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Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows a woman questioning whether money can buy happiness. She describes the importance her ex-husband placed on financial security, and how she came to appreciate the fragility of financial security when their brand-new dream home was condemned by the local council as unsafe. This led to the break-up of their marriage and protracted court battles with builders and contractors. She concludes that being ‘wealthy on the inside’ is more important than money or possessions. The clip shows close-ups of the woman being interviewed and the woman with her daughters, the condemned suburban home and two homeless people on a mattress in a derelict building.

Educational value points

• The clip questions how people define happiness. The 2003 World Values Survey conducted by an international network of social scientists found that, once people have adequate shelter, sustenance and security, increased wealth and material possessions do not necessarily increase their levels of happiness. Happiness or 'subjective wellbeing’ is more likely to be associated with high levels of self-esteem, a sense of autonomy and a connectedness to others, particularly relationships with family and friends.

• The woman in this clip questions the importance of material possessions. The woman says that her husband’s 'dream home’ made him feel like a 'king’ and that his world crumbled once things went wrong with the house. She believes that being 'wealthy on the inside’ (which she associates in part with closer family relationships), rather than material possessions, improves quality of life.

• The clip highlights issues of financial security. Over the decade to 2002, according to the Reserve Bank of Australia, combined household debt in Australia outstripped income and the household debt-to-income ratio rose from 56 per cent to 125 per cent, while personal savings remained at a record low. This meant that many Australians lived from pay cheque to pay cheque and had few resources to cope with a crisis such as unemployment or a financial setback such as the one described in this clip.

• An Australia Institute report released in 2005 revealed that, although Australians are now about three times better off economically than in the 1950s and consumption has risen accordingly, nearly two-thirds of Australians say they cannot afford to buy everything they need. Forty-six per cent of the people in the wealthiest households (with incomes above $70,000 a year) felt they were struggling financially, leading the report’s author, Dr Clive Hamilton, to conclude that people’s aspirations increase as their earnings increase.

• The woman in the clip raises issues of work–life balance. In 2005, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission released the study Striking the Balance: Women, Men, Work and Family, which found that Australian men still assume the role of main provider, often at the expense of family life. Men are increasingly working longer hours, with figures showing that 1 in 18 male employees worked more than 11 hours per day in 1974, whereas by 1997 that figure had risen to 1 in 8 male employees. The study found that men are still expected to construct their identities through participation in the workforce.

• Australia is among the world’s top four resource-consuming nations and Australians own more goods, use more energy and have larger houses than ever before. Australia also has record consumer debt levels, longer work hours, environmental degradation and an unsustainable use of resources. in 2004 Australia’s ecological footprint (a measure of how much land and water is used to produce the resources to sustain a human population) was 7.7 hectares per person, compared to the average global footprint of 2.2 hectares.

This clip starts approximately 48 minutes into the documentary.

A woman is interviewed in an outdoor setting of bricks and vines on a lattice wall. Footage of her condemned house is also shown.

Woman I just – I’d like to say that people think money is everything – they can buy everything. They can buy happiness, anything they want they can buy it. Well, we um built a house – a lovely, big house in a suburb of Sydney and to my husband, that was everything. That was his dream home. He was – he was right, he was king. Three days after we moved into our brand new house it cracked all down the back, from the top storey to the bottom storey, and within – eight months – we had a closing order issued through the council to get out of the house because it was collapsing, it was dangerous. We’ve had six years in court, trying to get the money back from the people that we ended up suing, from our house, and that’s when you realise that money, and material possessions, are nothing, because at any time they can be taken from you, and if you’re not wealthy on the inside, and with yourself, your life crumbles and that’s exactly what happened in our situation.

Dark music accompanies footage as the camera tracks up some debilitated stairs to two homeless people on a mattress in an abandoned building.

Woman My ex-husband liked the security that he thought money had brought to him. But it didn’t matter how much money he made, it still wasn’t enough and he worked and worked for this security that would never be there.

The woman is shown with her two daughters and their cat all sitting in a chair. This cuts between the last two shots of the interview and the people in the condemned building.

Woman Children need their fathers there to play with and just to be there for them and when they’re at work all the time, they can’t understand why and wives don’t understand why either, when it’d be different if the wife was whingeing that there was never enough money around and then the husband thought he had to go out and make more. But when the money’s there, and you’re not lacking for anything, then it’s very hard to understand why they still keep going out to make more of this money. I think it just becomes an obsession and they don’t know when to stop.