We need to be lifters, not leaners, if nation is to survive… The two great parties of our post-war era challenged each other for nearly two decades to take policy risks in the interest of strengthening our industrial, cultural and personal spirit. Both parties sought to ready our nation to thrive in a competitive international market. The drift of each towards increasing statism weakens both and the country.
So many of the things we relied on a middle-class family to do for itself now have a role for government, from feeding children correctly to building a granny flat or, for that matter, deciding which newspaper column is acceptable to read. It is the middle class itself that has insisted on its own enfeeblement with continual demands for the regulation of daily life and for insisting on the elevation of concerns such as animal rights and the environment as if nobody would have to pay or as if there were a source of unlimited wealth to draw on. One day the mines will be empty and our descendants will rightly curse us if we have misused our national bounty to abdicate our responsibility to be industrious, self-reliant and ambitious. These are the qualities on which success in an unknowable future depends. We undermine them at our peril.