The Coalition, led by Sussan Ley, is renewing itself under a new vision of small government and lower taxes, family, and common sense on social issues. The re-elected Albanese government now has a wide choice in future policy. It has discussed introducing a ‘progressive patriotism’ and ‘productivity.’

Australia is a vastly successful country. Renewal does not begin with nothing. It is based on the coming of ‘peace, order and good government’ to our vast continent with British settlement in 1788. It is based on the squatters and their European and Aboriginal workforce, who opened up the immeasurable land and turned it into a bountiful harvest.

Remembering these things can unify the country. While we also admire the civilisation and achievements of the French, the US, the UK, the Indonesians, and many others. We cannot be a narrow and belligerent country.

Peace, Order and Good Government

The histories of some countries imprison and limit. Britain’s Australian colonies took the ‘peace, order and good government’ they inherited and turned it into something new and fundamentally beneficial for ordinary people.

In 1855-58 the colonies of NSW, Victoria, and South Australia began self-government, all men were given the vote, and the secret ballot. Locally elected parliaments legislated for the ‘peace, welfare and good government’ of the colony (NSW), or ‘peace, order and good government’ in the other colonies, and in 1901 in the new Australian Constitution. Few, if any countries, were as democratic.

This democracy was developed by all. The NSW Labor platform of 1891 included abolition of voting in more than one electorate, removing the six-month residential requirement to vote, and elections to be held on one day, which should be a public holiday.

William Wentworth had spoken for all the colony when he called in 1819 for representative institutions, and development of the pastoral and mining industries.

In 1857, Premier William Haines of Victoria introduced voting rights for all the new ethnicities on the goldfields, including Germans and Chinese, although with immigration restrictions for Chinese which were avoided by landing in South Australia. The South Australians specifically discussed and included Aboriginal people in the vote.

These parliaments legislated bitterly fought land reform in the 1860s, which opened up squatter holdings to ordinary people. The ‘selectors’ selected squatter land and set themselves up as farmers and pastoralists.

By 1847 squatter holdings stretched from Moreton Bay (Queensland) down to South Australia.

Democracy was consolidated with the introduction of payment of Members of Parliament from the 1870s, and gradual reform of the less democratic Upper Houses of Parliament, the Legislative Councils. In the 20th Century we introduced compulsory and preferential voting. Aboriginal voters were excluded, but some were protected by s.41 of the Constitution, and voting restored in 1962.

A new ameliorative liberalism developed, a social safety net of pensions and shops and factories legislation.

But the new prosperity was based on the market economy, protected by Parliament and consolidated through economic development. Not on free government services.

Opening up the land to a harvest

By 1847 the squatters had vast land ‘runs’ of sheep and cattle, organised by themselves. The colonial authorities had tried to limit the spread of pastoralism to the ‘19 counties’ around Sydney.

But the squatters risked all by driving flocks of sheep and cattle beyond those limits to develop new ‘runs’ despite the dangers.

Dangers included floods and bushfire, see-sawing prices for wool (which fell in the 1830s to poverty levels), other squatters, and occasional violent conflict with Aboriginal people. One 1860 newspaper advertisement was by no means uncommon Stephen H. Roberts tells us:

‘The public of Queensland, more especially to the North, are invited to afford any information which may lead to be knowledge of the fate of Donald Cameron who, with a party of six, left Euralia, New England, in search of runs. Nothing has been heard of him since he left Rockhampton.’

He says:

‘It was no light task to muster some thousand head of store cattle or sheep and strike off into the unknown with a bullock dray of rations.’

The only markers might be ‘Roman numerals cut into a gum tree’ by an explorer decades earlier.

The eventual result of squatter enterprise was the great boom 1860s-90s, in which Australian prosperity exceeded even that of the US, UK, until the recession and drought of the 1890s.

Land laws slowly and reluctantly caught up with the development of the land, and holdings became formalised.

The squatters and their shepherds, horsemen, and labourers were a mixed group, including ex-army officers, younger sons of aristocrats, merchants, ex-convicts, hard-scrabble free settlers, and Aboriginal workers. It was an endeavour of usually ordinary people seeking their fortune, for their families and themselves. One representation of a squatter was the convict Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

The process of renewal today

Our country towns have memorials to the young men who came off their farms to fight and sometimes die for their country far from home. The cities too.

Our country graveyards are full of young women who died in childbirth, or from tuberculosis or other fevers, and too their young children and husbands. Men found solace in drink.

The contribution they all made matters, and lives on as the prosperous and successful country we are today.

But we live in a time of amnesia. And hostility to economic development. We must abandon both.

We can now see more clearly Australia’s success of an early democracy without revolution, and development of the vast land into a bountiful harvest, for what it is.

It is based on individual enterprise, and the humanitarian principles common to the West. That and common sense should be the basis of our renewed politics and society. A focus on productivity is needed, and a patriotism that is shared by all.

Reg Hamilton, Adjunct Professor, School of Business and Law, Central Queensland University