Check the malls (and fill my trolley)

It seems all everyone wants for Christmas is more stuff, and more stuff means more debt. But as Australians increasingly turn to the plastic solution, economists are wondering, where will it end?

THERE was a time, recorded in carols, when anticipation of Christmas revolved around the prospect of a good feed in a warm room. Christmas is coming and the geese are getting fat; we all want some figgy pudding; bring me food and bring me wine; bring me pine logs hither. Nobody talked about Christmas shopping. In fact, traditional song is remarkably silent on the subject of shopping in general, given that it could now be easily mistaken for our chief pleasure and purpose in life.

This month, according to one financial website, Australians are expected to swipe $18 billion on their credit cards. This Christmas, they report, we will spend more than three times as much in the Christmas month as we did 10 years ago, while the average cardholder spends two-thirds more than they would have in 1997. Everyone seems to need more stuff.

And strangely, although we are collectively earning more than ever before, that stuff always seems to cost a bit more than we can really afford. It's impossible to get ahead. And so we turn to the plastic solution, with the result that Australians currently owe $41 billion on their credit cards.

"I'm fascinated by the semiotics of the phrase 'shop until you drop'," says Clive Hamilton, the executive director of the Australia Institute, whose books include Growth Fetish and Affluenza. "There has been a lot of work done recently on shopping addiction, but that is the clinical end of a more general phenomenon."

Shopping addicts, he says, are generally treated with anti-depressants, which suggests that retail therapy is a doomed attempt to treat a malaise that runs much deeper than the crying need for a new set of saucepans. "At heart," says Hamilton, "I think it's a reflection of the meaninglessness of modern life, although there are other factors at work like status-seeking."

Relentless marketing campaigns, both for products and for quick and easy credit, are another key element in the shift in culture, Hamilton says. "We've seen an overthrowing of traditional middle-class virtues of thrift and moderation," he says. Most shoppers are too young to remember the Depression. They are easily convinced that "being temperate is uncool and unnecessary".

There are plenty of variations on the current shopping craze. Some people buy swags of cheap tat, often on a daily basis, that they will wear only once or twice. Others buy gadgets and pointless household goods that accumulate in the garage and get rolled over on hard rubbish collection days. Yet others accumulate goods and newly essential services — that monthly wax, for example — that, a generation ago, were regarded as unaffordable luxuries. "What is remarkable," says Hamilton, "is that in a time of unprecedented affluence, people have gone into unprecedented debt."

Hamilton's concerns are echoed by Gerard Brody, director of campaigns at the Consumer Action Law Centre in Melbourne, who says that many credit products are becoming easier rather than harder to get as debt levels shoot up.

"Every month you get credit limit increase offers, or offers of store credit, or interest-free arrangements that aren't really interest-free," he says. As a result, credit card debts have risen exponentially, from 14.5% of average annual income in 1985 to more than 86% by the end of last year.

Plenty of people pay off their monthly balances, of course, but nearly three-quarters of credit card debt does attract interest. "The increase in wealth is not evenly reflected in the distribution of wealth," says Brody, "but it means the cost of the things keeps going up." The boom time for the law centre, he says, comes a couple of months after Christmas when those deferred costs hit home. "That's when we see the bulk of our clients."

In the United States, where the combined consumer debt stands at a staggering $US2.4 trillion ($A2.71 trillion), a new film puts a different spin on Christmas shopping. What Would Jesus Buy?, a documentary directed by Rob VanAlkemade, follows a firebrand evangelist called Reverend Billy (actually screenwriter Bill Talen in a dog-collar) as he preaches the word of the Church to Stop Shopping inside the bellies of various beasts: Starbucks, Wal-Mart and the Gap. The film is produced by Morgan Spurlock, whose film Supersize Me tackled a different, but arguably related, kind of excessive consumption.

