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Oh my Lord

by Jamie Snashall on April 16, 2008 in Befuddled Foreigner

An earlier posting discussed the high levels of religiosity in the US and the idea that social inequality brings economic insecurity and corresponding higher levels of religious adherence.  A friend suggested that, given the dismantling or weakening of many elements of the Australian welfare state under John Howard’s government from 1996 to 2007, it might be worth further research to see if religiosity has increased in Australia over the same period.  There’s an Honours thesis topic for an enterprising student (assuming, of course, that such a study hasn’t already been done).

On a related note, Democrat frontrunner Barack Obama got himself into hot – maybe scalding – water with these comments at a fundraiser in San Francisco last week:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them.  And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Maybe he’s familiar with the Inglehart & Norris research?

Written by Jamie Snashall · Filed Under Befuddled Foreigner 

Jamie Snashall grew up in Tasmania – that little island to the south of Australia – which made him something of a befuddled foreigner in his own country. The English novelist LP Hartley once said "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there," and many Aussies would think that that perfectly describes Tasmania, a former British penal colony for the nineteenth century convicts who were too bad for Sydney. Banished at the age of 13, he ended up in the nation’s capital, Canberra, where he became a political junkie, worked as a very civil servant for some years before jumping into the political arena as media and policy adviser to Julia Gillard, who has recently become Australia’s first female deputy Prime Minister. His weaknesses are U2, Star Wars, Thai food and red wine, preferably all mixed up together. In his spare time, he is trying to finish a TV sitcom about a college student and civil servant who are roommates. When not writing this blog and working on his sitcom, he is allegedly enrolled in the Mid Career MPA program.

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