实战口语情景对话 第883期:Economics in Australia 澳大利亚经济

Maria: So Alex, you're from Australia. What's the economical situation there at the moment?
玛丽亚：亚历克斯，你来自澳大利亚。现在澳大利亚的经济形势怎么样？

Alex: We've actually been very, very lucky in the last couple of years throughout the global financial crisis. We've been, we had a very strong, very positive economic situation. The reason behind that is mainly because of China. They've been buying a lot of our export commodities and as a result, it's been fueling the economy. We didn't have a recession unlike the United States because of the stimulus package as well as China.
亚历克斯：在这几年的全球金融危机中，我们国家真的非常非常幸运。我们的经济形势强劲又积极。主要原因是因为中国的贡献。他们购买了许多我们国家的出口产品，这推动了经济发展。由于经济刺激方案和中国的帮助，我们没有像美国那样经历经济衰退。

So the Government did a very controversial stimulus package which included raising the retirement age up to sixty seven so that was something that wasn't really very much liked. It actually got the Prime Minister booted out of office but nevertheless as a result, a lot of these things that the Government did helped a lot.
澳大利亚政府实施的经济刺激方案备受争议，这项方案包括将退休年龄延长至67岁，这项方案不太受欢迎。实际上它让澳大利亚总理被赶下台，但是尽管如此，政府的许多措施都大有帮助。

We also have this thing that I think is one of the most exciting things to come out of Australia which is superannuition or superannuation, however you want to say it. It's a sort of mandatory eleven per cent on top of your income which by law you must put into a savings account which is then invested. The investment packages you can actually get, you know, it can be divided between property, between shares, between stock, whatever you want. You can manage it yourself or you can have it managed as well. But the law is you cannot take the money out until you are sixty five. So if you think about this, that's eleven per cent of what every single person is earning. Often families pool their superannuation together, their super, and that is all being invested. It's all being pumped throughout the economy constantly. Yes, it's kind of been pulled out of services and so on and so forth but it's going through. It's providing developmental initiatives and all sorts of stuff like that. So I think that's one of the reasons.
还有一个我认为是澳大利亚推出的最令人兴奋的计划，那就是退休金计划。这是一项强制措施，你要将收入的11%存入一个储蓄帐户，随后这笔钱会用于投资。你可以从投资计划中获益，可以将这笔钱分别投资于房地产、股份、股票。你可以自己管理，也可以找别人管理。不过法律规定，65岁以前不能将钱取出。你可以想一下，那实际上是一个人收入的11%。通常一个家庭会把养老金放在一起，然后用于投资。这会不断地为经济注入活力。虽然这项服务要拿出收入的一部分，但是确实有益。它提供了发展倡议。我认为这也是其中一个原因。

I certainly think that we're going to have better standards of living than our parents will unlike so many countries in the world which will just fall flat because they haven't got the structure, the social and the economic architecture to look after themselves in the next couple of years.
我确信我们的生活水平会好于我们父母那代，我们不会像世界上许多国家那样失败，因为它们没有可以在未来几年继续发展的社会结构和经济结构。