The three momentous mistakes we currently make are not to bend all our efforts to fix economic growth and therefore protect living standards, the failure to bend all our efforts to build a more credible defence against the most serious geopolitical threats we have known since the second world war, and the way in which we have converted the history of one of the most successful countries in the world, Australia, to an almost entirely negative history.

The third issue shows a lack of interest in how fortunate we are to have had democracy and economic growth, and the suffering caused in our region and most of the world by lack of them. It is a form of extreme provincialism,

So how do we reconcile ourselves to our actual history?

In 1793, Maximilien Robespierre led his French revolutionaries away from the Constitutional monarchy that might have saved his country from a century of repeated ferocious revolutions and great suffering.

Robespierre had the King, Queen, priests, and many others guillotined. He was himself murdered by the revolution in 1794. Revolutions eat themselves.

Our own local political leaders completely rejected violent disorder.

Instead, they put in place the ‘habits of constitutional government’ as James Bryce called them. It was a big step in the 19th Century, which was otherwise a dusty, rum drinking, rioting, violent time, where too many died young from fevers.

Our local leaders set up three surprisingly modern ‘one man one vote’ liberal parliaments in the 1850s. Unlike France, South America, and just about everywhere else we never had a violent revolution to achieve modernity.

To the NSW Legislative Council, the French Revolution was a ‘demon’ (Mr Marsh 1853). To the first NSW Premier, Stuart Donaldson, it meant France ‘had a more despotic government than they had when Louis XVI was deposed…’ (1858).

We gradually evolved into a country of a ‘one vote one value’ Constitution.

But many Australian historians are not hugely interested in how Australia became rich or democratic.

Our pastoral boom was in part a story of common endeavour between pastoralists and Aboriginal stockmen and labourers who were essential. There was also violence between pastoralists and Aboriginal people over hunting and tribal lands as the pastoral industry expanded.

Why do we ignore the workers who built our country and its remarkable standard of living instead of celebrating them? We certainly emphasise the violence.

As Tony Abbott says in Australia: A History, Melbourne in 1861, after the gold rush, had ‘possibly … the highest average income of anywhere in the world’.

His book has already led to a lively debate about Indigenous oral history. Sometimes relies on what people at the time recorded that they observed and said. Are rumour, hearsay, or second, third, fourth, or fifth-hand accounts actually true?

Our early decision to put in place habits of Constitutional government meant we survived the societal crises of the 1890s strikes, as well as two terrible World Wars, and the Great Depression.

I lived in Canberra and was a few meters from Gough Whitlam on the steps of Parliament House in 1975 when he condemned the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr who had just dismissed him. I was surprised by the ferocity. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been.

That crisis too was settled by an election, despite ‘strong passions’ shown at rallies for both sides, as Frank Bongiorno says.

I think that our remarkably early democracy and prosperity matter, as do the millions of refugees and displaced people trying to get here or other first-world countries.

Yet I doubt that many young people and immigrants are taught this. Some immigrant friends specifically noted to me the lack of any positive material about Australian history. It puzzled them. It puzzles me.

How can anyone not value our remarkably early prosperity and democracy? Or not notice the historical lack of both in our region and the world? And the tribal violence of our region and the world, even now, let alone then?

But this lack of perspective and proportionality is not uncommon in our social policy. We now promote an improved list of who to exclude from our ‘one vote one value’ Constitution through special measures, quotas, targets, and ‘voices’. Attempts to help those listed as disadvantaged have become a weapon against those not on the list.

We set up committees, bodies, institutions, government instrumentalities, and campaigns that proliferate and argue that ‘some animals are more equal than others’. Just try to count the committees.

Why not simply help the ‘disadvantaged’ of all kinds, and emphasise ‘we the people’?

Second, the land should be there for the quiet enjoyment of all citizens, but radical Constitutional experiments prevent this.

Mining developments that are fundamental to our prosperity are delayed or defeated by heritage arguments that turn out to be fanciful. There is too much uncertainty about what paddocks can be cleared safe from deliberately hostile legal action, what rocks can be climbed, or paths walked.

Third, Australia does well on all international measures of freedom, prosperity, and human rights. We inherited the Magna Carta which required a fair trial before imprisonment, while the world too often practices extrajudicial killings.

But we barely acknowledge this incalculable inheritance. Unlike, for example, the US Bar Association, which funded a memorial at Runnymede, near Windsor, where King John signed the Magna Carta.

We should celebrate our early stable democracy, our remarkably early prosperity and developing human rights, and remember how they were achieved. Even if we are provincial and not interested in the world or world history. And we should emphasise the needs of ordinary people not magical thinking. Economic growth matters.

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