I want to emphasis three points about that before saying some things about the cultural legacy of the period through which we’re likely to be passing for the remained of this decade.

Although you’ve heard lots of times before, Australia was one of only a handful of countries that came through the world financial crisis unscathed. Along with Poland and Korea we were the only OECD countries that didn’t have a recession as it is conventionally defined as consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth. And yet somehow the government has been spectacularly unsuccessful in selling that achievement. We didn’t escape a recession solely because anything that the government actually did. After all it was the generally prudent behaviour of Australia’s banks compared with those of the banks overseas. The generally better regulation of those banks by our authorities, the Reserve Bank and APRA, than was the case of regulatory authorities in the United States and various part of Europe. The willingness of Australia’s Reserve Bank to put interest rates up during the first half of the 2000s rather than leave them too low for too long as central banks did in most other Western countries in the first half of the 2000s that prevented Australians from becoming quite as over-indebted relative to their capacity to service their obligations as unfortunately turned out to be the case in the US in particular but also in a number of smaller European economies.

But our government did contribute to Australia’s capacity to withstand the worst phases of the financial crisis and as I say they’ve been spectacularly unable to reap any political dividend from that. Perhaps because we didn’t experience a financial crisis of our own and we didn’t get thrown into a recession by other people’s financial crisis’s the public at large thinks that there is nothing to be particularly grateful for either of the government of the day or those responsible for the better management and regulation of Australia’s banks in the lead up to the financial crisis.

But none the less it is and this is my first observation of the Australian economy, striking how despite the fact that Australia’s experience over the past three years has been world’s away almost literally from that of the people of the United States and Europe among other places, consumer sentiment and other feelings about the way the economy is travelling are deteriorating so markedly over the last twelve months.

The second point I would make about the Australian economy is that we are experiencing the biggest mining boom of our history. Not in Melbourne to be sure, or in Sydney. But in what are none the less undisputed parts of Australia’s economy, we are experiencing the largest upswing in the prices of we receive for the things we sell to the rest of the world relative to what we pay for what we buy from the rest of the world in over 140 years of history. That’s not really our doing it’s rather a by-product of the fact that the two most populous nations in the world, China and India, are passing through a stage of economic development at which, during which, the demand for commodities, with which nature or God depending on what you believe has happened to so richly have endowed this continent and the waters that surround it. And that’s a phase which in my view is likely to run at least until 2024 and maybe run to as late as 2037, before India passes out of that stage of economic development and moves into being a building economy where most people’s income is spent on services that in turn don’t use a lot of commodities in their creation or on-going use. But we are in as I say, as a result of what’s going on in China and India an extraordinary phase in our history which will generate an extraordinary amount of wealth.

My third observation is that the mining boom is having some serious side affects many of them unpleasant for other parts of the economy, and I’m referring particularly to the strength of the exchange rate and to a lesser extent higher interest rates, which are making life particularly unpleasant for the tourist sector for parts of the manufacturing industry, for some but by no means all of our agricultural sector, and certainly those parts of it which compete with imported product and indeed for our higher education sector which over the last 15 or so years has become increasingly dependent on the full fee paying foreign students of whom there aren’t nearly as many coming to Australia as there were two years ago.

And those unpleasant side affects have also coincided with a fourth important trend, which is after a long period during which Australians ran down their savings so much so that in the first half of the decade Australians collectively spent more than they earned, Australians appear in the last three or four years to have rediscovered the virtues of saving and are now saving a higher proportion of their incomes than at any point since the mid-1980s. Now from many a perspective, that’s a good thing. Among other things it means that the risk of Australia experiencing its own version of the financial crisis is diminishing. It also means that more of the present mining boom which inevitably given its scale is going to call for a large amount of debt and equity finance, more of that mining boom is being financed by our own savings and less of it by foreigners. But the corollary is that retailers are experiencing their toughest conditions since the recession of the early 90s. That doesn’t mean its as bad as it was in the early 90s but it is fair to say I think that its worse than anything they’ve experienced since.

And particularly because the industries that are in the politicians trite phrase ‘doing it tough’ or ‘struggling’ as they seem to say employ far more people than the mining industry and tend to be concentrated in the south east corner of the country where most of our media comes from and where most of our economic commentators live and where most of the population is employed there is a sense being created now that the economy on the whole is doing badly.

