AUSTRALIA: LSE leading light becomes an Aussie

A former deputy director of the London School of Economics, Professor Paul Johnson (pictured), became an Australian citizen on Wednesday after more than three years as vice-chancellor of Melbourne's La Trobe University.

Johnson, an economic historian, took out citizenship with his wife Susannah and their two children at a town hall ceremony to celebrate Australia Day where other migrants also pledged their allegiance to their new country. The day, 26 January, is a national holiday across Australia and - to the eternal regret of the nation's first people - is the occasion when British captain Arthur Phillip arrived in what is now Sydney Harbour in 1788 with the First Fleet of 11 convict ships.

Born in Bath, Johnson attended local primary and secondary schools before gaining a place to study economics and history at St John's College in Oxford, the first in his family to go to university.

After completing his undergraduate and PhD degrees and teaching for several years as a fellow of Oxford's Nuffield College, he moved in 1984 to the department of economic history at the LSE where he became a full professor in 1999 and, in 2004, was appointed deputy director. He took up the post as La Trobe vice-chancellor in 2007.

He has written or edited 10 books and more than 60 scholarly articles. He has been a consultant to the World Bank, the UN Research Institute for Social Development, the British government and the European Union on pension finance and pension reform, and is currently a member of the board and the investment committee of UniSuper, a AUD22 billion (US$21.8 billion) Australian superannuation fund.

Johnson says Australia has become "a land of opportunity in so many ways that I have no desire to return to the UK.

"Likewise, I see this country holding great promise for my two young children. Since I came here, the Australian dollar has reached and exceeded parity. Australia is clearly going to be a core part of the new Asia-Pacific world centred on China and India as major powers."

Since moving to Melbourne he says he has been able to do more in a few years than was ever possible in London: "It's so much easier to go out here; you don't struggle with the congestion like you do in most European cities. In Melbourne you can be on the edge of the city or deep in the centre and still experience a sense of space. This makes Melbourne a more modern and more accommodating city for future growth."

He and his family also enjoy the "overarching sense of mateship that is uniquely Australian".

"One of the attractions for both Susannah and me of Australia is that it is not as tightly conditioned by class structure as is the UK. Now there is a class structure in all societies and there is one in Australia so I'm very well aware of that but the class structure in the UK is ever present and I think quite oppressive and pernicious.

"I say that having in a sense through higher education risen up through that class structure and done very well out of it but it still seems to me that in the UK the privileges of the family into which you were born which gives you access to a lot of educational opportunities and then a lot of employment opportunities.

"Those privileges are still pretty strong and the social worlds are quite exclusionary. I think the social... the different social worlds in Australia are less exclusionary, it is a more open society."

The author of Making the Market: Victorian Origins of Corporate Capitalism, published by Cambridge University Press last year, also says he was a "serial renovators of houses" in the UK and has installed several complete bathrooms and kitchens.

"I'm quite handy with plumbing, not too good on the electrics because I'm never too sure how the circuitry works, but that sort of aspect to my life would probably surprise people because they don't normally think of academics as being at all practical.

"One reason I've always liked doing practical things, I've never had any proper training in it, is you can see some immediate results. If you're working on an academic article you spend months and months and months apparently producing nothing because you're doing all the background work.

"The results are very slow and you write your article and you send it off to a journal and several months later you get the referee comments back, it's such a slow process. The great thing about home improvement is you can say at the start of the weekend, 'right I'm going to rip out this kitchen and start rebuilding it', and within three hours you know you can see you've achieved something and so that sense of almost instant gratification is one reason I like doing those practical things.

"I haven't had much time since I moved to La Trobe, but I'll have to try to carve out a bit of time to get the power tools out and get down to some practical work..."

geoff.maslen@uw-news.com