Until then, most asylum seekers were treated more harshly than criminals. People must have known what was happening in the infamous detention centres - there was plenty of media coverage - but apparently they didn't care. Politicians used ''border protection'' as a fear trigger, and it seemed to work. Politics was a very different game back then. Party machines had ground the last shreds of ideology into media-sized pellets, and Australia had caught the American disease - grafting commercial marketing techniques onto political campaigning. By 2013, elections had become a battle between competing slogans and advertising campaigns. Needless to say, this eroded voters' respect for politicians, reducing them and their parties to mere brands. Vast sums of money had to be raised to pay for all that advertising, so there were constant scandals about so-called ''political donations'' and the potential for corruption. You'll find this one hard to believe: in 2013, government money was being poured into non-government schools, including some that were already very wealthy. Taxpayers were (apparently cheerfully) subsidising private schools attended by kids whose parents wanted them to have a ''separate'' education, based on socio-cultural elitism or religion, while the public education system was pleading for more funding. The resulting two-tiered school system hastened Australia's retreat from egalitarianism. These days, with the egalitarian spirit revived and budgets even tighter, we accept that if you want such luxuries, you pay for them yourself.

In 2012, they had an inquiry into school funding, but it was hidebound by a government decree that no private school should lose a single dollar of government funding as a result of its recommendations. So the proposed massive increase in funding for state schools never happened: no one could find the extra $15 billion needed, and a conservative government later scrapped the whole idea. In the meantime, New South Wales actually reduced its budget for public education. The mass transit revolution was yet to come. In 2013, they were relying heavily on petroleum-powered road transport for people and freight. There was not a single high-speed train. Airfares were too cheap: flying in the dirty jet aircraft of that era was an act of environmental vandalism that should have been restricted, not encouraged. Professional sport appears to have been one of their most popular forms of distraction. It supplied the populace with tribes, totems, rituals and festivals, plus a pantheon of heroes to rival the saints of traditional religion. In fact, sport appeared to have replaced religion as the Marxist ''opiate of the masses'': the religious counter-punch came later. In these frugal and health-conscious times, it's hard to imagine that highly acidic carbonated drinks, laden with fructose and caffeine, were as popular in 2013 as tobacco had once been. The processed food lobby wielded such power that manufacturers were free to market products known to promote obesity, without any health warnings. When you look at the burden placed on the primitive healthcare system by the obesity epidemic, you wonder why the regulators didn't act more quickly. But here's the biggest question: how could they have ignored all the warnings about the looming impact of the Great Warming? With global temperatures now up by almost 4 degrees, it looks as if the Great Warming has been responsible for the deaths of 2 billion people so far. That's better than was feared, thanks to some revolutionary mitigation projects that secured food and water supplies and suppressed the spread of mosquito-borne disease, but there may be worse to come.

In some countries, the early signs of climate change had been a catalyst for programs to develop clean and renewable energy sources, but there was no sense of urgency in Australia. Even if it was too late to avert disaster for much of the world's population, surely people realised a clean planet would be better than a dirty one for the survivors. And yet, in 2013, Australia was still extending its coalmining and fracking operations. Did they really not get it? Was it because they were more concerned about economics than ecology? (You'd hope not, though that would explain how they were able to mock or ignore the scientists' predictions.) Or was it simply that they wanted to believe everything would go on as it was? ''Go on as it was''? In fact, they weren't doing as brilliantly in 2013 as they thought they were. Rampant alcohol abuse; an unhealthy obsession with self-esteem; soaring levels of stress; millions drugged with antidepressants and tranquillisers; poorly paid teachers; many women paid less than men for doing the same work; the sharemarket run like a casino; more than 100,000 homeless; ludicrously low taxes on the uber-wealthy … and cotton farming in the driest continent on earth! How did they let all that happen? Still, top marks to them for being able to sing ''our home is girt by sea'' with a straight face.

Social researcher Hugh Mackay's latest book, The Good Life, will be published in May by Pan Macmillan.