Land of Plenty, The: Australia in the 2000s

The book that tells the story of Australia today: how we got here, and where we're going. A blistering exposé and manifesto for every Australian.

Australia, Davis argues, is built on a dream. A unique democratic experiment, we were once world leaders in developing a uniquely pluralist society. But this has become a dream unfulfilled; a dream betrayed. This book will tell the story of how we have gone backwards and betrayed our national ethos, why this has happened, and how to rebuild it.

Unlike other recent books on Australia today, this will be written entirely from the perspective of suburban Australia. Like Donald Horne's seminal The Lucky Country, this book assumes that the suburb is the fundamental social unit of Australian society and that all political change will be measured in terms of the anxieties and aspirations of the millions of Australians who live there, either in major cities or increasingly suburbanised country towns.

The Land of Plenty will look at how Australians lived under Howard's leadership, and through the broader set of global and historical changes that Howard represented. Rather than being a "book of the left", it will be a book in which every major constituency in Australia has its point of view and attitudes represented in their own terms, with the whole forming an argument about what the nation might become.