It’s winter in Australia but you wouldn’t know it looking at social media. Opening Instagram on a 2C morning this week, I was instantly warmed by my feed – one friend is cycling through Tuscany, another is on a yacht in the Med (huh? How?) and one pal is lounging on the terrace of their villa on a Greek island.
These are Australians with average jobs, on average incomes, who live in ordinary houses and spend summer in Europe (or Asia or the US) most years without it being much of a big deal.
Instagram can be a distorting lens but statistics show Australians’ overseas travel has ramped up by crazy amounts in the past 10 years.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2017, Australians took 9,118,000 international trips, with 5,115,000 of those holidays (4,003,000 journeys were for other purposes, such as visiting relatives and business trips). Outbound international travel nearly doubled in the past decade, increasing from 5,143,000 total trips in 2008.
It’s not just the amount of travel Australians are doing, but the type.
Yachts and villas, Greek islands and farmhouses in Sardinia, private pools and butlers in Bali, degustation menus at Michelin-star restaurants, skiing in Colorado or Japan – these were once the spoils of the global jet set, millionaires, people who belonged to a different realm.
But in recent years luxury travel has been democratised. Things once out of reach to anyone but celebrities or the mega-rich have filtered down to the middle classes, courtesy of cheap flights, budget airlines, travel companies such as Luxury Escapes (a hugely successful Australian venture selling five-star hotel rooms online for a fraction of the rack rate) and the opportunity to have short-term leases on high-end private residences via Airbnb (there is even a new special category called Airbnb Luxe – “extraordinary homes with five-star everything”).
I got to wondering (after being wedged off a footpath in London’s Regent Street by four Australian women, walking abreast, their arms heavy with posh shopping bags): are Australians the new jet set class? Should the term Eurotrash be amended to Oztrash?
In the 1980s and 1990s, only the richest one or two kids at my school ever travelled overseas, and they did it just the once (and were forced to do a presentation to the class about their trip). Those in the next band of wealth might have the odd holiday to Queensland. Everyone else stayed home, or went camping on some miserable patch of cold ground in a national park.
But last week while on a travel story at a high-end health resort in Queensland, I met dozens of people who would classify themselves as middle class (dental technicians, nurses, pharmaceutical sales reps, deputy principals) who could not only afford the health retreat but talked of recent sailing trips along the Dalmatian coast or lavish group 60th birthdays in southern Italy or “quick trips” to Bali.
Nowadays in middle Australialand, these kind of trips are the norm. Who knows about the stress and the worries, months later, back home when the credit card bills come in (Australians have one of the highest levels of personal debt in the world). But in the cold light of Instagram, the villa, the yacht and the secret islands and the beaches and the cobbled terraces and the view from your room to the Pont Neuf becomes normalised.
Australians in the main wouldn’t think of themselves as bourgeois, or as part of a global elite. We cling to a national image that is generations out of date. This image is much more earthy and scrappy than we really are. We think we’re outsiders. Provincial even.
This image needs a refresh. Could it be that we are actually the opposite of what we thought we were – that instead, we are wealthy globalists? Our hypermobility, this northern hemisphere wintering, is after all, a way in which prosperity in Australia manifests itself.
Look at the stats. Not only do we travel more and for longer than other nationalities, but Australians are the second-richest people in the world (just behind the Swiss) according to a Credit Suisse report. Once the median middle-class person in Australia’s wealth is taken into account, we are the richest. THE RICHEST!!!!!!! IN THE WORLD!!!
(Other indexes, such as the most recent OECD report on GDP per capita positioned Australia as the 14th richest country in the world – but many of those ahead of us such as Monaco and Bermuda are tax havens.)
There is a disconnect between how we see ourselves versus the reality of our wealth and lifestyles. And this blindness to our reality extends to magical thinking about the bottom 10% – ie beliefs about the adequacy of the Newstart allowance, or giving up some of our tax breaks (franking credits, negative gearing) in favour of policies that spread the wealth more equitably.
After all, if we think we are poor or struggling there’s not much incentive to be more generous to others. The scarcity mindset needs to go if we are to return to what we believe is our natural, national set point: egalitarianism.
Novelist Tim Winton wrote an excellent essay on class in Australia for the Monthly in 2013. It still rings true six years later. After all, we are still on our lucky streak of 27 years of economic growth.
He examined an enlarged middle class that still thinks they are battlers.
He writes: “When I was a kid, most people in the suburbs were likely to describe themselves as battlers – code for unpretentious, working-class toilers. Nowadays, largely as a result of the nation’s remarkable prosperity, the social centre has broadened to the degree that ‘Middle Australia’ is normative. People are just as likely to describe themselves as battlers, but their historically large incomes belie the nature of their struggle, which often has more to do with material ambition than any issue of real hardship. In many instances, the ‘battles’ of Middle Australia are self-imposed.”
Adds Winton: “The soundest measure of a person’s social status is mobility. And the chief source of mobility is money.”
Middle Australia is living through a golden, gilded age right now, manifested in our hypermobility. This is the sort of golden age that we take for granted. Perhaps we won’t even properly see it for what it is, until it’s over.
Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist
