Anthony Albanese might be wary of voter backlash but there’s a cost to doing nothing

Labor luminary and economic reform maestro Paul Keating once berated the Coalition for squandering its long post-war run in office under Robert Menzies. An era, Keating taunted, when conservatives injected Australia with a “near-lethal dose of fogeyism”. “When they put the country into neutral and where we very gently ground to a halt in the nowhere land of the early 1980s, with a dependency on commodities that would not pay for our imports”. History doesn’t repeat but there are plenty of echoes. Australia is a nation adrift, confronted by staggering global, intergenerational, welfare, security, energy and climate challenges, seemingly unsure…