The Aussie fair go means exactly that – for everyone

WHILE I always enjoy reading Bob Janssen’s regular contributions to the letters column, always well written and persuasive, I often don’t agree with their content. Still, such differences of opinion are healthy and the very essence of a healthy democracy.

However, I feel obliged to challenge Bob’s definition of “a fair go” (GCB, 17/5), both for its limited content and its stated derivation.

Bob says a fair go means you make your own decisions, grasp your opportunities and enjoy the fruits of your labour. So far, so good. But he also ascribes its origins in Australia as deriving from the same system that saw “the rise of despots under failed socialist systems”, before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Fair go, Bob! The Australian tradition of a fair go has its origins much earlier than that. They lie in the same colonial background that enshrined mateship as a major virtue in the canon of Australianism. The despots in those days, if such they can be classed, were not socialist dictators but rather the English authorities and jailers.

As well as the positive (if selffocused) attributes Bob mentions, for Australians of earlier days – and hopefully still today – a fair go also means ensuring that everyone irrespective of class, colour or creed, has an equal chance to succeed whether in a fair fight or in life’s struggles.

Believing in a fair go means extending a helping hand to those who need it, for whatever reason: ill-health, lack of education, lack of equal opportunity, and so on. And the tradition of a fair go underlies most of our national founding myths, from the outback ethos of pioneer and battler, through the Anzac tradition, into our assistance through taxation or voluntary donations for those in very difficult circumstances, such as Aborigines, victims of floods and bushfires, drought-affected farmers and people with disabilities.

Nobody likes taxes, but everyone expect the services they provide, benefits such as educational facilities, medical services, defence, transport infrastructure and so on. While, like Bob, I deplore the politics of envy or the excesses of unionism and freeloading corporations, I also believe that extreme disparities in wealth and privilege are not in any nation’s best interests, leading to crime and other social disruption.

So, unlike Bob, I believe the tradition of a fair go is an admirable feature of Australian society and hope it long continues.