Lucky country? What’s luck got to do with it? Photo: Thomas Lucraft.
If you’re reading this, you’ve made it to 2025! Congratulations!
Considering the last few years have been really crap, that’s quite an accomplishment.
We know the roll call of brown sandwiches because we’ve chewed through them, although no one saw them coming.
In the two decades leading up to 2020, almost every organisation – especially the APS – released a document with ‘Vision 2020’ in the title (geddit?).
Kudos to any futurists who predicted massive months-long bushfires in Australia in 2019/20 followed by a global pandemic that would kill millions and result in a global lockdown.
Bonus points if your bingo card also had that the US President would be a one-time ‘reality’ TV host who would beat a Clinton, lose to a near-corpse and then be returned to office.
See! Just getting to this point in history is worth a celebration.
And more good news, because you’re almost certainly reading this in Australia, this country is pretty freaking awesome. You may not think you won the jackpot, but you won one helluva prize, despite what the whiners are preparing to ring their hands about the country for their Australia Day/Invasion Day opeds.
You might like to holiday in Europe and ski in Japan or pee in hot springs in New Zealand, but there’s nothing like Australia.
Australia is a marvel worth celebrating despite some shortcomings because here’s the thing (before you rattle off our collective sins), every country has some shame in its past (and/or present) and skeletons in the closet. As the hat says: Pobody’s nerfect. But we’re better than most and, unlike many countries, we still have faith in our institutions and our laws because they haven’t screwed us over completely and consistently (although it helps if you can forget the sins of Dan Andrews’ Melbourne lockdowns).
One of those laws that can’t be ignored is that if you’re writing a column like this, you have to mention a certain historian, so with that in mind …
In what’s now become a cliche that launched a thousand essays, Donald Horne famously observed in 1964 that “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise”.
The reality is Horne’s criticism can be applied to most jurisdictions that not only decided to live “on other people’s ideas” but chose the worst ideas in history (shout out to Cuba, Venezuela and Victoria).
Sixty years after it was published, it’s hard to argue with that observation about our leaders, but again, take a gander around the world. Most countries wish their leaders were good enough to be second-rate, especially if it meant they could enjoy the life of the average Australian.
Parliament has hardly been overrun with talent since about 2007 – scary though it is that many of the deadweights in 2025 were there bringing down the average 18 years ago. In fact, many of them, including our prime minister (elected in 1996!) have never had a ‘real job’ outside politics or the union-advisor-parliament sausage factory, so it’s a marvel we’re doing as well as we are.
Twelve years after his ‘lucky country’ observation, Horne extrapolated his thesis: “I had in mind the idea of Australia as a [British] derived society whose prosperity in the great age of manufacturing came from the luck of its historical origins … In the lucky style we have never ‘earned’ democracy. We simply went along with some British habits”.
And despite the tired arguments of increasingly tired republicans, we can be thankful for the British habits we inherited, including the Westminster System.
Quaint traditions like ministerial responsibility might have passed to the dustbin of history, but the pillars survive and the outcome is good, even when a PM decides to appoint himself to half a dozen ministeries. Who suffered most? He did.
Check our great and powerful friend for comparison.
After four years of obvious, precipitous mental decline, the US media is finally acknowledging that the most powerful man in the world for the past four years needed to be watered twice a week, raising a question that will be answered in a hundred memoirs coming to a remainder bin near you: who the hell was running the US when the president was getting his nappy changed?
Say what you like about our PMs, and we’ve had some shockers lately, but if they aren’t up to the job, they get cut pretty fast. Question Time sees to that. We’re not big on second chances in The Lodge – and the same goes for Opposition Leaders.
So as we trudge back to work and the cricket gives way to tennis, the traffic slowly increases and we check our calendars for the next long weekend, take a moment to be thankful.
There’s a lot of unpleasantness in the world, and who knows how 2025 will unravel, but the best place to watch it is from here.
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