Until recently, nation-building has seldom featured in the utterances of politicians or public commentators except when extolling (or lamenting) the halcyon days of grand public infrastructure schemes of such a scale that they could only be underwritten by government: schemes designed to harness the potential of our natural bounty and, in so doing, create a new society. Indeed, one might have been justified in concluding that nation-building had been consigned to the status of an historical footnote.

Every now and then, when someone promotes a grand — and sometimes silly — scheme to reverse the nation’s rivers, water its deserts or in some way profoundly transform its productive heartland, Australians sit up and take notice. Somehow nation-building is inextricably bound up with the ‘idea’ of Australia and still resonates in the popular consciousness. With the froth and bubble of a long election campaign now behind us it is prudent to ask whether nation-building is set to ‘re-surface’ as a contemporary policy and political discourse.

Nation-building appears set to undergo a renaissance as the Australian national ‘idea’ is re-forged in the cauldron of drought and climate change. The 2008 federal election demonstrated a clear recognition on the part of policy-makers and the electorate that the emerging challenges of climate change and water security will require concerted government action and that ‘the market’ has neither the capability or capacity to meet these challenges without the backing and muscle of governments.

The content and direction of nation-building may also be shaped by other factors such as the resources boom, an unprecedented budgetary surplus, the new Federal government’s resolve to address key capacity bottlenecks and, perhaps not least, public weariness with the excesses of new public management.

Globalisation too may define a new policy frontier for nation-building — both as a consequence of the economic stimulus it provides as well as the threats it poses to national identity and national institutions. In this light, policies mandating the transition from analogue to digital communications, or policies opening up of the telecommunications market (through — ironically — the corporatisation of Telecom and the subsequent sale of its successor, Telstra) might be seen as exemplars of late twentieth century nation-building.

This will not be comfortable territory for politicians, institutions and a public obsessed with tax cuts, interest rates and budget surpluses, not to mention a horror of public borrowing. The battlelines drawn around Labor’s ambitious plans for national broadband illustrate the tension between values of fiscal rectitude and visionary risk-taking. It has ever been thus in the business of nation-building.

Confronting these and other challenges may stir governments and the electorate from the ‘comfortable and relaxed’ complacency into which the nation seems to have lapsed. We may yet realise that the nation is not ‘finished’ by a long shot and governments will re-discover a mandate for big, bold initiatives.