Down Under, there is great optimism about 2015

The Sydney celebration demonstrated humanity’s greatest quality – our infinite capacity for believing that the world can become a better place, writes Michael Simkins

Fireworks explode off the Sydney Harbour Bridge during the midnight fireworks display on New Year's Eve on Sydney Harbour. Cameron Spencer / Getty Images

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The bushfires currently raging in Victoria and South Australia are probably not the way the country wanted to begin its year – and technically, it didn’t. At the stroke of midnight, Sydney lived up to its reputation of laying on the best free party in the world. I know because I was there. For the last three months I’ve been living and working in Australia, and with my final days being spent in a hotel in central Sydney, I saw in the New Year in some style at Sydney Harbour.

The event involved a spectacular firework display above the Opera House at midnight, and ended with a pyrotechnic cascade of fire from the city’s famous old bridge. Similar offerings around the world included London’s nearly 14 tonnes of fireworks around Big Ben and Dubai’s 70,000 LED panels, which transformed the world’s tallest building, the 830-metre Burj Khalifa, into a spectacular light show.

There were signs that Sydney was taking a slightly more pragmatic view of the customary new year’s eve spirit of joyous optimism. The numbers of revellers was considerably down on recent years, even though it was still over a million.

One of the contributory factors of this decline was thought to be the vague but tangible threat of terrorist attack.

The idea that Sydney – or anywhere else in Australia – could be a possible target for an act of extremist violence was, until recently, unthinkable. But then came the Martin Place siege in early December. And with it, everything changed.

Indeed, the news has been sobering here for the past 12 months. In June, the Malaysian passenger aircraft MH17 was shot down in the skies over Ukraine, claiming the lives of 28 Australian nationals. In late December, the country found itself shaken once again by the senseless and horrifying slaying of eight children by their mother in North Queensland.

The massacre, shocking at any time, had added poignancy due to its proximity to Christmas.

Economically too, Australia faces a difficult time. For a decade now the domestic economy has been prospering on the back of a mining boom, and everywhere you look the benefits have been apparent. “If you wish to gauge the prosperity of a nation, look at its restaurants,” said an economist friend of mine, and if his theory is correct then Australia still seemed to me a land of plenty.

Yet with investment shrinking and the price of iron ore falling by 47 per cent in the last 12 months, prime minister Tony Abbott’s current coalition government faces a budget deficit and tough economic choices

Overshadowing everything is the threat posed by climate change to the Australian way of life. Scientists may argue all they like as to whether global warming is a cyclical phenomenon or a man-made catastrophe, but for many who live and work in Australia the debate is already over. The news bulletins chronicle an almost daily digest of drought, soaring temperatures and increasingly savage bushfires.

The inevitable consequence has been economic hardship for farmers, cattlemen and others whose livelihood depends on the great outdoors. Much hope was invested in Mr Abbott being able to express the country’s environmental concerns at the G20 summit in Brisbane last October, but as so often happens at such events, the occasion proved – if you’ll excuse the phrase – so much hot air.

Despite all this, the Sydney celebration, like other new year parties on this poor, beaten-up old planet of ours, from Rio to Moscow, demonstrated humanity’s greatest quality – our infinite capacity for believing, no matter the evidence to the contrary, that the world can become a better place.

“Optimism,” wrote Voltaire, “is the madness of insisting all will be well when we are miserable.” Maybe so, but thank goodness I didn’t have to stand next to him last Wednesday. He might have spoilt all the fun.

Michael Simkins is an actor and writer usually based in London