Mr ROSS CAMERON (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Family and Community Services) (12:44 PM) —In January, during the quiet holiday month of the year, a report was released by the Australia Institute's executive director Clive Hamilton and one of its researchers, Elizabeth Mail, titled Downshifting in Australia: a sea-change in the pursuit of happiness. The `sea-change' referred in part to the series of the same name which was run, with great success, on the ABC. SeaChange was about an idyllic small community in a fishing village some distance from a great metropolis, in which a collection of interesting individuals had not quite opted out of life but had chosen a quieter, more tranquil, more peaceful life. They had created a space within which to pursue the deeper meanings and purposes of life, relationships and other such important things.

In the report, the researchers pointed out that the SeaChange ideal, which seemed to strike such a strong chord with the viewing audience in Australia, is being reproduced in the population as a whole. The phenomenon of downshifting is defined by the researchers as making a voluntary long-term lifestyle change which involves accepting significantly less income and consuming less. Individual Australians and Australian families are deciding that there are more important things in life than the ceaseless pursuit of either material prosperity or material security.

It is fascinating that a survey showed that many Australians—in fact, two-thirds of all those surveyed—said that they do not have enough money to buy everything they really need. The curious thing about that is that the survey was done at a time when Australians are richer in terms of disposable income than they have ever been in our history. The researchers suggest that Australians today are three times better off than their parents were in the 1950s, yet we have this phenomenon of a majority of people saying that they do not have enough money to afford the things they really need. At the same time, 83 per cent of Australians surveyed by Newspoll for the researchers agreed that Australian society today is too materialistic, with too much emphasis on money and not enough on the things that really matter.

What we are seeing is a dichotomy and a tension in the expectations of average Australian citizens between having a strong conviction that they need more money to buy the things they really need and at the same time saying that we are too obsessed and too preoccupied with material prosperity—and a majority of 83 per cent said that. The researchers also found that, in the last 10 years, nearly a quarter of Australians had made a deliberate personal decision which satisfied the definition of a downshifter—they had deliberately made a choice to deprive themselves of their current income in order to free up more time. The principal motivations were to spend more time with their family or to spend more time pursuing things broadly described as `self-fulfilment'.

The other interesting aspect of the survey was that the overwhelming majority of those who identified as downshifters indicated that they were happy with the decision they had taken. Interestingly, they were not saying that they were dropping out of society or that they were joining some social movement; they were simply saying that as individuals they realised that they were too obsessed and too preoccupied with the rat-race. As somebody said, the problem with the rat-race is that, even if you win, you are still a rat. I think many Australians feel that sense of alienation with their true self which comes from getting onto that never-ending treadmill. As the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Family and Community Services, I regard these decisions to spend time with family, to spend time with children, as positive developments in the Australian psyche and culture. (Time expired)