Australia has long thought of itself as the lucky country. Whenever its economy has started to falter, a commodity boom has usually come along to restore prosperity… until in the 1980s, when the rest of the world failed to rescue us, and we embarked on a decade of reform. I am afraid the world is going to fail to come to our rescue once again, and this time it’ll be harder to get a boost from reform because the easy reforms have already been done. Here’s how I see our history from the earliest days of colonisation. For most of those two or so centuries, we have been a commodity exporter , at first specialising in wool and wheat …
