JENI O’DOWD: How second-rate leadership on housing, immigration turned us into the ‘Lotto Country’

When Donald Horne wrote about “the lucky country,” he wasn’t high on our sunsets.

He was warning that Australia rode its luck while second-rate people ran the show.

Sixty years on, tell me this doesn’t land. We are not the Lucky Country. We are the Lotto Country, a place that still expects luck to do the heavy lifting while leadership does media training.

Our kids can’t buy a home in Sydney or Melbourne unless a parent signs as a lender, guarantor and emotional support animal. A smaller deposit scheme for first-home buyers does not change a seven-figure reality.

Queues snake down pavements every Saturday for rentals that are smaller, older and dearer, and if you do snag a lease, you can forget saving for a deposit.

Takeaway coffee flirts with $7, a basic punnet of strawberries is $5, and yesterday I paid $28 for a jar of instant coffee. Even keeping the lights on at home is a luxury for some.

We are living with the consequences. Youth crime is spiking in the NT and Victoria, gang crime continually makes headlines in Sydney, and there’s a quiet crisis at animal shelters as families surrender pets they can no longer afford.

Birth rates have dropped, not because we hate babies, but because the spreadsheet wins. The message to young Australians is brutal in its simplicity. Don’t start. Don’t move. Don’t hope.

Hit pause on your life until prices behave, and just hope you are not too old when they do.

Immigration settings remain high while polls, rallies and commentators continually scream that the intake is out of step with housing and infrastructure.

This is not an anti-migrant line; it is a pro-competence one. If you expand the population without the homes, trains, schools and hospitals to match, you are not compassionate, you are careless.

The Lotto Country mistakes volume for vision and a press conference for a plan.

Where are the watchdogs? The Liberal Party was sent packing after the last Federal election, and it would take some sort of miracle for the Coalition to be re-elected at the next, given the size of its loss.

Labor knows it, which breeds complacency. Accountability always needs a contest.

Investigative journalism is disappearing as the number of journalists dwindles. Exclusive stories behind a paywall from credible media outlets that pay the journalists to produce them are run for free on another site with a token “as reported by” credit.

When scrutiny becomes a filter rather than a flame, governments get very comfortable being second-rate.

Donald Horne’s irony curdled into cliché because we liked how “lucky” sounded. It flattered us. The Lotto Country is less cuddly, but more accurate.

Luck is winning Powerball. Leadership is laying pipe, zoning land, approving density near transport, and pushing roads, schools and clinics ahead of demand, not two elections behind it.

Leadership is also telling voters the truth. If you want cheaper homes, they have to be built where people want to live.

That means height, not just sprawl. It means upsetting a few streets that think the sky belongs to them. It means reforming tax settings that juice investor returns while locking out first-home buyers, and doing it with a timeline that treats the market like a patient, not a piñata.

Australia still has everything that matters. Rule of law, stable institutions, a resource base the world wants and a lifestyle people cross oceans to reach.

Our country should be impossible to stuff up. Yet we are creating a nation of haves and have-nots where owning a house will be dependent on your parents’ wealth.

I am not arguing for despair. I am arguing for ambition with a deadline. Set five-year housing targets that tie funding to delivery, not announcements.

Fast-track approvals for projects within 800 metres of train and metro stations, and publish monthly dashboards that citizens can read without a translator.

Calibrate migration to capacity in real time, suburb by suburb. Put serious money into TAFE and construction productivity so we are not held hostage by a skills bottleneck.

Pay for watchdog journalism like we pay for roads, because democracy without accountability ends up in a ditch.

And because I am an Eminem tragic, let me put it this way. This isn’t about losing yourself, it’s about finding your spine.

The Lotto Country can keep coasting on recycled luck, or we can choose to be a first-rate country on purpose. Pick.