I am sure there are some people doing it tough out there, but from what I witnessed at the weekend, ‘we’ (the general working family population of Western Australia) have never had it so good and quite a few are doing OK …
We live opposite a lovely park, which has a lake, children’s playground, barbecue pits, you know the sort of thing. It’s not the richest neighbourhood by any means, but we fell in love with the neighbourhood the day we drive through it on the way somewhere, and were delighted when a cute house came up for sale a few weeks later. We jumped at it and have lived there ever since. Every year, a kid’s concert occurs at the park, with bouncy castles, Dora the Explorer shows, camel rides and such. This year, it seemed to attract more people than ever, and although the signs along the fringe of the park clearly say ‘no stopping’, before too long there is a jam of vehicles diagonally parked up alongside each all the way around the park’s verge, and outside on the front of our house too.
And so this was the sight that beheld me as I popped my head up over my gate, stretching to myself as I surveyed the scene over the weekend gardening activites. Row after row of some of the cleanest, largest, shiniest, priciest SUVs you have ever seen. One after another, no joke. In most cases, the ‘working families’ alighting from these wagons had 2 or 3 young children each, were in the early 30s and the cars they drove were probably one of two in the household. Porsche Cayennes, Toyota Klugers, BMW X5s (not X3s, X5s), Audi Q5s … not your regular schmutter, these were $80-$120k borgeous mobiles.
Good on yer I say, but it made me stop and wonder what we now take for granted, how well we are doing really and it certainly contrasted to the poxy Ford Cortina my Dad used to drive us around in all those years ago.
