 50 readers per day, you get a recurring result that in the long run delivers more far reaching results.
Compare the latter with the one-action one-result effect of the earlier. The ratio of the effect per iota of energy expended by a lecturer, a leader of protest rallies, or even an activist that serves soup in a soup kitchen is far smaller than the effect per iota of energy expended by, say, a widely-read writer whose work remains potent and continues to influence actions long after the effort to produce it has been expended.
Robert Kiosaki described the same principle using a different example in his book The Cash Flow Quadrant, where he cited the difference between two people who make a living delivering water to a village from a distant source. One does it by going back and forth with buckets, while the other builds a fixed pipeline from the source to his distribution point.
The earlier is dependent on a relatively greater continuous effort to keep his business going while the other one built a system that generates recurring results for him with far less continuous effort over the long term.
This is not to say delivering water using buckets is not an important skill. Indeed, when disaster strikes, in the case of this example, say, an "act of God" destroying our hypothetical water supply pipeline, then those who make a business of delivering water using buckets steps up to fill an immediate temporary need. But then this solution becomes a problem when it is regarded as a permanent measure. As that all-too-familar argument goes, the village can make do with it. Pwede na yan.
That goes for just about any sort of disaster that hits a community. As we shall see in the third and last point, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) is a disaster in its own right and Australia (thus far as we know) is responding to it relatively well.
Point 3: The GFC is a disaster that Australia responded to well, and the way it did was not about a simple matter of luck.
For now Australia is the first advanced economy in the world to gear up for expansion even while the rest continue to desperately claw their way out of the rut. It is an example of true resilience:
Here in Australia, the [financial] storm also battered, but it destroyed less. While a great part of the western world went into recession, the country seems to have survived, "riding the tsunami" as one headline put it. Although Australia’s unemployment rate worsened from 4.2 in 2008 to 5.8 (September 2009 figures), its financial indicators remain good. Economists are not attributing it to dumb luck though. It is a combination of everything from the excellent policies of the previous and current administrations (stricter banking regulations and timely interest cuts) to initiatives to stimulate every individual’s appetite for consumption. After all, isn’t the latter what Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s stimulus package is for? Some economists are saying that the financial crisis is over for Australia. Indeed, this is a lucky country – in this round.
Measure after measure put in place that contributed to the resiliency of the Australian economy were implemented over the terms of several governments. The poor man's idea of resilience is about "coping" when disaster strikes. True resilience is engineered into a system to anticipate disaster so that it is able to side-step, bend with, and absorb its shock.
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The even bigger point
It is unfortunate that these disasters happened at a time in the democratic cycle when politicians are less likely to have the good of the greater public in mind. During the lead up to the 2010 elections, there will be less focus on governance and administration and more focus on politics.
As such, we as voters and, more importantly, the set of people in the best position to influence thought have a responsibility to induce the right behaviours and the right thinking in our society. It becomes more imperative now that we get a big boot up the arses of our politicians.
Voters are ENTITLED to be given a coherent and CONSOLIDATED statement of platform by their politicians, instead of us having to piece it together ourselvesfrom the various horsemanure exchange sessions they sit through to gain media exposure. Voters should DEMAND it and expect to GET IT.
It is only when customers are DEMANDING that service providers SHAPE UP.
That same principle applies to politicians. If their constituents engage them like morons, guess what: they behave like morons too. And I don't think anybody here will disagree with the REALITY that Pinoy politicians have acted like morons over the last two to three decades.
In a democracy, especially, the quality of politicians merely reflect the quality of their constituents' engagement.
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[This message was edited by benign0 on 2009-10-12 20:40]
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