By Nick Bryant
Copyright theage
The “Western refugee” is how the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh describes “rich-world citizens” who flee their well-heeled homelands to escape the chaos and uncertainty of this topsy-turvy world. In Australia, I run into them all the time. Compatriots who took flight from “Brexit Britain” and fear Nigel Farage, its prime architect, might become the next prime minister. French expats fretful that Marine Le Pen’s protege, Jordan Bardella, could win the 2027 presidential election. Americans alarmed by Donald Trump’s authoritarianism.
I recognise the type because I am something of a “Western refugee”. Someone who did not want to continue raising kids in the United States because of the scourge of unchecked gun violence and a politics unhinged. Someone who feared, after the storming of the US Capitol, that political violence would become almost as marked a feature of American life as school shootings. When, seven weeks after the January 6 insurrection, I watched Donald Trump feted at a conservative conference in Florida like a Roman general returning triumphant from the scene of a noble victory, I knew we were witnessing the stirrings of his restoration.
As a study in contrasts, often I tell the story of flying into Sydney one morning from Los Angeles and turning on breakfast television. On the muted screen, a reporter with a perturbed look was outside a school in Adelaide. In America, I would have been watching the aftermath of the latest school shooting (so far in 2025, there have been more than 90). In Adelaide that morning, a burglary in a neighbouring street had prompted a school lockdown.
Other examples abound. Here, the economic meltdown caused by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 was labelled the Global Financial Crisis. Elsewhere, it was called the Great Recession, which again spoke of our happy isolation. Recession-free for almost 30 years, no wonder Australia is so enticing for “Western refugees”. Not just a lucky country but “the Lucky Country”. Few new arrivals would know how a shibboleth, taken at face value overseas, started life as the title of a scorching polemic.
