This article was first published in The Daily Mail, 3 June 2025, featuring a contribution from Zachary Gorman. 

A commentator says most Australian completely misunderstand the meaning behind the well-known phrase: ‘the lucky country’. 

The term was coined by author Donald Horne in his 1964 book of the same name and has wrongly become associated with long term prosperity and the country’s avoidance of economic and social problems seen in other nations.

Australian commentator Topher Field told the Unemployable Media Podcast the phrase was not intended to have the positive connotations most thought it did. Horne coined the phrase to describe a country whose prosperity was due to stumbling upon a land of great natural resources and relying upon them ever since for a prosperity that owed little to hard work or good management. ‘It was actually telling us, you guys are lazy. You guys are riding off the back of good luck. Good luck of geography, weather and industry,’ he said. ‘You guys are the lucky country, and if you don’t wise up real quick, your luck is going to run out. You’re not going to know what hit you because you’ve never had to navigate anything bad.’

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Dr Zac Gorman, a historian at the University of Melbourne’s Robert Menzies Institute, said the criticism being attributed to the modern era was ironic.

‘People who use the phrase to suggest that our luck is being squandered by our present politicians often miss out on the irony that they are actually making the exact same argument that Horne himself was making in the 1960s.

In doing so, they are engaging in the same nostalgia for the past that Horne was so dismissive of.’

Gorman added that the idea of the lucky country predated that of Horne, saying Australia was known as the ‘working man’s paradise’ in the 19th century.

‘We had uniquely high wages and social mobility compared to the rest of the world.’ he explained in a statement to Daily Mail Australia.

‘Joseph Cook, who went from coal mining in England from the age of 9 to become Australia’s sixth prime minister, used to describe Australia as “the land of the better chance”‘.