MELBOURNE, Australia — Australia cruised through the 2008 global financial crisis on the back of a massive minerals boom. China could not get enough of its iron ore. The lucky country, rich enough to be a laid-back country, proved its good fortune once again. After agriculture and wool came coal and ore. Meltdowns were for losers.

In the United States, there is the affectation of industriousness. People like to make it appear they work all the time. In Australia, as the environmentalist Tim Flannery observed, there is the affectation of effortlessness. People are determined to make it appear they are not working too hard. Sometimes that is the case.

But some of the angst endemic to the developed world, with its lost manufacturing jobs and squeezed opportunities, has seeped of late into the irreverent Australian psyche. The minerals bonanza and commodities frenzy are over. Jobs in services are beginning to follow manufacturing offshore. For many young Australians the only way to get into the stratospheric Sydney housing market, inflated by rule-of-law-seeking Chinese buyers, is to wait for parents to die. Unemployment is not high, but underemployment is. Australia is America’s ally in an increasingly Chinese neighborhood; that could be problematic. The next big thing is unclear.

Could Australia’s luck have run out? Is it ripe for the politics of anger that play well these days from the United States to Austria?