I’m glad I live in Australia and not the USA

I didn’t choose Australia. Not originally, anyway.

I came here as a child with my family. I didn’t make the decision, didn’t know what Australia was, what it would become to me, or whether one day I would think of it as home. Children don’t make those sorts of decisions; they simply follow their parents.

And somewhere along the way, something happened. Australia stopped being the country I lived in and became the country I belonged to.

I have occasionally wondered what my life might have been like if my family had stayed in the United States. Perhaps it would have been wonderful. Perhaps I would have grown up perfectly happy, made friends, built a career, raised a family and never given Australia another thought. There’s no way of knowing. But I do know this: when I look at the United States today, I’m grateful that my parents brought me here.

Not because Australia is perfect. Far from it. We have our problems – plenty of them. We have politicians who say things they don’t mean and mean things they don’t say, and governments that occasionally make decisions that leave us scratching our heads. We have racism, inequality, poverty, homelessness and a long list of things that need fixing. We have newspapers that can turn a molehill into Mount Everest if it suits their editorial position, and politicians who can turn almost anything into a culture war.

So why am I grateful? Because underneath all the arguments, Australia still has some things that I have come to regard as extraordinarily precious.

Take healthcare. In Australia, the basic idea is that getting sick shouldn’t bankrupt you. Our healthcare system isn’t perfect – anyone who has spent hours in an emergency department or waited months for a specialist appointment knows that. But Medicare exists on the principle that healthcare is something we should provide because people are people, not simply because they happen to have enough money. I like that principle. Very much.

Then there are our gun laws. Australia doesn’t have a perfect record when it comes to firearms, but we made a decision after Port Arthur that things had to change. We changed them. And most Australians can go about their daily lives without routinely wondering whether the stranger standing beside them in the supermarket is carrying a firearm. I can go to the shops without considering whether somebody might decide that an argument over a parking space could be settled with a handgun. Our children can go to school and learn about our country, our history, our world, instead of learning about “active shooter drills.”

Then there’s our peculiar Australian relationship with authority. We don’t exactly worship our politicians – quite the opposite. We elect them and then spend the next few years complaining about them. We call the Prime Minister by his surname, give politicians nicknames, and make jokes about them. And if somebody becomes too impressed with their own importance, Australians have a remarkable ability to bring them back down to earth, usually with one sentence: “Who does he think he is?” There’s something healthy about that. Perhaps it’s because Australia has never been particularly comfortable with grandiosity.

We’re a country where a person can become Prime Minister and still be described by somebody in a pub as “that bloke from Canberra.” I rather like that.

We also have compulsory voting. Some people complain about it; I don’t. I like the idea that democracy isn’t something we participate in only when we’re particularly enthusiastic about the candidates. Voting is a civic responsibility. We don’t have to like the choices. We just have to make them.

And then there’s something else that is harder to measure: Australian culture. The irreverence. The humour. The willingness to have an argument and then sit down together afterwards. The ability to call somebody an idiot without necessarily hating them. The assumption that your political opponent is not automatically your enemy. At least, that used to be one of our strengths.

Because this is where America has given me pause. American politics increasingly seems to have become less about governing and more about identity. Politics has become tribal. People don’t merely disagree about policies; they increasingly seem to disagree about what reality itself looks like. There are Americans who cannot watch the same news programs, trust the same institutions or even agree on the basic facts of an event. And once politics becomes that deeply tribal, compromise begins to look like betrayal.

We should be careful, because Australia isn’t immune. We are importing some of the same political habits. We have our own culture wars, our own outrage industry, our own conspiracy theories, our own politicians who understand that keeping people angry can be more politically useful than solving problems – and our own media organisations that have discovered that outrage is very good for business.

Perhaps that’s why I feel particularly grateful to have grown up here.

Australia has given me a different political instinct. It has taught me that governments change, that prime ministers come and go, that political parties lose elections, and that politicians who once seemed indispensable eventually disappear into history. And somehow the country survives. We argue. We vote. We complain. We laugh. We carry on. That’s democracy. It isn’t supposed to be a permanent civil war.

And perhaps that’s the thing I appreciate most about Australia: it gave me a sense that life is bigger than politics. You can vote Labor and have a Liberal friend. You can vote Liberal and have a Labor friend. You can disagree about almost everything and still ask, “Fancy a beer?” Or, if you’re being particularly Australian, “Fancy a cuppa?” That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about politics. We should. It matters enormously. But perhaps we shouldn’t allow politics to consume every part of our lives.

So when I look across the Pacific, I don’t look at America with hatred. I don’t even look at it with superiority. I look at it with a mixture of sadness, curiosity and gratitude.

America is an extraordinary country. It has produced extraordinary people, extraordinary achievements and extraordinary contributions to the world. But it has also become extraordinarily divided. And sometimes I find myself wondering what might have happened if my parents had never brought me to Australia. Would I have been happier? Would I have had a different life? Would I have become a completely different person?

I’ll never know.

What I do know is that a decision made by my parents when I was a child eventually became one of the defining facts of my life. They brought me here. Australia became home. And after all these years, when I look at the country I might have lived in and compare it with the country I actually did live in, I find myself thinking something I never could have imagined saying when I first arrived: I’m glad I live in Australia. Not because Australia is perfect. It isn’t. But because it is home. And sometimes you don’t fully appreciate home until you have somewhere else to compare it with.

So, America, no hard feelings. You’re a remarkable country. But I’ll stay here. I’ll take Medicare. I’ll take our gun laws. I’ll take compulsory voting. I’ll take our irreverence. I’ll take our arguments, our imperfections and our maddening politicians. And I’ll take the Australian habit of complaining bitterly about the country while quietly being grateful that it’s ours.

After all, I didn’t choose Australia. But somewhere along the way, Australia chose me. And I’m rather glad it did.