It’s a pity Donald Horne didn’t call The Lucky Country ‘Women, Booze and Bedspreads’ instead.  Better still, that could have been the subtitle.  Just imagine the international interest it would have attracted.

Horne’s social observations might also have gained as much attention as his political commentary. Five decades on, reflecting on both aspects of the book assists us to understand the Australia that was, the country that is, and the nation that might be.
Traditionally, Horne’s statement that ‘Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck’ has stolen the analytical limelight.  We now know that Horne’s statement was largely wrong because in the decades following the publication of The Lucky Country, Australia demonstrated a capacity for reform, renewal and subsequent economic success unmatched by few other nations.

Paul Kelly summarises the reasons for our prosperity in 1992’s The End of Certainty. By this time the central issues Horne identified as holding us back had been addressed.  The five pillars of Australian Settlement – the White Australia policy, Industry Protection, Wage Arbitration, State Paternalism and Imperial Benevolence – had been dismantled or greatly reduced in influence.
It is important to remember the role of a lonely voice in this reform.  The MP for Wakefield, Bert Kelly, waged a stoic battle against the scourge of protectionism.  The Modest Member’s work enabled the decades of Hawke/Keating and Howard/Costello reforms.  Paul Kelly’s Triumph and Demise warns that the breakdown of bipartisan policy development endangers necessary future reform.
Notably, as John Howard demonstrates in The Menzies Era, Horne was also wrong on another front.  Australia was not run by second rate people in 1964, although it was in need of reform.  Rather, the Liberal and National parties were, and remain, relatively hopeless in comparison to Labor at promoting themselves and their record of stability and prosperity.

But back to ‘Women, Booze and Bedspreads’, borrowed from Horne’s observation that ‘while the men stood up in their bars and fantasized about the women they would like to get into bed with, their wives gathered at home over afternoon tea and fantasized about new bedspreads’. In the decades following, women made it out of the lounge room and into the workplace.  Their salaries paid for their own bedspreads. They walked into the front bar and had a beer with the blokes.
Unfortunately a small but noisy group of women decided they didn’t like our pubs, nor the men in them.  They stormed out of the front bars, entered the wine bars, and started screaming at the top of their lady lungs about our horrible, sexist country.  The bearded hipsters they dragged with them nodded silently. Men, after all, are not permitted to disagree. Slowly they were joined by the Greens, multiculturalists, human rights campaigners, bureaucrats and ABC employees.

Nick Cater’s The Lucky Culture demonstrates how such ‘progressives’ have hijacked the national debate.  The politics of difference, not the politics of a cohesive, relaxed and comfortable nation, abound.  The thought police monitor every action and word.  People would rather take offence than engage in robust debate.

Worse, the noisy minority argues economic progress is no longer to be celebrated, but rejected or feared. As Cater observes ‘the creators of common wealth are today assumed to be roguish and unscrupulous. The assumption that growth follows investment… and a growing economy would pay dividends to all, has been abandoned’. ‘Cultural wealth’ is now considered to be more valuable than ‘financial wealth’.

Horne’s Australia that was, seems echoed in the country that is: both were in need of reform.  Political bipartisanship, according to Kelly’s Triumph and Demise, is largely dead.  The wisdom of the wine bar now dominates the wisdom of the front bar. The nation that might be awaits the next wave of reform that in the Australian tradition is thoughtful, gradual and championed by the brave few.