Australia will be strenuously challenged and tested in coming decades thanks to flagging economic performance and new geopolitical threats. No one knows what lies in the heart of man, but God – are we actually still a strong country, capable of meeting whatever is coming?

We need a better economic direction, and a country with confidence in its identity and achievements.

That means getting the governmental balance right and making our cultural life more constructive. Overall, this nation needs less pointless conflict, preference to no one, and a more reasonable avenue for discussion.

Good government is a complicated business and involves more than enforcing contracts and maintaining a standing army, as Prime Minister Melbourne thought in the 1840s. Government has grown.

But as government has grown, we have drifted in our understanding that government works best when it is limited and actually productive. Government railways transported grain, beef, wheat, and wool; public telegraphs, power, water, and gas all served an economic purpose.

The consensus breaks down when government becomes wildly ambitious with clashing symbolic goals.

Take, for example, the Tax Act which moved from about 1,080 pages of legislation in the 1950s, to over 14,000 pages in 2015. Compliance costs ‘are in the order of $40 billion per year’, according to Treasury. We lost our way in complexity.

The complexity of labour laws, built up over 30 years, now rival the Tax Act. The preliminary ‘Booth Report’, released on 18 May, concluded ‘complexity reflects the nuanced realities of modern work arrangements and the degree of legal specification required…’ ‘Education’ will help.

Or perhaps it will not help if the problem is many award provisions capable of numerous meanings. Which must be complied with.

A new systematic simplification effort would help, without attacking entitlements or the competent Review. We want efficiency not a traditional labour relations political war. Those wars have been consistently won by one side of politics. That side is not the Coalition.

Most migrants, in my experience, are aspirational, trying to build a life for themselves and their family, and aware through personal experience of the great chance that Australia offers. Few would want us to ignore the many national priorities in immigration decisions, including costs, integration, and threats, given their own interests and patriotism.

The Climate Change laws involve nearly 24 government agencies. Higher power prices and great uncertainty about sources of energy resulted. The apprentice and training system became an alphabet soup: NFROT, VET, MINCO, AVTS, MCEETYA and pages more.

The government is labouring its way through numerous unanticipated objections to new taxes on assets announced in the 2026 Budget. It is a Big Government Budget which should focus on income tax cuts and investment, and more on expenditure reduction, and does not.

To build a strong economy for the future we need a small government productive budget.

To build a strong united country for the future we need to address the False Gods which destroy morale and direction and lead us into trackless wastes.

Our ruling religion is not that of the Australia of old, which was work hard, play hard, accumulate assets, and bring up children.

We must find a way to focus on evidence. Judges for example, cannot operate in any sensible way while adhering to a faction or party. Leaders I partly admired always did things I could not quite agree with, despite often excellent beginnings. Although a good political row may clear the air. Occasionally, even solve a problem.

A second False God is the way we make fundamental decisions with no knowledge of the price. Based on feelings. Parliaments just do things.

A third failure is failing to understand institutions and laws. The Act guiding the Fair Work Commission 50 years ago was a simpler creature, and managerial decisions were largely off limits. Now the Commission is required by law to decide whether employees in the private sector should be able to work from home.

Getting back to first principles would help. Dismissal laws were not intended to be a vehicle for an industrial-scale level of applications generated by AI.

A fourth major False God is misuse of the open-mindedness and idealism of young people. At university I noticed that many young people allied themselves with foreign wars and revolutions they knew nothing about. I now know a lot more about these wars and revolutions, damaging information which should have been more widely available. Where were the benefits of a free and open university environment?

Without being unpleasant and insulting, there is no point in pretending Australians did not work hard to achieve gradual development of a flourishing, remarkably successful democracy and economy. Which is also a comparative story, given the glaring absence of anything like it in so many sources of refugees and vast population movements.

Category mistakes are common, one recent book confusing ‘populists’ of the West with all manner of threatening third world dictators, while ignoring the rule of law and Constitutions which cannot be overridden in the West.

Australian government is alive to the problems of all, including those ‘left behind’. This is one of our achievements. But our intellectual life does not include any real understanding of the alternative approaches to these things in the world and history. Or of the difficulties our early colonists faced, often illiterate and poor.

Krista Lawlor, writing in hyper-polarised America, says that the values of the ‘reasonable person’ are an answer to a polarised political debate.

But there is no point at all in bringing ‘reasonable’ values to anything without understanding the facts. This requires never-ending rethinking and completely free speech. Where would we have been without economic growth? Absolutely nowhere. Yet our religion is ignoring economics, our only door to the future.

A major False God is allowing influential opinion to thwart the people about all manner of things, from immigration to national symbols such as flags. And being hostile and belligerent about it. A reasonable person might step in and stop that.

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