We are the greatest nation on Earth … or so our leaders keep saying in a rather wooden and uncertain fashion, as though reading from an autocue.
But we can still take advice from others.
At some stage, the world noticed that Ronald Reagan was a better President (1981-89) than many. He was not a conventional intellectual and used to enrage many by reading out folksy letters and articles from the great American people.
Many of these people did not live in city centres like New York, but were rural people, with cows and pigsties and too much manure and grass.
Reflecting the views of ordinary folk is not such a bad method of governing. It is the marble theory in practice – ask the general public to guess how many marbles are in a large jar, and the average guess is about right. It also happens to be democratic.
Besides, those folksy articles and the Reader’s Digest had got it right about communism. It was indeed violent and hateful.
Australian leaders do not have to employ Reagan’s folksy letter-reading approach, but some sympathy with Australian traditions and way of life cherished by ordinary people helps. Instead, what have they been offering – a torrent of nonsense grovelling to hateful language and ideas?
How would a Reagan-like leader, with sympathy for the country and its people, tackle the following two problems facing Australia?
For many, the idea of ordinary civil discourse is a strange thing, like an alien encounter: ‘Stranger, which Galaxy are you from?’ they say. They see the real question as how they can stridently criticise a particular nation, but only in a foreign hotspot, while staying just barely on the right side of the law. And they do so because of deep emotional need.
As a society, we support social disunity on all fronts, fail to address integration problems, and provide new scope for grievances to be expressed and encourage them. Our intellectual life is negative. Which occasionally amounts to outright denigration of and hostility towards the country, even from institutions.
There is a growing alienation problem, as the ordinary civil consensus on which the country relies is constantly attacked and undermined. No one speaks out strongly for the overall country.
The theme of ‘The Australian Achievement’ was rejected for our Bicentennial 1988, which instead adopted the negative ‘Living Together’. Government diluted our modest national symbols. ‘Was it for this the clay grew tall?’ first world war poet Wilfred Owen asked.
Although there is now enthusiasm about democracy – ‘The Parliamentary Education Office educates Australians about, and inspires their enthusiasm for, Australia’s parliamentary democracy.’
The Marble Jar counting result about this is clear. People are utterly sick of the torrent of nonsense and grovelling to hateful language and ideas.
Given this, we should systematically lessen all official government promotion of disunity. There should be a new requirement that all official national celebrations be genuine celebrations of Australia as a country, and no endorsement of complaints, demands, or apologies.
Only with this will they meet the test of ‘special significance in community mores’ used to set public holidays and attract government support and funding.
Statutory authorities and their hangers-on should not presume to imply the taxpaying general population are bigots, especially as taxpayers continue to fund and support these authorities.
This will come as a shock. Transitional measures will be needed. It will require the ordinary political process of negotiation.
In addition to social unrest, leaders have to deal with the surprise that economic activity has failed to flourish. Australia has experienced a five-year average annual change in labour productivity of -0.4 per cent. If you take out the unproductive public sector drag, it is +0.1 per cent.
This has severely damaged living standards:
‘Over the 3¾ years to the third quarter of 2025, real hourly wages in Australia fell by 2.6%, a larger decline than in almost any other OECD economy, leaving real wages little changed from pre-pandemic levels.’
It is surely time that Parliament had regard to this and changed direction.
‘Oncosts’, the payments extra to straight wages, are estimated to be about 30 per cent of labour costs. But there are other oncosts, namely red and green tape. These include differing state licenses, the cost of environmental permissions, Indigenous and Native Title consultation, and any number of other duplicative regulations.
Perhaps some overall attempt at costing all of this should be made, along with the torrent of legislation, subsidiary regulation, permits, controls, policy guidance, and coerced ‘best practice’. Native Title inexorably expands.
Sometimes the ‘small additional costs’ are not that and are heavily disguised by great community emotion. Damaging increases in power prices and subsidies came from climate change measures. No budgetary statement on the economic damage is made. The Australian people might, if such a statement was made, decide that the price is too high.
For decades, new environmental cost burdens were added on to projects an ad hoc basis because of campaigns.
But every lad and lass can complain. There is surely an obligation for government to propose workable solutions…
As for productivity, a joint parliamentary committee could provide an annual report on additional financial burdens placed on the private sector compared to overall economic growth. This report could be given rigour by a statement from the Parliamentary Budget Office so that it carries weight beyond partisan politics.
We could introduce moratoriums on new government spending, spending targets for reductions (e.g. 5 per cent), or less harsh approaches could be taken.
These are some ideas a Reagan-like leader could take while keeping in mind the opinion of Australians.
The Hon. Reg Hamilton, Adjunct Professor, School of Business and Law, Central Queensland University
