Opinion
My summer in Norway left me sad for Australia’s future
Lucianne Tonti
ContributorWhen I’m out walking my brother’s dog in Asker, a town on the outskirts of Oslo in Norway, I learn to pay attention. The cars here don’t make a sound; a Tesla or Polestar has snuck up on us more than once while Humphrey (the dog) and I cross the road.
Our morning walk takes us along a stream flush with wildflowers, past a newly renovated train station, through a forest and down to the fjord. Here, I loop Humphrey’s lead around a pole, take off my sneakers and shorts and dive off the jetty. While I’m here to help my brother and his wife with their baby, dog walks are one of my responsibilities (swims are a perk).
A motorised floating sauna in Oslo passes in front of the Akershaus Fortress.Credit: Michael Carey
In the month I spend there, I learn that Norway is a country built on clever policy, where wealth and its perks abound.
On the walk home, I spot electric vehicles charging in almost every driveway. Norway has adopted EVs faster than any other country. In 2024, 88.9 per cent of new cars sold were electric. This rather brilliant achievement wasn’t an accident. Since the 1990s, there has been a string of policy incentives steering people towards EVs – like scrapping VAT and import duties, free parking, toll discounts, access to bus lanes, and plenty of charging stations.
By contrast, last year in Australia, EVs accounted for an abysmal 9.6 per cent of new car sales. Embarrassingly, the National Electric Vehicle Strategy was only rolled out in 2023.
When I get home, I pick raspberries from the garden. We’ll eat them for breakfast, all of us, together, because Norway’s generous parental leave means my brother and his wife have 49 weeks of leave between them at full pay. In Australia, new parents get 24 weeks’ leave at a rate equivalent to the national minimum wage.
In addition to parental leave, Norway’s welfare system provides a long list of significantly more substantial perks, including free university and healthcare, and subsidised childcare (in Oslo, kindergarten is capped at $180 a month; in Australia, it costs between $70 and $180 a day).
If you are wondering who is paying for all of this, the answer is exasperating.
In part, oil and gas reserves are footing the bill thanks to heavy taxes imposed on their natural resources. In 1990, the Norwegian parliament created a sovereign wealth fund to ensure that any money made from the country’s non-renewable resources would benefit citizens.
Today, the fund is worth $US1.9 trillion (almost $3 trillion) and has been so well invested that it generates more income for the country’s 5.6 million people than oil and gas production. By contrast, last year, the Australian government collected more money from HECS repayments than from the petroleum resource rent tax.
Australia’s housing crisis is worsening.Credit: Joe Armao
Meanwhile, the headlines from back home describe the usual problems. Housing is so unaffordable that young people may never be able to own a home. The government will address student debt, but not the structural issues causing it. Climate change has triggered a devastating algal bloom in South Australia. Despite promising to pay $22 billion in corporate tax, coal mining conglomerate Adani is yet to hand over a single cent.
Sitting at my brother’s kitchen table, I wonder why we have let a handful of mining companies worth billions of dollars take all our money.
Due to the quantity and diversity of our mineral and energy resources, Australia is significantly more resource-rich than Norway. And yet, the national debt is $900 billion, and our sovereign wealth fund is worth only $224 billion (it was created by privatising Telstra).
We have nothing to show for it because our politicians have repeatedly failed to create a tax regime that would ensure Australians reap a share of the super profits generated by exploiting our non-renewable resources.
When I text my brother (who moved to Europe, got his master’s for free and his PhD on a salary double what Australia offers) to check he’s fine with me writing this story, he replies: “I loathe a sunburnt country. Is the title of a poem, I never wrote.”
Lucianne Tonti is a freelance journalist and the author of Sundressed: Natural Fibres and the Future of Fashion.
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