I spent some of the best years of my life in America, mostly in New York City. Among people who ate bagels, spoke like Woody Allen and could not drive, I felt at home. I went to college, and to rodeos, to the deep South and the Midwest. I felt the energy of a superpower state, and the immense friendliness of its people. So don't call me anti-American.

But Bob Hawke is right in saying the Americanization of Australia has gone too far - first, foreign policy, now industrial relations, and more besides.

In 10 years we may wake up to ourselves, and wonder how we allowed it to happen. How did we get this underclass? Why is our health care so expensive? What happened to our cheap medicines? When did Australian TV drama vanish from the screens? And why doesn't anyone like us any more?

Sure, we will still call each other "mate", and say "g'day", and regard baseball as a joke, not a sport. We will still be debunkers, clowns and egalitarian in our manners. But we may well live in a society that is less distinctively Australian, and more like America's.

Since our mothers and grandmothers danced with its servicemen during World War II, Australia has been enthralled with, and in thrall to, the US. But the sycophancy has reached new depths under the Howard Government. On this, Mark Latham was right, and Bob Hawke, too.

In foreign policy, the US is assured of Australia's subservience. No longer must the US consult or lobby us. Not only on big matters such as Iraq, where we parroted the US lies and leapt into the war, but on smaller matters, too, Australia is the US's blind ally.

Take, for example, the vote last year on the United Nations General Assembly resolution that referred the matter of Israel's massive security wall - the one it built through some Palestinian land - to the International Court of Justice. Of 150 countries, only Israel, the US and four others voted against the resolution - the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau and Australia.

In matters cultural, you might have missed Australia's latest toadying to the US, which took place last week in Paris. At a historic meeting of the UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, 154 countries gathered to vote on a treaty to reaffirm the right of countries to protect their artistic and cultural life from the ravages of free trade rules.

Well, 148 countries voted in favors of the treaty. Not the US, of course, which wants no barriers, such as national content quotas, in the way of its cultural domination of cinemas and television screens; and not Israel. And Australia? It abstained from voting - along with Honduras, Liberia and Nicaragua - and in this way caused no offense to our powerful ally.

Recall that Australia and the US are the only major countries to fail to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions. And that even Britain extricated its citizens from Guantanamo Bay because of concerns about the legal process.

Consider that under our free trade agreement with the US, the Government has put our Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, which has delivered cheap medicines, in jeopardy, if the US pharmaceutical companies decide to take us to the World Trade Organization. Watch how our health system is being pushed towards the privatized US model - even though America has the shortest life expectancy and the highest infant mortality in the developed world.

The Government's industrial relations changes will deliver incremental changes but one day we will wake up with a sizeable population of working poor, a much more unequal distribution of income, and two weeks' annual leave - just like the US has.

Except for highly educated Americans, whose exquisite minds and words are often put to dissecting their society, most others believe the US is a beacon in a dark world; with nothing to learn, and everything to teach the rest of us. I liked to tell the mothers who were required to rush back to work six weeks after childbirth that Australian women were entitled to 12 months' (unpaid) leave - nothing to boast of in Europe, of course. And I mentioned long service leave, and Medicare. The prevailing view among Americans was that Australia and the world were out of step, not America.

And they are proving to be right. Increasingly, Australia is adopting America's way of doing things, and its way of seeing the world. In industrial relations, the Government intends to outdo the US. When the majority of workers in a US business vote for union representation, the boss is required to deal with them collectively. But that will not be the case here.

From the intellectual stimulation to the borscht on Second Avenue, from the grassroots activism to the New York subway, there was much I loved about America; but not the gross inequalities. Its deplorable rate of child poverty - one of the worst in the OECD - was enough to dampen anyone's enthusiasm for the American way.

Australia's kinder, gentler society drew me home. We were once leaders in many fields - the first, for example, to introduce an age pension. We were distinctive. Now we are just followers.

© 2005 Sydney Morning Herald