Two questions that will shape our destiny in the next 25 years

In the 21st Century, Australia’s direction has been largely shaped by global events – take the GFC and the Covid pandemic. What would a regional conflict do to the nation?

Members of the Chinese Navy stand at a military port in Zhoushan, China. What might be Australia’s role if there is a regional conflict later this decade? Picture: Getty

It is now January 2025; we are officially a quarter of the way into the 21st Century. At this point in the 20th Century the war that would end all wars, the Great War, had come and gone and so too had the globally significant Spanish flu epidemic. My point is, by the quarter-century mark there is evidence of how the century is shaping.

Those who survived the Great War wanted a different society. It was a time of new (jazz) music, new dances like the Charleston, and new fashions. Technology spawned by the war effort helped to create a middle class in our biggest cities. Out with servitude in the rural idyll of Downton Abbey, in with the freedom of a factory job in the inner city where there was at least the separation of work from home.

The beginning of the 19th Century, too, was a time of transformation. The rise of the British Empire hinged on the outcome of the 1815 Battle of Waterloo against Napoleon’s French army. Within a decade Britain was the dominant superpower and the Australian colonies enthusiastically absorbed its culture and supplied its markets with resources.

In the 21st Century, too, I think Australia’s direction has been largely shaped by global events. The collapse of New York’s Lehman Brothers in September 2008 led to the Global Financial Crisis and triggered a surge in public spending. A pandemic had the same effect just over a decade later. These decisions still reverberate in the public mind.

Steve Jobs’ original Apple iPhone, unveiled in 2007, changed the way Australians live, work and manage relationships. China’s ramping of its demand for resources in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis created generational prosperity in Australia. Even the rise of the so-called woke movement here in recent years is evidence of Australia absorbing not so much a global trend as a developed world phenomenon. I’m not sure there’s a woke movement in China, Iran or Mali. Perhaps this is an opportunity for some to spread the gospel?

This raises the question of the extent to which we in Australia control our country’s destiny. Perhaps as a rich, middling power in a globalised world, it is simply our lot that we respond to events. Maybe we should be skilled not just in mining, shearing and lifestyling but also in war-gaming developments that have the capacity to impact our wellbeing.

To kick things off, here’s two questions that could shape our destiny in the second quarter of the 21st Century. What might be Australia’s role if there is a regional conflict later this decade? And what will be the consequences of Australia passing through peak Boomer in the early 2030s when our biggest ever (older) generation draws down on healthcare budgets in the years prior to, well, dying off?

Whichever way I look at modern Australia, I keep coming back to the idea that we are a modestly populated, resource-rich continent bobbing about in the South Pacific, responding as best we can to global forces. And for the most part I think we’ve done a pretty good job. However, I do hope that some federal department somewhere is gaming response options to events that could shape the prosperity and freedoms of the Australian people over the quarter-century to 2050.