The Australia We Could Still Build

It is 2056, and somewhere up the highway, there is a town doing better than anyone expected. Not a museum piece. Not one of those sad little heritage displays with a grant-funded plaque out the front and nobody under seventy inside. A real town, with noise in it: children, dogs, church bells, football boots on concrete, someone complaining about the price of sausages at the canteen.

The church bell still rings on Sunday, and the pews are full of young families, because somewhere along the way this country remembered that a nation without faith is a body without a soul. The primary school down the road teaches children that the country that gave them everything is worth loving, and nobody apologises for it. The footy club has enough volunteers to run the canteen without the same three mothers doing everything. The show society has a waiting list for the committee. The volunteer fire brigade still knows every family in town.

Small things, we are told. Of course they are. The people who say that have spent half a century missing the point. Small things are what a country is made of. Burke called them the little platoons. Most Australians once just called them life.

None of this exists yet. Not properly. It is a picture of Australia thirty years from now, one version of it anyway. Whether it stays a picture or becomes something your children can actually live in depends on what we start doing now.

Start with the family, because everything else starts there. For 50 years, we have been lectured that the family is just one lifestyle choice among many, and look where that got us. A birth rate falling through the floor. Loneliness everywhere. Children raised by screens because mum and dad are both flat out feeding a mortgage that eats half the household alive.

In the Australia of 2056, the settings have been changed. Tax policy treats a single-income family raising three children as the national asset it is. Housing policy lets a tradie in his twenties buy a block and marry his girlfriend instead of renting a shoebox until he is forty. Work, welfare, and education are built around the obvious fact that children need parents, parents need time, and families need a bit of room.

Nobody sitting around that kitchen table needs another bureaucrat’s five-point plan for “social cohesion”. They have something much better: a government humble enough to leave them alone.

A family also needs a country that belongs to itself. In that future Australia, sovereignty is not treated like an embarrassing word muttered by oddballs at regional branch meetings. It is understood as the starting point for everything else. Australia decides who comes here, at what pace, and on what terms.

Not because we fear the stranger, but because we love the neighbour. You make sure there is room at the table before you set another place.

That means immigration runs at a pace that the hospitals, schools, roads, and housing stock can handle. Every new Australian arrives in a country ready to welcome them properly, not into a rental queue, a clogged emergency department, and a suburb wondering why every promise from Canberra somehow made life harder.

A sovereign country also grows its own food, refines its own fuel, makes enough of what it needs, and remembers that supply chains are not a national security policy. A country that cannot feed, power, and defend itself is not really a nation. It is just a marketplace with a flag, coat of arms, and government.

Then there is the matter of who gets to run the place. There is an old principle, kept alive mostly in Catholic teaching, that nothing should be done by a higher authority if a lower one can do it for itself. Subsidiarity is the formal word. Common sense is the better one.

Our federation was built on that instinct, and we have spent a hundred years betraying it. By 2056, it runs the other way. Canberra has pulled back to defence, the borders, the currency, and the few things only a national government can do. The states actually govern. The shires have a real say over their water, roads, land use, and development.

When the decision about the local hospital is made by people who will be treated in it, rather than by a consultant two thousand kilometres away who could not find the town on a map, the decision gets better. So does the citizen. Running your own affairs makes adults of people. Being managed from a distance makes petitioners of them.

We have had more than enough of that.

None of this needs inventing. The local churches are still there. So is the family farm. So is the country show. So is the federation itself, for now. Battered, yes. Starved of respect, certainly. But still standing.

This is not a blueprint for utopia. Conservatives should be the last people on earth promising one of those. It is simply a plea to stop bulldozing the things that already work.

That is why hope should set the tone. The other side is good at pulling down statues, renaming things, rewriting school lessons, and producing glossy strategies about inclusion. It is hopeless at building anything that lasts.

Our people cleared scrub, raised churches, built towns, and federated a continent on a fraction of the wealth we have now. Capacity was never the problem. Confidence was. And confidence is coming back.

You can see it in the young men filling traditional churches that their grandfathers walked out of. You can see it in the homeschool co-ops multiplying while the education bureaucracy sneers from a safe distance. You can see it in young families leaving the capitals for somewhere with a backyard, a main street, and neighbours who know their names.

The future we were told was inevitable, borderless, rootless, faithless, and managed by experts, is running out of road. Good.

The road between here and 2056 has very little to do with winning arguments on the internet. That may disappoint the online revolutionaries, but nations are not rebuilt by posting.

Get married. Build a home. Have children. Fill the pews. Plant some trees. Put your hand up for the local council, or go and coach the under-12s if committees are not your thing. Keep the shop open. Save the local show. Teach the child to love what is worth loving.

Governments follow where families lead. They always have.

The pessimists say the old Australia is gone, and they are half right. The complacency is gone. That lazy old assumption that faith, family, and country would look after themselves while we looked after the mortgage is gone, and good riddance to it.

But the rest is still here: the land, the people, the inheritance, and the God who gave us all three.

That's my vision for 30 years from now. But 30 years is not long. Anyone who has planted an orchard knows that.

Best get started.

“Society is indeed a contract… it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
― Edmund Burke