The Lucky Country's Unlucky Truth: When Complacency Becomes Dangerous
There’s been a lot of chatter online lately about Australia being a “wealthy country in gentle decline,” and honestly, it’s got me thinking about how we’ve managed to sleepwalk our way into some pretty serious structural problems while patting ourselves on the back for being the “lucky country.”
The irony isn’t lost on me that Donald Horne’s original “lucky country” quote was actually a criticism, not a compliment. He was calling us out for being “run mainly by second rate people who share its luck” and for lacking curiosity about the world around us. Fifty years later, and we’re still coasting on that luck while the foundations crumble beneath us.
What really gets under my skin is how we’ve allowed the conversation to be hijacked by the same tired political theatre while the real issues go unaddressed. Take the housing crisis – it’s become so normalised that we’ve got politicians openly boasting about their property portfolios while young families are priced out of entire cities. When someone points out that our Prime Minister has a $9 million property portfolio, the response isn’t “maybe that’s part of the problem” but rather “well, that’s not even that much in today’s market.” That response alone should terrify us.
The mining tax debacle from the Rudd era perfectly encapsulates our problem. We had a chance to properly tax the companies extracting our finite resources, but $20 million in corporate advertising was enough to kill it. Meanwhile, those same resources continue to be shipped overseas while we import manufactured goods back at premium prices. It’s economic masochism dressed up as free market ideology.
What frustrates me most is how we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that flooding the country with immigrants while per capita GDP falls is sustainable economic policy. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not anti-immigration. But when you’re bringing in people faster than you can build housing, schools, or hospitals, while simultaneously refusing to invest in training locals for skilled positions, you’re creating a pressure cooker. The human cost is visible on every street corner in Melbourne, with rough sleepers becoming a permanent fixture of the urban landscape.
The wealth inequality discussion has been particularly eye-opening. Watching people debate whether “late stage capitalism” is a real term while families with full-time jobs live in their cars feels like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Whether you call it late stage capitalism, end stage fiat currency, or just plain old greed – the result is the same. A generation locked out of homeownership, casualised work becoming the norm, and public services stretched beyond breaking point.
The political class seems completely disconnected from these realities. When your local federal MP owns multiple investment properties and retired on a parliamentary pension that’s six times the average Australian’s superannuation, it’s pretty hard to believe they understand what ordinary people are going through. The whole system feels rigged in favour of those already at the top.
But here’s the thing that gives me hope – people are starting to wake up. The discussions I’ve been seeing suggest there’s growing awareness that voting for the same two major parties and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. More people are looking at crossbench candidates, asking harder questions about political donations, and demanding actual policy solutions rather than soundbites.
Maybe what we need is to stop being the “lucky country” and start being the smart country. That means having serious conversations about wealth taxes, property investor reforms, and actually taxing multinational corporations properly. It means investing in education, renewable energy, and advanced manufacturing instead of just digging stuff up and shipping it overseas.
The alternative – continuing down this path of gentle decline while inequality grows and our institutions weaken – isn’t really an alternative at all. It’s a recipe for the kind of social instability that no amount of luck can fix.
The question isn’t whether we can afford to make these changes. It’s whether we can afford not to.