Australia and its neighbour New Zealand are great places to live as evidenced by the number of South Africans “packing for Perth”.
Australia’s attraction is that it conforms to European standards of justice and governance after an accident of history — that of originally being a penal colony from 1788 to 1868.
Tegan Brink’s article (“Australia and SA not bit players in games of great powers”, July 14th) makes for interesting reading as do his statistics which make much of Australia’s diversity. However about 70% of the population of 26-million are European/English. Only 4% are indigenous, 72% speak English, 2.7% Mandarin, 1.4% Arabic and 1.3% Vietnamese.
It doesn’t sound very diverse does it? Similarly to our local languages spoken here, I would suggest the 50 indigenous Australian dialects, though interesting, aren’t much help in getting an engineering degree.
Unlike Europe’s chaotic migration policy, Australia doesn’t play around. Illegal migrants and boat people are sent back where they came from or are shipped off the Papua New Guinea. You need good credentials to emigrate there.
Australia and New Zealand are geopolitically linked to Southeast Asia, where parliamentary democracy isn’t universal and where China is expanding militarily at a worrying pace. Australia’s stance on nuclear non-proliferation is commendable but faced with a belligerent China, for how long will their new nuclear subs only carry conventional warheads?
His kind words about Cyril Ramaphosa’s peace mission to Ukraine must be taken with a pinch of salt given the embarrassment it caused back here in SA .
Bernard Benson
Vie email
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