I really want to believe that the author's survey reflects a new maturity and a decline in the cultural cringe, however we still have a foreign head of state.
I'll bet that millions of taxpayers' dollars will be squandered on closing the 'medal gap' at the next Olympics.

Australia still has some way to go.

God help us!

Mark's idea of success is to have "progressed" from a nation of people who did things, even if only played sport, to a nation who sit on their fattening ass, drinking oddball coffee, & vino, eating food cooked by someone else, talking about people who do things.

Mate I'll take the ocker with his pie, eating because he's hungry in preference to your caffe society type, eating something with an unpronounceable name, because "it's an experience".

I'll take the bloke with boat in tow going off to catch a fish, rather than your sophisticated SNAG eating some imported fish at the "latest" up market posers fish restaurant.

I'll take him with his hands smelling of fish & bait any time. But mate keep your citified type, with hands smelling of eau de cologne out of my sight, I really don't need to feel disgusted today.

If anything typifies the very worst of Oz today, it's your inner city chattering class, who would not recognise real life, even if it hit them on the head.

Yes, I too am wary of claims about our poor past.

Sure some things have changed for the better, but many of the older traits of Australia are worth preserving. This includes our love of sport, and a general attitude which mocks pretention.

I accept much of what Mark wrote, but fear that an undue dependence on China for so much of our raw material exports, and therefore our current prosperity, may yet sap this new-found self-confidence. We are riding a dangerous wave, depending on what we have, rather than what we are. We have become lazy, just digging things up and sending it north to China just as we once grew everything and sent it off to Britain. We need to diversify our markets and we need to do this soon.

I do not call being involed in all these illegal wars as a sign of maturity.Alarm bells should be ringing when anyone puts us into this Global contex that the UN wants.

Agenda 21 of the UN will enslave us all.

I sincerly hope Mark McCrindle's published works offer more in the way of substance than this vacuous piece.

Note McCrindle's fetish for "diversity" - he seems to think Australia is so much better now that our cities have been flooded with non-assimilating Third World immigrants.

Now, I concede that the top-down imposition of mass diverse immigration and multiculturalism has awarded us with a dazzling array of ethnic restaurants unparalleled in their exotic tastiness.

So, yes, we have a wider selection of foods ... but no one talks to anyone anymore. Many of us now speak different languages and wouldn't even know how to talk to one another. Rather than everybody feeling more at home, Australia has become an alien nation. Rather than everybody coming together, Australia has become a more fragmented, discordant society than ever before. The "crimson thread of kinship" that used to unite Australia has been shredded. Ethnic enclaves, ethnic crime, white flight, draconian race hate speech laws and identity politics are now ugly realities of Australian life and fly in the face of McCrindle's claim that Australia is a multicultural utopia.

Contemporary Australia is not only a less cohesive country than it used to be - it is also a dumber, cruder and less productive country. High culture has disappeared. Educational standards have been dumbed down. Moral standards have sunk into an abyss. Politeness and common decency are quaint relics. Our economy has been de-industrialised and our export profile now resembles that of a Third World country. Manufacturing - the driver of innovation and creativity - is practically on its deathbed. Secure full-time employment in productive industries has been replaced by casual, insecure jobs in the service, logistics, and retail sectors. Foreign companies now own large chunks of our economy and land. Our housing market has gone from being one of the most affordable in the Western world to the least affordable.

Sorry Mark, but I prefer the old Australia.