We seek to become a land of ordinary civil free speech, where people go about their business earning an income and raising children, government spending is limited and focused on the people, and where prosperity through enterprise is a common goal.

A ‘land of dreams,’ Matthew Arnold called it.

The Founding Fathers did a good job getting us started.

The Australian Constitution of 1900 let the people speak in a manner few did at the time, and many do not today.

Illiteracy was an estimated 42 per cent in 1858 but colonial compulsory schooling largely eliminated it by the 1920s – a real achievement.

Australian liberties were strong enough in the 1930s to withstand the violence and hatred of fascism and communism, unlike half of Europe.

Our economic wealth grew with wool and wheat, mining and beef, and later manufacturing.

In 2026, however, there are challenging problems with free speech, and we suffer economic stagnation. The Commonwealth needs renewal.

There seems little doubt that the Australian people want to fix integration failures and the accompanying lack of assimilation within migrant populations, often from troubled hotspots. Others want controls on new migration.

But lectures will be given to Australia about how it is a human right not to ‘assimilate’. The social vision of government stands in the way.

The federal government is yet to balance a budget or succeed in addressing cost and corruption problems in the building industry.

We can add to this the gross budgetary failure of at least one of our state governments, which combines this with failure on crime, building industry corruption, and extremism on every front.

A new social vision also favours lessening of judicial restraint, and introduction by adventurous court decisions of change which cannot be introduced by elections, because people would heavily vote against it.

‘The people’ are now segmented into preferred groups. Preferred groups are talked about a lot, because they embody virtue. Unlike the people. Their interests will be pursued over all others.

A recent historical account that attracted accolades compared ordinary Australians in history with followers of a dictator. The one that Charlie Chaplin made fun of in The Great Dictator. Such a comparison is remarkable even by modern standards of crooked thought and speech.

This basket of intellectual failure is the vision for the country which is seriously advanced by parts of our intellectual life.

But it promises only stagnation. Australia is a country built by ordinary people and common sense, not elite preoccupations.

In 1854, the Colonial Secretary told the Victorian Legislative Council that the Australian future depended entirely on what the people could build:

‘Democracy means the power of the people, and by the people I mean in general the commons – not one class of the people alone but all classes of the people combined. By the commons the great public power and the great success which have attended our nation have been attained. I do not think that anyone can say that those consequences are directly to be attributed either to the regal or to the aristocratical class…’

We have now a new aristocratic and imperious regulatory class that wishes to impose its vision. Although this is not our tradition. In the 1853 NSW Constitutional debates ‘the people’ were mentioned 312 times or more. In the Victorian debates 49 times. The colonial government was limited.

Why not simply abandon separating the population into disharmonious groups? People would be relieved. The language of ‘inclusion’ and the rest of it suggests disunity and was invented for temporary purposes. We must be ‘a nation for a continent, and a continent for a nation’ Edmund Barton, our first Prime Minister said. Not separate nations.

People want their stagnant standard of living fixed. Our economic difficulties must be addressed. We have untold mining riches, including uranium, gas, coal, and other resources which could fund our future. But their wealth is not realised because of legislative restrictions. Including priority given to religious issues relating to land and title and the relentless anti-nuclear campaigns of the past.

The Master Builders say that we cannot build enough houses with the National Construction code ‘ballooning from 93 pages to 889’. Each new home bears regulatory costs of up to $320,000.

Our workplace relations Act has ballooned to an Act of well over 800 sections in four volumes, a model of unfathomable complexity. Workplace grievance applications have overwhelmed the Fair Work Commission with an industrial-scale increase in numbers. And businesses have to respond to the applications.

Government has introduced higher electricity prices which damage industry and ordinary people, in the name of climate change.

We moved to a ‘more than 280,000-page in force Commonwealth statute book’ by 2022 according to the Australian Law Reform Commission. How can such an amount be read by anyone, let alone applied? And what is the effect?

This is a failure on all levels. It is a break with Australian traditions of limited Government controlled by the people.

We do not need new government visionary schemes. We need to reduce the cost and complexity burden of those visionary schemes already introduced, including the unsustainable NDIS. We need housing and new markets for the economy.

A moratorium on new regulation should be introduced, together with a program of systematic regulatory simplification across the economy. In some cases, we can reintroduce the regulation of ten or more years ago. The basic framework of the Workplace Relations Act 1996 could be reintroduced, streamlined to eliminate the duplication of statutory authorities it introduced. Or we could work through the current Act.

The budget should be balanced, and tax cuts made to encourage aspiration.

This is how ordinary people built Australian prosperity. Our early social visions were actually paid for. But a new imperious government introduces only more cost and complexity. A moderate way forward to an economic growth culture can surely be found on all these issues.

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