Meanwhile … just how long will it take to crack the Tassie Paradigm … ?

Guardian: Tasmania gambling on an uncertain economic future

The Apple Isle is searching for answers to a record budget deficit and the highest youth unemployment in the country

There’s a pub in Beauty Point, northern Tasmania, called the Riviera Hotel. You can just about imagine Brigitte Bardot draped across its sleek balcony because that’s what the 50s-style architecture and riverfront location evoke.

But this is 2013. It’s Saturday afternoon and two middle-aged men sit alone on each side of the L-shaped saloon bar, cupping their beers and betting tickets, waiting for their numbers to come up. They look at home in front of the big open fireplace, in a place where wasting time and money on gambling is a right like any other, especially as it gives the working man half a chance to get richer. Except it’s not even half a chance.

Ambitions seem as frozen in time at the pictures on the Riviera’s walls. Along with the surf-and-turf menu, they’ve hung here for so long they’re fashionable again. Despite the hotel’s prime position at the top of the Tamar Valley wine region, the wine on the blackboard is Jacob’s Creek and the sparkling of choice a piccolo Yellow. Two friendly bar staff seem more keyed up for Keno than vino. The electronic bingo game is played more in Tasmania than any other state, real expenditure totaling about $25m in 2009-10.

It’s a different story for the company with exclusive rights to run Keno and pokie machines in Tasmania. The Federal Group developed the $32m Saffire resort at Coles Bay on Tasmania’s east coast as part of the deed of arrangement it made with the Tasmanian government in 2003 to develop tourism while making profits from the pokies. But with room rates starting at about $1500 a night, it’s out of reach for the average Tasmanian who earns less than that per week. With a “Guests Only” sign at the front gate, most locals haven’t even seen reception.

If happiness equates to money in your pocket, you can understand why some would want to move somewhere else – Western Australia, for example, would put an extra $400 into their weekly pay packet. It’s one of the reasons why, according to a Launceston City Council report, an estimated $100m in wages was lost in the wider north of the state between 2006 and 2011.

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But what if Tasmanians were to turn things around and ask themselves a different question: Are we happier?

Imagine a place where you can buy a three-bedroom house for $300,000, where the stars come out at night, where children walk home from school, front doors are open all day, traffic jams don’t happen, broccoli grows in your garden and a platypus might live in your backyard. No one moves to this place to get rich; they come to feed their souls. For some it’s a place of their dreams, nourished by a desire for a better quality of life. People who think this is a form of retirement from life are wrong. More like the exact opposite: an honest embrace.

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Former prime minister Julia Gillard recently promised $100m of federal funds to be spent over the next four years on regional development in Tasmania. Jonathan West, author of the controversial Griffith Review essay Obstacles to Progress, was employed to help direct the funding. In his essay, West wrote that “demographics and income sources have coalesced to create two cultures – one of a substantial ‘underclass’ with a culture of low aspiration, and the other of a smaller, comfortable, government-dependent middle class”. Many Tasmanians, busy making their own livelihoods, are critical of this jaundiced view and wonder how West might now be fit to judge where funding is directed given his predetermined view of the state’s class system. ( TT, Rodney Croome: The hope Jon West Rejects )

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Tasmanians are intuitively good at living well on less than most Australians deem necessary. It’s a recipe for survival that deserves far more credit from those who take waste and excess for granted and for whom consumption and spending are signs of success.

Read the full article, with full links, The Guardian here

Hilary Burden is a Tasmania-based writer and journalist whose memoir, A Story of Seven Summers, was published last year by Allen & Unwin.

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