Parts of it are, as I acknowledge but there are parts of it that we don’t see here in the south-east corner in our daily lives which are as I’ve also said, experiencing the best conditions in over a 100 years. And so it’s a very difficult economy to encapsulate by any single figure or by pointing to any particular barometer that may have been reliable or painted a broadly acceptable general picture in the past.

But I think it is still fair to say that Australia’s economy is doing, and will continue to do, remarkably well by comparison with the countries that we used to compare ourselves with in north America and Europe in particular, for whom the legacy of the financial crisis and the ongoing burden of public debt that is partly also a legacy of the financial crisis but has its roots in bad decisions made before the financial crisis ever struck there, the experience that they’re going to have will be much worse than ours.

The greatest resources boom in our history, which is what we are experiencing, is something that should enable us to build and to bequeath to our descendents a better society. Just over a month ago The Economist magazine, devoted its lead editorial as well as 15-page supplement to the Australian economy, and it had on the front page a map of Australia shaped like, or pictured as, a gold nugget and it offered the comparison between Australia’s potential and that of California as it seemed to be in mid 1850s at the time of the gold rush. And in its lead article The Economist said, ‘Australians must now decide what sort of country they want their children to live in. They can enjoy their prosperity, squander what they don’t consume and wait to see what the future brings. Or can they actively set about creating the sort of society that other nations envy and want to emulate. Such society cannot be conjured up overnight, least of all by government; they’re created by the alchemy of artists, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, civic institutions and governments coming together in the right combination and the right time. And for Australia this is surely such a moment. ‘ Let me emphasis this was The Economist running this, not the Manchester Guardian or some sort of cultural publication, but the Economist. A fair question to ask is what kind of society, what cultural legacy will beneficiaries of the present mining boom and wealth created by it leave future generations of Australians…

We Australians’ like to think of ourselves as generous people and in some ways we are. We have one of the highest rates of volunteering in the world, we’re generous with our appeals for the victims of natural disasters both here and abroad, thousands of Australians sponsor children in developing countries. But our richest citizens with some very honourable and outstanding exceptions are not, I’d suggest among them. According to Australian of the Year Simon mcKeean who is one of those honourable exceptions, of about 8000 Australians reported that reported taxable incomes over a million dollars in 2008/9, the latest figures that are available, more than one third did not make a single charitable deduction, at least not one for which they claimed a tax deduction. Tax payers with taxable incomes more than a million dollars in 2008/09 donated 1.71% of their income. That’s a considerably higher proportion than that given away by other income groups except curiously those earning $6,000 or less but affluent Australians are less generous than their counterparts in other countries who according to the annual Merril Lynch cap Gemini survey give away between 3-11% of their wealth annually. There are now 860 private ancillary funds in Australia, foundations which as many of you probably know have to give away at least 5% of their assets annually in order to qualify for various tax breaks, and those 860 funds gave out assets of over $2 billions dollars. But according to peter Winnike who is the head of phillanropic services at the myer family office, given the number of Australian earning over a million dollars are year there should be at least 8000 private ancillary funds in the country.

Private sector support for the arts has risen as you’ve just heard from 112m in 2001/02 to 221m in 2009/10 that’s an increase of 98% and its in large measure of the efforts of AbaF in promoting greater private sector support for the arts. Within this the overall the value of outright giving as distinct from sponsorship has risen by more than 161% over the past decade to $123m or 56% of total private sector support for the arts, up from 42% in 2001/02. Private sector support for the arts now accounts for 10.4% of the total income of Australian arts organisations, up from 6.7% ten years ago. So the trends in the right direction. But this has been a decade of extraordinary growth in income and wealth. Notwithstanding the impact of the financial crisis on share market values towards the end of that period. Aggregate personal disposable income rose by 69% over this period, while household net worth rose by 83%. As a proportion of GDP which rose by 66% over this period, the increase in private sector support for the arts represents just 0.002 percentage points from 0.015% to 0.017% That’s a figure that needs to increase if the arts in Australia are to flourish and thrive, especially given the increasing fiscal constraints under which state governments in particular now find themselves operating given their dependence on the GST which is in turn adversely affected by Australian’s increasing propensity to save, as I mentioned before.

There might be some merit in suggestions that governments match in some proportion donations by individuals and small businesses to the arts as happens in south Australian and Tasmania and Western Australia through premiers funds that have been established under the auspices of AbaF, but it would be I think surely even better if for example of their peers some serious and wealthy Australians made large and well publicised donations to cultural activities and institutions and encouraged and challenged others to do likewise as Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet have encouraged their fellow rich Americans to do.