The Lucky Country
With an introduction by Hugh Mackay 'Australia is a lucky country, run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.' The phrase 'the lucky country' has become part of our lexicon; it's forever being invoked in debates about the Australian way of life, but is all too often misused by those blind to Horne's irony. When it was first published in 1964 The Lucky Country caused a sensation. Horne took Australian society to task for its philistinism, provincialism and dependence. The book was a wake-up call to an unimaginative nation, an indictment of a country mired in mediocrity and manacled to its past. Although it's a study of the confident Australia of the 1960s, the book still remains illuminating and insightful decades later. The Lucky Country is valuable not only as a source of continuing truths and revealing snapshots of the past, but above all as a key to understanding the anxieties and discontents of Australian society today.
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What Hacker News says
- You're correct of course, but that level of strategic thinking is well beyond those in charge. David Horne summed the situation up well.
"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise."
- > We don't seem to be able to differentiate our economy away from resources at all
Or, equally importantly, control the means of production better than we've been doing to date - for a number of mineral resources and a great deal of energy we seem content with being tossed scraps in exchange for granting access for others to extract and sell on elsewhere.
> looking pretty bleak for the Lucky Country.
Pretty much as Donald Horne wrote when he popularised the saying for his book title.
- "Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck." - coined by social critic and journalist Donald Horne in his 1964 book The Lucky Country.
- Just a note - it's not just "this Government" - this is bipartisan and has a long history spanning decades. Both sides are just as incompetent as each other when it comes to technology and the Internet.
It's exactly the same kind of problem that we've always had here, summed up in 1964 by Donald Horne, "Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise."
I guarantee this will be the response when this doesn't work - surprise. They'll claim it was a sure thing, that they did everything right (even though they went through multiple rounds of sham "public consultations" and ignored all the expert testimony)...
- To use the Donald Horne quote "Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise."
Unfortunately, this has propagated down to a lot of the people. They want the government to be the parent instead.
As Jordan Shanks once said - "I have 6 investment properties" is the entire personality of a lot of Aussies. Many others are the same they just don't have the opportunity.
This whole situation appears to be a failing on all angles. From government over reach, corporate greed by forgoing morals to the people who are so worn down they just don't have anything left to give.
- David Horne said it best in 1964.
"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise."
