I spent a large amount of my adult life living in Asia observing Australia from the outside. I am now very comfortable financally, though working physically as hard as ever, and now able to make decisions based on principles rather than what is best economically. Through my observations, and using bench marks from the society I was living in, on many occasions I didn't like the impression I was getting about Australia generally. At times it seemed to be extremely harsh, and greedy. Generally people seemed concerned only with themselves, both as individuals and as a nation, and the one word that really grated was "they". "They" seemed to be responsible for everything that went wrong, and it was also "they" who should do something to fix virtually everything that people found unsatisfactory in their lives. All my life I supported the coalition side of politics, but I'm not going to vote for them this election. My focus is not so much on domestic issues, but generally on how we are making our way in our relations with other countries and whether we are working towards better interaction with both the governments and people in not only those countries we are comfortable with, but those who we are suspicious of. Increasingly the differences between they "haves" and "have nots" is going to matter, and being so small, we can't afford to isolate ourselves and ignore the realities of the future. There are too many issues to list here, but as an example, I believe that we must sign agreements such as Kyoto. Unless we acknowledge that per capita we are one of the worst offenders, we will have any credibility, and as much as we would like to see ourselves as a leader, we are more likely to be seen at best, irrelevant, and at worst, a greedy hypocrite.
