It is ‘more like romance than reality’ Dr William Bland enthusiastically told a banquet celebrating NSW self-government in 1856 (Sweetman). A former convict, he harnessed such sentiments to help build the colony and a new self-governing Constitution and Parliament.

Our modern approach is negative. Not harnessing positive sentiments to do something useful. Bland was a key figure in the creation of the Australian Patriotic Association in 1835. Patriotism is not particularly popular in today’s intellectual life.

But we still have to deal with real problems, somehow. Even with our inability to accept the emotional need to believe in the country if it is to function well and develop. And our tolerance of the intolerant, those who comprehensively reject our values and modest symbols. Bland and his generation, the generation that laid the colonial foundations of democracy and the economy, did not make either mistake.

Today, most real wage growth in Australia in the last 40 years was before 2012, and it then trailed off as economic reform failed (ABS). And ‘since Q1 2021 … real hourly wages in Australia have fallen by approximately 5 per cent …’ (OECD).

The better governments of past decades would not ignore this. The then government announced on July 6 1987, ‘twelve areas for microeconomic reform’ – an emergency economic package of real reforms. The announcements kept coming.

A March 1987 minimum wage decision placed ‘The Restructuring and Efficiency Principle’ requiring ‘measures implemented to improve efficiency’ at the heart of national economic life.

We can do this again today. A new temporary package introduced this year might reduce government imposts on industry and ordinary people:

• introduce the New Zealand Building Code or similar, an 83-page document to replace our over 2,200-page guidelines
• suspend some requirements to use renewable energy, targeted environmental and Native Title mining requirements
• suspend new taxes
• suspend non-productive immigration
• start a Cabinet committee to cut budget expenditure by 5 per cent

This may be the only way to regain growth in real wages, which is supposedly the priority of all. The alternative is likely to be continued stagnation.

Real wage growth is of course not the priority of all. People care about ideological causes. Not ordinary people.

It may be the decline in Christianity, or the wilder fringes of the humanities which have become a replacement official religion. Perhaps it is a middle class anxious for a sense of purpose amidst the quiet melancholy of ordinary suburban life.

If you place costly moral causes above cheap power, a roof over their head, and an economy capable of sustainably raising wages, then you place ordinary people last.

Then we write pious articles about ‘Populists’ and wonder why this moral universe does not work, and why the peasants are revolting.

If you want real wages to grow, if you want to head off the ‘Populists’ you pretend to despise, if you are about helping ordinary people not ideological campaigns to give you a purpose in life, then an emergency temporary package of economic measures may be the answer.

How did our better governments introduce such reform in the past? Fierce internal control was the answer of the Hawke/Keating governments (1983-96). The many internal and dedicated reform opponents were bullied into compliance over tariffs, competition reform, labour issues, privatisation, and budgetary restraint.

In the Howard/Costello reform period (1996-2004) opponents were off the leash and campaigned openly to destroy even more tax, competition, and labour reforms.

I was heavily involved in passage of the Workplace Relations Act 1996, arguably a successful or most successful economic reform of the labour system. It was passed, just, by the Australian Democrats in the Senate. It almost destroyed them.

Their later agreement to the Howard government’s GST introduction in 1999 did destroy them. We now have a progressive Senate, dominated by the Vandalising Statues Party, opposed to any economic reform. This means the other parties must work together.

This means taking a practical, not Don Quixote approach to reform. For example keeping the priority of enterprise bargaining and building on it. It is easy to demand everything on earth. It is harder to persuade.

There are other fundamental issues. Last week I heard a prominent Jewish leader say that Australian Jews are emigrating to Israel to escape antisemitism. This is a shameful thing.

Jewish people were key to building our economy, the law, the arts, everything good about the country. The landmark one-man-one-vote Parliament in Australia, the South Australian House of Assembly in 1857, included Morris Lyon Marks, who arrived in South Australia in 1846. He was a member for Burra and Clare March August 1857-58 (resigned).

He ran an ‘extensive mercantile and import business for many years in Adelaide and Burra; trustee Adelaide Synagogue; after parliamentary career went to New Zealand and later Victoria’. (Register of Parliament)

In those days, Christian oaths were of fundamental importance, and Jews were unable to swear them. A great Australian compromise was found.

The Register reported that Lyon ‘opened the Bible at the Book of Moses, and, having placed his hat upon his head, took the oath according to the Judaic form’. He then signed the Oath of Allegiance. (History Hub)

Finally, we should remember the unspeakable cruelties our soldiers suffered in foreign hotspots:

‘When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.’ (Kipling)

We then torment those soldiers further when they come home, possibly with physical and mental damage. And are then officially investigated for years.

Government spends a lot on legal advice and machinations. Why not spend money finding a better way to treat our soldiers?

Look after our own, not endless questionable abstractions. That is the golden thread of Australian civic culture.

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

* strange communists I have known … Bertram Wolfe. A joke.