One of the most famous things John Steinbeck never quite said is that socialism failed in America because the poor saw themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Steinbeck’s actual line was narrower: ‘Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.’
But the paraphrase survived because it captured something true. America was a country in which the broke man could imagine the rich man as his future self.
Australia was built around a different promise.
The Australian dream was not a mansion, an empire, or your name on the side of a skyscraper. It was a decent wage, a house on a quarter-acre block, a reliable car, time for the family, and nobody important looming over you. America offered the freedom to become Rockefeller. Australia offered the freedom to tell Rockefeller to get stuffed.
Ours was freedom through simplicity: liberation from class, pretension, and unnecessary authority. The point was not to rise high enough to command other people, but to stand securely enough that nobody could command you. The beach, the pub, the backyard, and the weekend were not signs of inadequate ambition. They were proof that life belonged to you.
There was great virtue in this. It gave us egalitarianism without requiring uniformity, a suspicion of people who mistook status for character, and perhaps our most refined national talent: the ability to puncture self-importance before it became contagious.
But there was a weakness hidden inside the strength. A culture that prizes ‘enough’ can become suspicious of anyone who wants to build more. We admired ingenuity, but distrusted scale. We liked the inventor in the shed; we were less comfortable when he became the owner of the factory. Success was acceptable provided it remained modest, apologetic and preferably somewhere out of sight.
Politics did not create that instinct. It gave it stationery.
Over time, cultural suspicion hardened into policy: a 30 per cent company tax rate for larger businesses, payroll taxes that punish hiring, stamp duties that punish movement, planning systems that punish building, and regulations capable of turning an idea into a professional-services subscription. We tax work, employment, investment, movement, and success, then convene a productivity roundtable to ask where all the productivity went.
The result is an economy increasingly arranged around what cannot leave. Minerals remain underground until we dig them up. Houses remain here no matter how often we sell them to one another. The most mobile assets – capital, ideas, and ambitious people – are less sentimental. They board planes.
Yet none of this means Australians are short of imagination. This is the country that produced the black box flight recorder, the multichannel cochlear implant, critical Wi-Fi technology, major IVF breakthroughs, and the wine cask. Even our genius was practical. We did not promise to change the world. We found something that needed fixing, fixed it, and went home for dinner.
That record also complicates the usual political argument. Many Australian breakthroughs emerged from universities, public hospitals, the CSIRO, and government laboratories. The lesson is not that government must disappear. It is that government is at its best when it supplies the platform for human ingenuity, and at its worst when it confuses enabling people with supervising them.
Our problem has rarely been invention. It has been scale. We produce clever ideas, congratulate ourselves, and then watch while somebody else commercialises them, capitalises them and builds the global company. Australia can sometimes feel like an incubator with an excellent departure lounge.
The answer is not to import every American excess. We do not need a national religion of wealth, 80-hour work weeks, or billionaires treated as minor deities because they launched an app. The Australian instinct that life should be lived rather than merely monetised is worth preserving.
But the simple life was never economically simple. It rested on productive industry, abundant energy, affordable land, rising wages and people willing to risk capital before the rest of us enjoyed the result. Leisure is a dividend of productivity, not an alternative to it. A country cannot regulate, tax and litigate its productive base into submission and still expect the backyard, the weekend, and the secure family life to survive untouched.
That is the bargain politics must recover: lower and simpler taxes on productive investment, faster approvals, stable rules and a presumption that Australians should be free to begin unless government can identify a real reason to stop them. We should be able to admire success without worshipping wealth and encourage ambition without surrendering our egalitarian character.
Australia does not need to become a nation of temporarily embarrassed millionaires. But it must stop treating its builders as temporarily tolerated taxpayers. The simple life was never the alternative to enterprise. It was what enterprise made possible.
