Australia is a country of remarkable prosperity and democracy, with a relatively peaceful history, inherited liberties, golden beaches, and a relaxed lifestyle.

We have now had several months of new ‘ideas of Australia’ history TV shows, books, and lectures which captured some of this.

There was little disagreement about Britain’s role in our history. British liberal ideas were Australia’s bridge to the modern world. Was this beneficial? There was little enthusiasm about it.

Our democracy, court system, and prosperity are variously based on the Westminster system, Magna Carta, common law, and early trade in wool, wheat and mining which began and still supports our economy and standard of living. The US Constitution was influential.

And our local campaigns and parliaments of the 1850s which developed local constitutions and laws building on these things with the secret ballot.

This is not contested and is beneficial, unless you expect instant complete reform rather than considerable debate. Why not say this?

In Britain, democratic ideas were delayed by an aristocracy that we did not have. All men did not get the vote until 1918, and women until 1928.

The ‘squatters’ led by William Wentworth fought democracy, but one-man-one-vote was granted in the 1850s in three Australian colonies. They settled for the less democratic upper houses in each colony and electorates weighted to the country regions. Wentworth is the typical Australian leader – flawed.

By 1841, Queen Victoria was forced to commission the ministers who held a majority in the UK House of Commons, not those who she personally preferred.

This was transformational for Britain and for us.

Most would now agree with David Malouf, who said we share ‘a particular habit of mind and all that goes with it’ and ‘an affinity’ with Britain and the US. It came from a common language and Shakespeare, a further common language of ideas and even values. And the largest part of our population came from the British Isles, including our early leaders and their ideas.

Europe had instead the French Revolution (1789-99), then the failed revolutions of 1830 and 1848, none of which completely ended European old-style aristocratic or absolute rule. Their ‘constitutional debates’ were often conducted by blood and iron and war. They make difficult reading.

We did not need as much blood and iron in our constitutional debates, because Britain had done that for us.

This raises a second issue. Sean Scalmer called the 1850s democratic constitutions ‘containing contention’ and a successful attempt to avoid violence and disorder. Mark McKenna says that Eureka ‘obscures the true history of Australian democracy – overwhelmingly a story of protest and hard-won reform rather than one of a single transformative insurrection’ although he thinks the goldfields hastened democracy.

At the Eureka Stockade in the Victorian goldfields of 1854, miners rebelled against excessive mining taxes, discussed ‘one-man-one-vote’, and fought colonial troops. The 1890s ‘great strikes’ lasted longer than the stockade’s 20-minute battle and some warned that they looked like the beginnings of a civil war. But a civil war never started. Instead, both led to local parliaments and elections.

The old Whig idea of ‘the people’ and measures to give practicality to their hopes, and the new and growing liberalism, brought meaningful reform within the bounds of what was locally acceptable.

In Europe, the events of 1789, 1830, and 1848 overthrew governments and were violent, often civil wars. France had five republics and almost the same number of competing monarchies and ‘empires’ after the revolution.

The Australian Federation in 1901 was an amalgam of six successful British colonies in which much of the male population could already vote and some women, although voting rights for Aboriginal people were not universal until the 1960s.

A third issue is great contention about the future. One writer wants our ‘British heritage’ as he calls it to shrivel to a ‘speck’ and others make a desperate attempt to find in our environment and Indigenous or multicultural heritage something, anything to avoid the past and present.

The Australian landscape has long imprinted itself on our society and culture – ‘Clancy’s gone to Queensland droving, and we don’t know where he are.’ (Banjo Patterson).

Our agricultural and pastoral industry, the start of our modern economy, forced us to try to understand the land. Pastoralists and labourers, European or Aboriginal stockmen, knew the tough outback well. Red dirt and scrub or gum trees.

This can, like it or not, never be the complete replacement Australian identity that some now try to write about although I wonder how much our educational system is freewheeling rather than consistent with what the electorate wants.

Finally, our current challenges are not the old ones of democracy and Parliament but repairing our stagnant productivity growth. Our labour productivity growth is only -0.1% over five years, although the ‘market sector’ is in positive territory (Annual Wage Review 2025).

The failure of the Productivity Summit of August 2025 may be almost complete. The 1984 Hawke summit worked because the economic crisis of the 1980s was intolerable with growing inflation and unemployment.

Our current crisis failed to convince our machinery of government to act. Perhaps the Australian political system is too weak.

Good ideas would include cutting income tax and government spending and making the company tax rate more internationally competitive.

The first term of the Albanese government did not focus on economic reform, and the government was nevertheless re-elected.

Jim Hacker in Yes Minister provides the cop out answer: ‘It’s the people’s will. I am their leader; I must follow them!’ A senior government minister recently said of social media: ‘It’s made change harder, it’s made constructing the case for change harder, and it’s made bringing people together harder.’

What is our easy bridge to the future going to be now? Parliament is adrift and does not know. Our living standards are threatened.

The Hon. Reg Hamilton, Adjunct Professor, School of Business and Law, Central Queensland University