If you’re thinking of moving to Sydney, forget it. That slice of unsolicited advice was offered when I made my third visit in little more than a year. The idea of actually settling in Sydney has never crossed my mind, but for those who are contemplating such a move the advice is sage stuff. Sydney is a city in crisis: house prices are sky high, on a par with those in London; the urban sprawl has reached its limits; the roads are clogged, and the reservoirs are running dry. I suggest to a city shopkeeper that the airport authorities should hang a ‘No Vacancies’ sign under the ‘Welcome to Sydney’ banner. He responds with a laconic smile and offers to sell me a chain of ‘No Worry Beads’. Nice try. For all their problems, Sydneysiders remain robustly optimistic and brimming with can-do self-confidence. This is evident at Bondi beach, where scores of surfers, clad in sinister black wetsuits, defy the chilly spring weather to lie in wait for the dream wave. It is also evident at the Sydney Opera House, where packed audiences whoop their delight after an ambitious Don Giovanni. Teddy Tahu Rhodes, who sings the title role, is destined to follow his compatriot Kiri Te Kanawa to international greatness. A former accountant, his display of virile energy prompted my companion to volunteer that he could fiddle her books any time.
Mark Latham, the former leader of the Labor party, is ‘lower than a bloody dingo’. So said a senior party member after Latham’s diaries were published in mid-September. The diaries provide an insight not only into the brutal workings of Australian politics but also into the mind of a man who came within a whisker of running — and ruining — Australia. Latham declares his party to be ‘irreparably broken’ and says he ‘no longer regards Labor as a viable force for social justice’. His own commitment to the Labor cause, he adds, has been ‘destroyed by the bastardry of others’. Will Tony Blair be quite so candid when the time comes?
The ‘business’ part of my trip is the Australian launch of a book on Israeli innovation, which I co-authored with my wife, Helen. Lord Weidenfeld launched it in London; Rupert Murdoch, who wrote the foreword, did the honours in New York. The Australian formalities are conducted by Malcolm Turnbull, a formidable character in a country of formidable characters. Turnbull is perhaps best remembered as the barrister who represented (successfully) the former MI5 agent Peter Wright against British government attempts to suppress publication of his book Spycatcher. Now he is a first-term politician and is widely tipped as a future prime minister. As the speeches drone on, Turnbull slips me a note: ‘Your next project should be how to bonk.’ Flattered, if somewhat flustered, I avoid a response. Later I revisit the note and find that he actually wrote: ‘Your next project should be a how-to book.’ On reflection, George Weidenfeld might be more interested in ‘how to bonk’.
What do Australians think about New Zealand? Not very much and not very often. ‘We think about New Zealand like we think about Tasmania,’ one Australian tells me with unaccustomed tact. Another notes that if New Zealand were, God forbid, to be carried away by a huge tidal wave, no one would notice the difference. Not-so-nuanced Australian newspapers refer to New Zealand as ‘Helengrad’, an unkind reference to the Stalinesque prime minister, Helen Clark.
Politically pristine Kiwis have every reason to feel inferior to their slightly anarchic neighbour. New Zealand is everything that Australia is not. While Australia exhibits the characteristics of a thrusting alpha-male, New Zealand remains stuck in sullen adolescence. The heavy grey sky overhanging Auckland offers a clue to the national mood. As I pick my way through the airport-in-progress, a chainsaw voice announces that New Zealand’s agricultural regulations prohibit the import of ‘enumels’. I guess what that means and breeze through customs without a care. But visiting Auckland the other week for the first time in 30 years induced an involuntary tightening of the sphincter. The city is even more dour and dull than I remember. Kiwis excel at rugby, but in most other endeavours they barely touch mediocrity. Friends who have visited New Zealand recently rave about the ‘Pacific paradise’, but I am into cities, not glaciers and snowfields. All I see is a relentless sprawl of clapboard houses which entomb the bleak moodiness of their inhabitants. The geometrically planned gardens and the finely manicured parks awaken my most destructive instincts. But lo, there is a change. Remoteness has turned to resentment. Back in the Seventies a social commentator described his fellow citizens as a ‘passionless people’. No longer. Kiwis have acquired passionate hatreds for Americans, for Israelis, and for anyone else who is not ‘aware’ — of nuclear issues, globalisation, the environment, ecology, animal rights.... But all that has not made its problems go away. Alcoholism and drug abuse continue to take a crippling toll. Suicide is now regarded as a ‘significant cause of death’. The incidence of violence against children is among the highest in the developed world. Not a very happy paradise.
Some say Ms Clark has simply failed to outgrow her youthful prejudices; others, more cynical, say she is positioning herself for a top UN job. Either way, she has steered her country into a weird parallel universe. Both New Zealanders and Australians derive from a common British ancestry, so I am surprised that their world-views and aspirations should have diverged so radically. An indication of the difference can be found in their immigration policies. Australia is seeking to attract the sharpest pins in Europe and Asia; New Zealand, which suffers a persistent haemorrhage of its best and brightest, is looking to Tonga and Western Samoa. Domestic policy appears to be informed by an overarching guilt complex about supposed historic wrongs done to the indigenous Maoris, who make up 15 per cent of New Zealand’s population. On cue, the chattering Pakeha classes quickly lapse into bizarre jargon — ‘acculturative stress’, ‘material deprivation’, ‘colonial trauma’, ‘collective grief’ — to describe the angst.
My Qantas jumbo banks steeply over the Millennium Dome and follows a slow, spectacular path up the Thames before making its final descent into Heathrow. I gaze down with relief at the familiar clutter of high-rises and the tightly packed miles of terrace houses. The Iraqi imbroglio, the Tory leadership battle, Blunkett’s continuing search for love, Turkey and the EU, the chronic Middle East crisis. It’s good to be back in the real world. Paradise can wait.
Israel in the World: Changing Lives Through Innovation, by Helen Davis and Douglas Davis, is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.