Archive Article: People Are Tired Of Change. Aug 98.
December 23, 2008

Reform fatigue is gripping Australia. People are getting tired of all the changes. They see themselves as the casualties of change. Well, unfortunately, the pace of change has only just begun.

There’s a wave of nostalgia sweeping across Australia (and indeed many other countries). Baby Boomers in western countries remember with fondness the good old days of the 1960s, especially the bumper year of 1968. Their parents yearn for the stability of the 1950s.

But we cannot put the clock back. There are two major economic driving forces in world affairs: globalization and technological development.

Globalization means that the world order which we have had for the past three centuries, which revolved around strong national governments, is now changing. National governments will remain in existence but they will no longer be the main controlling force.

Indeed, it seems that there will be no major central group of humans doing so. George Orwell in 1948 wrote a brilliant novel warning about the growth of government power: 1984. The novel has many wonderful points but it is wrong in one way: governments have lost power and not increased it. There is no single Big Brother as such. Even most of the communist governments of the George Orwell’s day have now gone.

The current era is one of fragmentation, not centralization. Governments can regulate the details of our lives but not the major factors. Transnational corporations often overshadow governments but also compete among themselves for customers.

Meanwhile, there is increasing speed of technological change. This is a process that feeds upon itself, with one group of scientists competing with others. There have been other technological revolutions in human history but this is the first time that the revolution has been global in scope.

This is not a repeat of Britain’s industrial revolution, which was gradually copied around the world. The pace of change is being set in different cities around the world simultaneously. Bangalore in India, for example, is now a major player in the computer revolution – India has the world’s second largest English-speaking scientific work force (after the US).

Underneath all this change, of course, there is the persistent factor of human nature. There are many continuities in life. A person from Old Testament times would not understand much of today’s technology but they would recognize the same old features of greed and jealousy.

Indeed, even the resistance to change is not new. For example, after Moses had led his people out of Egypt, they started to grumble against him. They wished they had stayed in Egypt, where they were used to being slaves. “There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted but you have brought us into this desert to starve”.

Therefore, a sense of history is useful in thinking about the future ahead of us. Some things are new but others are not. The skill is to be able to tell the difference.

BROADCAST ON FRIDAY AUGUST 21 1998 ON RADIO 2GB’S “BRIAN WILSHIRE PROGRAMME” AT 9 PM, AND ON AUGUST 23 1998 ON “SUNDAY NIGHT LIVE” AT 10.30 PM.