Sweet spot – Australia's unsung success

It is also not particularly responsible for upward pressure on the dollar. When you look at a graph of Australia's balance of payments you see that we have been mostly running a deficit for years.

It is countries that run consistent current account surpluses that put upward pressure on their currency, while we are just in the position of starting to pay our accumulated deficits back.

What is putting pressure on the dollar is high average interest rates due to our overall success, not just the fact we have a mining industry.

Buying into the MRRT policy is a bigger mistake. Not only is it bad policy but it suggests that Hartcher does not understand the direction in which economic reform still needs to go.

Two of Hartcher's refrains are that we have succeeded by being outward looking, and that increases in real wealth depend on increases in productivity. The MRRT assumes that Australia can adjust its tax rate independently of what happens in the rest of the world, an inward looking policy.

But it is also penalises one of the highest productivity industries in the country. If Mining and Energy is 8% of the economy and employs 1.5% of the workforce, then that means that the other 92% of the economy employs 98.5% of the workforce.

Mining and energy are easily more productive than the average. Yet what an MRRT does is to discourage investment in a high productivity part of the economy and weights it towards less productive parts.

There are other mistakes, but in terms of the whole, they are trivial.

His basic point is well made. That Australia is a success, that it owes its success to its own efforts, and that both sides of politics – Labor and Liberal – have crafted it between them.

It's a thesis that has not been put before because so many of our intellectual class could not bring themselves to accept that John Howard was as good a prime minister as he was. That meant that not only did they ignore the achievements of Howard, but of necessity they obscured the achievements of Hawke and Keating.

Now that Hartcher has stated the facts it behoves everyone who cares about Australia should be talking them up.

As Hartcher says:

Winning sporting gold is a national triumph. Winning real gold, the gold of high incomes and high living standards, is, apparently, trivial.

It is not trivial at all, and deserves to be celebrated. Happy Australia Day (for yesterday), and many more to come.