Artabana is a Swiss/German social health savings pool initiative.
This is a report to their German communication platform, Wikibana from Australia on our efforts to get groups established downunder.
Hello to all the German Artabana people!
With the help of Ulla Musik in Hobart, Tasmania, I have been working with Joy Foley at the Bindarrabi Community in NSW to form an Artabana group in Brisbane's southern suburbs. She has made progess there and we are slowly getting somewhere here in Brisbane.
It has been 6 months of meetings and at the time of writing, we are almost at a point of being able to open a joint bank account with only two people. It has been slow-going, but I taught Ulla a new English word - “persistence”! Ulla has been disappointed at the slow uptake, despite a road trip around the Eastern States to promote Artabana. What is holding Australians back, we wondered?
I suspect it may have to do with a lingering historical animosity between lay people and their bureaucratic masters, or the apathy of a maverick people who are used to government control. I am just recently reading the history of the great migrations from the British Isles by sail (The Long Farewell by Don Charlwood) in the 19th Century. The British and Colonial governments took much more responsibility to ensure the long trip was taken and reasonably safe. Surprisingly, crossing the Atlantic to the free States of America by free enterprise was much more dangerous. However, the passengers to the new Colonies down under were a maverick lot. Initially convicts, the later arrivals were a mix of the poor for the most part, and middle-class skilled labourers, brow-beaten by religion, sad to leave their home and made to feel unwelcome by an aristocracy unhappy with the overpopulated 'vermin'. Once they arrived, they toiled to improve their material lot, but as the Eureka Stockade showed, their role in the emerging democracy was a very controlled one. Just enough democracy was instituted to avoid a revolutionary or civil war, leaving the ordinary person suspicious of those in political and business administration. Australia is a perculiarly top-down democracy, where it is infact ILLEGAL not to vote!
However, I am 'persisting' with Artabana because it answers the complaints of many people now thoroughly disilliusioned with the neoliberal culture of gobalized business and corrupt politics here. They are looking for initiatives that nurture people. As Australians, we are beginning to realise that if we are to throw off the shackles of our controlling, privatized nanny state, we have to do things differently and we have to do it ourselves. But few are willing to take the first step. They want leaders they know and can trust to show them the way forward. But they need time to adjust to the idea that they have to do the local committee work themselves. They don't yet realise that there is joy in doing this with a new set of values that brings us closer together.
