The Sun-Herald

WHO WE ARE: The year of growing dumber

To nominate the best lines from the movies of 2009, go to The Tribal Mind.

A column about Australia by David Dale, published in The Sun-Herald, 29/11/2009
By the time you've finished reading this column, there will be seven more Australians. Five babies will have been born, four immigrants will have settled in and two poor bastards will have died. By midnight, Australia's population will have grown by 600, bringing us to 22,075,000 at midnight.

The revelation that Australia is enjoying a population explosion - the result of breeding like bunnies for five years and opening the floodgates to skilled workers from Britain, China and India - may be The Most Significant Thing We Learned About Ourselves In 2009. But there are other candidates for that title, and I'd like your vote before declaring a winner. Here are some more insights into The New Australia which we gained this year:

Most of us are too dumb to function in the modern world. That was the conclusion reached by the Bureau of Statistics from its "Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey" of 8,988 Australians aged 15 to 74. It said only 30 per cent of us possessed skills which are "the minimum required for individuals to meet the complex demands of everyday life and work in the emerging knowledge-based economy". The Bureau was particularly disturbed that 59 per cent of Australians "have difficulty with tasks such as locating information on a bottle of medicine about the maximum number of days the medicine could be taken, or drawing a line on a container indicating where one third would be".

Hamish Blake is our favourite person. In the six-monthly "Q-scores" survey of how 2000 Australians regard various celebrities, Blake displaced Hugh Jackman as the most recognized and liked person in the land.

Australia's favourite wine is made in New Zealand. It's Oyster Bay sauvignon blanc. Three years ago chardonnay was outselling sauvignon blanc three to one, but according to Sandy Mayo, global brand director for Penfolds, it developed an image problem when Kath and Kim started referring to it as "cardonnay": "We heard a lot of consumers say they would never take a chardonnay to a dinner party because everybody would laugh at them."

Australians WILL go to see an Australian movie ... as long as it's set in another country and employs mostly foreign actors. Mao's Last Dancer, set half in China and half in the United States, sold $14.5 million worth of tickets this year. The year's most successful Australian movie set here and using local actors was Charlie and Boots, which made $3.7 million.

We have a compulsion for constant contact Put another way, we've transformed from a landline society to a mobile society. A survey by Roy Morgan Research in the first half of the year reached this conclusion: "The percentage of people with a fixed line connection has been on the decrease over the last 10 years and has finally been surpassed by people with a mobile phone, which has increased rapidly ... [Now] 85.2 per cent of the Australian population (15.13 million) own or use a mobile phone, which has overtaken the proportion who live in a household with a fixed line connection (84.9 per cent, 15.08 million").

Most of us will find love before we die. That's if you define love as wanting to live in the same house as your partner. In its "Family Characteristics and Transitions Survey", the Bureau found that "for people aged 35 years or over, 95 per cent had had at least one marriage or de facto relationship. This included 18 per cent who had had two (live-in) relationships and 7 per cent who had three or more."

On that encouraging note, we'll stop the revelations for now. Go to comments to tell us which was the most significant and to nominate other vital insights we gained this year.

David Dale is the author of The Little Book of Australia -- A snapshot of who we are (Allen and Unwin). For daily updates on Australian attitudes, bookmark blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.