The Australian dream beckons as Spain grapples with noise and tension

Australia, the quiet oasis some prefer to Spain

Two events a year: the Australian Open and the Formula 1 Grand Prix. Outside those two windows, so runs a thesis that is gaining traction, the largest country in Oceania vanishes from the news and lives on the margins of the noise. From that premise is born the Australian dream, presented as a replacement for an exhausted American dream. And not as the destination of a plane ticket, but of a reincarnation.

«If I had to be reincarnated, I would ask to be born in Australia», the argument goes. Whoever signs it says they love Spain, but describes a Spain turned into a powder keg, and places the dreamed-of map at two concrete coordinates: Sydney or Gold Coast. The envy, they add, is healthy.

Why doesn't Australia appear on the news?

The starting reasoning is geopolitical: while three quarters of the planet are caught up in wars and tension, there is a country that goes unnoticed in a corner of the map, with no enemies and in nobody's crosshairs. Hence the question that opens the topic: when was the last time you saw a news story about Australia that wasn't about sport?

That absence is credited with a list of virtues: no terrorist attacks, no shootings, no stabbings, a low crime rate, good wages and good beaches. The contrast drawn is explicit: against a Spain and a Europe where, according to this narrative, you can get stabbed or robbed, there you can walk the streets at any hour. It is a perception, not a statistic: nobody backs it up with a single official figure.

Better wages and higher prices: the calculation without figures

The economic core of the argument boils down to one sentence: higher prices, but much better wages than here. The country is also described as restrictive on immigration, «the opposite of Spain and Europe», and that trait is presented as an advantage rather than a problem. There lies the glaring paradox of the thesis: praising one's own closed door just as the neighbour's is being criticised.

What is striking is what is missing. In the entire argument there is not a single average salary, a rent, a crime index or a cost-of-living figure. The paradise rests on impressions and on images of smiling people.

Spiders, crocodiles and a penal past

The most repeated objection doesn't dispute the economics, it disputes the wildlife: spiders, snakes, crocodiles, sharks. The response to that point is quick: as if there were no bugs in the rest of the world. The second reproach is historical and has more mileage: the United Kingdom deported convicts to Australia, which is invoked as a reminder that the country's origins were hardly select.

To those two objections is added a third, more uncomfortable one: emigrating to a country governed by what is described as an ultra-pogre and ultra-proge administration just as that very thing is being criticised at home. And there are some accusations about police actions for posting certain things on social media, claims thrown out without any supporting evidence, just like others about who really controls the country.

The country one claims to have been born in

Among the objections appears a curiosity that breaks the general tone: someone claims to have been born there, with no Australian roots, but Danish and German. The anecdote is a reminder that Australia is not an abstract experiment, but a country of superimposed migrations.

The rejected options are also listed: the United States for its guns, Latin America for its insecurity, Russia for conscription, the Middle East for its political climate, China for a homogeneity judged unsettling, and Thailand for the reptiles that can turn up in the bathroom. From that sifting emerges a single geographic survivor.

The desire is solid. The accounting, non-existent. Nobody cites a salary, a rent or a crime rate. The Australian paradise is defined, in the end, by everything it is assumed to have.