Norway is, if the United Nations is to be believed, something of a paradise, a utopian ideal to which the rest of the world can aspire. Not for the first time, in 2004 the UN Human Development Index, which ranks countries according to life expectancy, education and income, decided that Norway was the most liveable country in the world.
In the years following World War II, Norway was the poor cousin of Europe, its patchwork of remote and rural farmsteads eking out a grim subsistence livelihood while the rest of Europe enjoyed a post-war boom of prosperity. However, the discovery of oil off the Norwegian North Sea coast in the late 1960s transformed the country’s fortunes in the most dramatic way: Norway is now the world’s sixth largest oil producer and third largest oil exporter. Norwegians enjoy the third highest per capita income in the world (between $US37,700 and $US43,350) and the government has created what it humbly calls the ‘most egalitarian social democracy in western Europe’.
Norwegians are entitled to free medical care, free education (including university), unemployment benefits not far below salary levels, sick leave on full pay for up to a year, five weeks annual leave, up to a year of paid maternity leave (42 weeks of which is on full pay and known as the ‘mother’s wage’), four weeks paid paternity leave, heavily subsidised childcare and a guaranteed pension. You can also expect to live for 82.22 years if you’re a woman and 76.15 years for men, a life expectancy assisted by the fact that there are 413 doctors and 1840 nurses for every 100,000 Norwegians (compared with 302 and 532 respectively in Australia).
When added to the fact that Norway has no external debt and has $US70 billion invested in the Petroleum Fund to protect Norwegians against a future without oil, it is difficult not to envy Norwegians the cradle-to-grave largesse of their government.
Norwegians may pay prohibitive rates of income tax (55.3 per cent for the highest earners, down from 70 per cent in 1992) and a range of service-user fees, but the general consensus is that they are more than compensated. So institutionalised has the welfare system become that when the long-standing reign of the Labour Party came to an end in 2001, even the new centre-right coalition government understood that the welfare system was sacrosanct.
For all of Norway’s extraordinary social data, however, the statistics