Talen, who stages his stunts with the help of a gospel choir and travels in an old bus emblazoned with the command "Save yourself", says that what he does fills a gap left by the demise of political theatre. He started out on his own in Times Square, where Disney and its many works were his target. But like many of the marketing gurus on Madison Avenue, he tells The Times of London, he was soon drawn to the dynamite persuasive strategies of America's right-wing televangelists. Why not try to beat the opposition with their own tactics?

Around 40% of US gross domestic product derives from consumer spending, Talen told The Times. "For many American families, they spend so much over Christmas they spend seven months paying it off." One lure, of course, is the suspect cheapness of the clothes, shoes and electrical goods made in the Third World factory belts. "We used to be a nation that produced things. Now we import," he said. "We are consumers. A value system has developed in the US which is 'buy more, spend less'."

The film shows him standing on street corners in Manhattan, berating passing shoppers. "Brothers and sisters, this is the SHOPOCALYPSE," he yells. "Stop your shopping now! You are BOMBING Baghdad with your shopping! It is YOU who are responsible for the SWEAT in the sweatshops!" It is over the top, but VanAlkemade sees him as both sincere and significant. "He's on a very serious mission," he says, "and although he hasn't been to theological college, he's as real as any preacher."

Renegade economist Steve Keen, associate professor in the school of economics and finance at the University of Western Sydney, is quite prepared to buy the idea of the "shopocalypse". Over the past couple of decades, he says, the traditional fear of being in debt has been supplanted by a conviction that leveraged buying is "part of being intelligent". The result has been a boom in borrowing.

Outstanding credit card balances were more or less static until 1995, he says; since then, they have quadrupled. Home-owners, meanwhile, are now up to their ears in mortgage debt, which represented just 25% of household disposable income in the '60s and is now up to 137%. Total household debt — made up of credit card debt, personal debt and mortgages — is currently worth almost as much as the Australian economy. And since it is growing at about three times the rate of GDP, it will soon be worth more.

Most economists, he says, do not see this as a problem. "Most economists," he adds sardonically, "don't believe money matters, believe it or not." The most recent national accounts show that household spending — whether in cash or on credit — was the main source of growth in the Australian economy in the last quarter. "Aussie consumers take the reins," announced a jubilant press release from the Commonwealth Bank's research unit.

But, to Professor Keen, this kind of growth is unsustainable. "Last year, the increase in debt was responsible for about 18% of total spending," he says. Back in the '60s, despite the popularity of hire purchase, it was never more than 5%. And there will come a moment, he says, when that debt turns bad.

"The idea is that you get a huge reverse mortgage and spend up, but that only works if house prices keep rising. And it's not just people making this mistake. Banks are making a mistake too." The last debt bubble burst, he points out ominously, in 1930 — and the current level of debt as a proportion of GDP is twice as high as it was then. Shopocalypse, indeed.

But it is hard to deny the shopping culture, at a national or even a personal level. Some people do decide to make do with less but, says Hamilton, it is a tough psychological shift. "People who break out of this cycle by downshifting, in a sense buying back some time for other things like exercise or spending time with friends, report that in the first year there are a lot of psychological hurdles they have to overcome. We have a constant escalation of desire; the gap between what we want and what we have is never enough. A life of materialism gets into people's veins, somehow."

VanAlkemade says he found his own attitude to shopping shifting as he was making What Would Jesus Buy? "I became more conscientious as I went on. Just simple stuff, asking myself, 'Do I need that?', 'Do I have one of those in the back of the closet already?', or 'What is the story behind this product?' " As a result, he has entered into an extended "dialogue" with the makers of his favourite brand of jeans after reading that they sacked more than 100 Mexican garment workers when they tried to join a union. "In their last discourse, they said, 'We have nothing to share and nothing to hide'," he sighs. "I think I'm wearing my last pair of their jeans."

But at a broader level, he says, we have to decide what kind of economic growth constitutes progress. That means more than a few people deciding to go for a sea-change.

"We have to figure out whether it is worth polluting the Earth more by buying stuff we don't need. We've got 3 billion more people coming in the next 40 years. As we all know, we are in an emergency situation."