Now to some preliminary conclusion on the prospects for a resumption of nation-building. First of all there is the obvious point that nothing can happen unless governments make it happen. And here the news is probably good. Canberra has demonstrated that it can call up massive reserves of power to change the course of national development. In the wake of these changes it is likely that government has less leverage over wages and monetary policy and less room in which to moderate the demands of the corporate sector. But we do have ample revenues and, probably, a hugely more efficient Canberra administrative apparatus with a freshly demonstrated capacity to deal coherently with the immense complexity of modern government.

The aim of a 25-year-long, top-down, neo-liberal re-engineering of a whole nation society was always to drive the market ever more deeply into the grain of daily life as a denominator of value and an automated code for all significant life decisions. The market was meant to bury deliberative politics, to reduce popular expectations of government, to redefine politics as economic management tout court and to neutralise normative culture. To use Francis Fukuyamas’ phrase, it was meant to bring us to the end of history and even to kill the shaping influences of memory and history in national politics. Had it succeeded Australia would feel more like Singapore and ‘the Nation’ would be dead as a motive force in our lives. But thankfully it has not succeeded. A certain pragmatic utilitarianism is still actively shaping our imagined future, our intuitions and value judgements about fairness, and about what progress and national development should mean: and we care about it. Our own ‘Whitefella Dreaming’ might still be working on our collective will and imagination.

With four final points I hope to persuade you that the changed nature of the challenges we face in the future may come to the rescue of our nation-building past.

Firstly, it is likely that a constructive adaptation to global warming will give rise to structural and cultural changes of a kind that we last saw in the aftermath of World War II. Economic history teaches us that War transforms the relations between economy, political culture and the state. In our case World War II brought on a permanent concentration of income tax powers at the national level, a still ongoing program of mass emigration of new settlers to our shores, and a spate of iconic nation-building programs like the Snowy River scheme. These are iconic elements in our own version of the ‘Dreaming’ that keep alive our hopes for nation-building.^[19] Facing up to global warming has the potential to resuscitate our national imagination in a similar way. It presents us with challenges that obviously call, not only for incremental changes at the household level, but also for whole-of-government action at the national level. Here we need think only of what will be required to bring the Murray Darling river system back to life in a future of reduced and more variable rainfall. This challenge alone has the potential to break up much of the rusted, stalemated, framework of current federal-state relations: think of the implications, not just for allocation and the pricing of water, but also for a whole clutch of related and interconnected changes that will redefine water conservation, forest management, primary industry, farming practice and rural and regional development. It even has the potential to heal the tragic gulf that now divides urban from rural Australia.^[20]

Changes on this scale are likely to burst the limits of routine pragmatic political accommodation. They force appeals to a latent collective national imagination and so take on an iconic force that can change motivations and bring people together with an enlarged sense of collective agency and identity. With this could come a restored sense of sovereignty and political agency. So also global warming might give us an opportunity to mobilise power in a way that brings vested interests to heel. More fundamentally, it has the potential to restore the legitimacy of state intervention and to generate the needed cultural energy for nation-building government — those very resources that our economic reformers have tried so hard to erode! It creates spaces in which strangers can more easily recognise each other as citizens of the nation joined in mutual responsibility for the longer-term future that they will bequeath to their own children. Of course all this could be so easily sidelined. My point is simply that the challenge of global warming has the potential to produce some very powerful nation-building proteins.

A second creative challenge has to do with the re-building of our infrastructure. We are members of the OECD with a per capita national income that is about the same as France. France has a first-world national transport and rail network: ours is not much better than India or, at best, Malaysia. We have some of the world’s most liveable cities that are being stressed by bad public transport and the absence of all coherent planning. The same is true at every level of our run-down education system. Ditto for our broadband capability and for our investments in research and development in new technologies and value-added quality niche manufacturing. Look out from the breakwater at Newcastle harbour and you will see (on my last visit there) up to 52 ships waiting to load coal from our hopelessly outdated loading terminals. The point is, simply, that our infrastructure deficits are huge, glaringly incommensurate with our aspirations as a first world nation — and, that, now, for once in a lifetime, we have both the revenue and compelling economic justifications for doing something about it. Huge reconstructions change expectations, create opportunities and fire up the national imagination.

Third, it is a commonplace of political sociology that progressive and modernising social movements — of which the women’s movement, the peace movement, and environmental and conservation movements are the most notable instances — can only make way in the face of organised political power when entrenched opposing interests are in disarray. The point is that, in Australia today, at the level of ideas, the neo-liberal opposition to constructive governance and nation-building is eclipsed or even exhausted. No one is listening anymore to the worn out ideological catch calls for more privatisation, user pays, cutting government spending, smaller government, and more competition: and perhaps likewise, thankfully, labour market reform. For the moment at least the vested interests have lost their voice. It takes a lot of energy and a long time — maybe 20 or 30 years — for selfish power to persuade national populations to accept policies that are opposed to their larger national interests. And even then it can take a comparatively short time for the ideologies to come undone and for the people to come to their senses. There is a good chance that even blind ideological objections to public borrowing could be swept away by renewed political calls for constructive nation-building.

With the fourth and last point I come to the prospect about which I care most. My survey of middle Australian attitudes showed that even 10 years ago there was no consensus for economic reform and, more to the point, that the broad middle was waking up to the realisation that more economic reform meant more pressure on families, run down public health and education services, less job security, more stressful workplaces, urban degradation, uncertain retirement incomes, and probably declining whole-of-life incomes. Later national survey numbers confirm that an increasing proportion of us are seeing, for the first time, that more economic reform also brings reduced standards of living for our children. It is a perfect example of what some people call ‘social learning’. Intuitively, and ever more consciously, a national population may just be waking up to the truth that a booming economy and increasing GDP means environmental degradation, endangered futures and falling quality of life. And with that awareness comes a recognition that ‘the Economy’ is not animal mineral or vegetable, not a thing in itself, but a symbolic construction that comes out of society itself as a political artefact and something that we have the power to change.

As that understanding sinks in a nation can more easily understand for itself that economic rationalism is a perfect irrationality, an ideological concoction, and a form of systematically distorted communication. We see then that we must again understand and use the economy in exactly the same way as our great ‘Nugget Coombs’ generation of nation-builders did, namely as a set of practical instruments for improving the lives of a national and now global population. What is the use of money if it makes you poorer? That unsettling question has the potential to change the meaning of money. I think I hear that bit of the story coming at us like a steam train in a tunnel.

Here we are at the end. Of course, there are no metaphysical or historical guarantees. Still, I put it to you that the prospects for a resumption of constructive nation-building are better than they have been in a long while.