OPINION

AUSTRALIA is in the middle of an epidemic that is threatening to gut the country from the inside out. It’s a cultural down spiral and if we allow it to continue there might be no hope of reversing it.

It’s not meth, it’s not alcohol and it’s not violence. It’s an epidemic of plain old weakness and we’ve only got ourselves to blame.

Like the rest of the country I watched SBS’s Struggle Street series intently, but I was probably less shocked than most.

Back in 2011 I spent three months investigating youth gangs in one of Australia’s other Struggle Streets, the Tweed Shire, on the NSW far north coast. Like the scene of Struggle Street, Mt Druitt, the Tweed is also home to a large swathe of public housing. Unlike Mt Druitt, however, the Tweed Shire is paradise, with a year round subtropical climate, pristine bushland, river ways that teem with fish, and world class surf breaks.

And yet what I witnessed was every bit as troubling as Mt Druitt. Domestic violence, substance abuse, boredom and youth gangs — the Tweed Shire was suffering. Kids had taken to branding themselves with rings, tattoos, clothing, garage rap songs, postcodes and Facebook pages; house parties had become little more than drunken fight clubs, often involving weapons; football games were ending in brawls, egged on by rival gangs from the sidelines; there were spot riots; dads escorting their families’ home from dinner were being chased and beaten by stick-wielding kids.

Even those trying to help the kids became targets. The Tweed’s major youth welfare service, St Josephs had its refuge destroyed by a gang, at least one of whom used to live there. The Salvation Army suffered a similar attack.

The Shire’s large elderly population also came under fire. Vietnam War veteran, Martin Grove, returned home one morning following night shift to find his front door and car smeared in excrement. It was the latest in months of similar physical and mental torment. He responded by shooting himself in the head with a shotgun on the lawn of the kids he thought were behind it.

The complaints of boredom, poverty and hardship were hard to take seriously amid the sunny reality of life in the Tweed. But they make sense to leading youth psychologist and director of the Government’s Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre, Dr Michael Carr-Gregg.

“These are all logical outcomes. When the foundations are weak, no one will be surprised when the structures come tumbling down,” he says.

Carr-Gregg blames the loss of ritual and tradition in Australian society for many of the problems. Or what you might also call, the great Australian culture vacuum.

“Ritual and tradition are supposed to be protective factors against delinquency, crime and alienation. [Without them] there is a greater likelihood of being disaffected and disaffiliated, finishing school early, feeling less connected and more likely to engage in anti-social behaviour,” he says.

In the past it was religion; social institutions like scouting and guiding; and participation in sports, art, music, dance and drama that formed the basis of Australian society. Indeed, most cultures around the world. Not any more. “Drugs and alcohol” have replaced these in many of the nation’s outposts along with a side-helping of juvenile gang culture.

“There is no doubt that gang membership gives disaffected young people a sense of meaning and purpose and belonging,” he says.

When it comes to Australia, there’s also one other great tradition that’s fallen by the way side: leaving home to find work, with children living off welfare either at home in housing estates or in other jobless townships up to the age of 25. I put it to Dr Carr-Gregg has Australia let a culture of weakness set-in?

“I think what is lacking is resilience,” says Carr-Gregg, opting for a kinder euphemism. “[What is lacking] is that capacity to face, overcome and be strengthened by adversity.”

This lack of resilience appeared to poison every step of the decision making process in both the Tweed and Mt Druitt Struggle Streets — from committing to school, work and parental obligations, to dietary and exercise guidelines, drug and alcohol consumption, anger management, imagination, entrepreneurial vigour and job seeking and creation.

But you can’t blame the products of this culture. What they know they learned from those that came before them. Still, you have to point the finger at somebody.

As a kid, I grew up on the intersection of the welfare and working classes. My mother and I were given the opportunity to take up a place in a public housing estate but you didn’t have to be Dr Michael Carr-Gregg to realise a township populated entirely by the socially ill was not an ideal environment for the absorbent mind of a child.

So we turned it down and with the support of the family, my mother joined the real struggle. She got a job. Several in fact throughout my childhood and adolescence, as we shuffled from share house to share house across Sydney. When I was 13 she even saved enough money to take us to Nepal. Now there was a real Struggle Street.

Government welfare played a part in our life, as it should in any that truly needs it. But it should not facilitate weakness.

Follow Jed Smith on Twitter @jed_j_smith