When Donald Horne coined the phrase “the lucky country,” it was intended as a rebuke. Yet for those who arrived in the aftermath of the World War II, including my grandparents who were Holocaust survivors, it came to mean something else entirely: not luck, but opportunity.

Between 1945 and 1970, more than two million migrants came to Australia. They did not come for comfort. They came because this country offered something rare in a shattered world – stability, freedom, and the chance to begin again.

Holocaust survivors understood that better than most. They had seen what happens when institutions collapse, when extremism takes hold, and when the rule of law is turned against its own citizens. They arrived with little having lost everything including their families during the war, but did arrive with clarity: freedom is not an abstraction. It is the foundation of everything.

In factories, in small businesses and trades, they worked. They saved. They invested. Home ownership was not an entitlement; it was an ambition. Security was not assumed; it was earned.

By the 1960s, Australia had one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. Migrants and their children were central to that achievement. They deferred gratification, took risks, and believed, quietly but firmly that effort should lead to reward.

That belief became a culture. They passed it on to next generation and to the one after. It was a belief I grew up with.

It is that culture which now looks increasingly fragile.

Australia today is wealthier, more comfortable, and yet more uncertain of itself. There is a growing reliance on government, an expectation that security and prosperity can be managed from above rather than built from below. At the same time, productivity has fallen to some of its weakest levels in decades. This........

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