Australia is often described as a `lucky country`, a country that has achieved amazing things despite poor political leadership (Cater 2013; Horne 1964; Mackay 1993; Shultz 2022). In 2022, Australia was a cosmopolitan nation of just under 27 million citizens, where governments were democratically elected (at least) every three years, and the military received instructions from the government, not the other way round. Australia had a market-based economy, an impartial justice system, a social safety net that protected vulnerable citizens, and a regulatory framework designed to ensure that corporate profits were not achieved at the expense of public value. Unsurprisingly, the United Nations Human Development Index ranked Australia in the top-ten of developed countries (UN 2021). Australia's major blemish was its failure to solve the disadvantages suffered by its indigenous communities. In 2020, the National Agreement on Closing the Gap committed Australian state and federal governments to greater efforts in overcoming the entrenched inequality faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. In July 2023, the Productivity Commission concluded that these efforts were not achieving meaningful progress across most of the socio-economic indicators and, in some instances, were making the situation worse (Baset 2023).
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