Santa's coal, country protest and the patchwork economy

The wealth generated from wool and minerals allowed us to build things like railways that then allowed us to produce and export grain products. Technological advances such as refrigeration allowed us to export other products, including meat and dairy.

In 1964, Donald Horne coined the phrase "lucky country" to describe Australia. He meant this ironically. His point was that Australia did not create new things, but just rode on its resource base. To Horne's mind, and I quote from Wikipedia, Australia"showed less enterprise than almost any other prosperous industrial society."

This was not unique to Australia. New Zealand displayed similar cultural characteristics, as did Argentina.

To Horne's distress, his phrase came to be to be taken literally, for it was so self-evidently true. Yet in all this, in all the discussion over distribution of wealth, Australians had a degree of insecurity.

There was no assumption that "good economic management", the term economy in the way we use it today had not yet been invented, would of itself generate growth. We had to manage what we had, recognising the boom-bust cycle.

There was often, as there is today, a degree of complacency. That was central to Horne's point. And yet, Australians still recognised the sources of the nations wealth, still knew that bad times often followed good.

Now here, in passing, I want to award another bag of coal to the doughty warriors of left and right who in recent decades have applied imported intellectual constructs to the analysis of Australian performance and policy independent of domestic conditions.

I am not sure when or indeed why so many Australians became disconnected from the underlying realities of their country.

I suppose that I would say that the disconnect really became clear in the 1980s, that it was in part simply due to increased population.

As organisations or cities get bigger, interaction becomes internally dominated, the level of interaction with the external world drops. By the 1990s, the internal world of the cities, of groups within the cities, had become so intense that awareness of underlying realities and linkages had largely disappeared and could be ignored.

The smugness that resulted, the increased intolerance towards alternative views, manifested itself in a variety of ways. Here I want to award a bag of coal to those who coined the phrase middle power, who wish to see Australia (and I quote the PM) punching above its weight.

This is plain silly. Apart from anything else, if you fight above your weight, you risk getting your head kicked in!