Leadership Quote by Anthony Albanese

Calling Australia "the lucky country" is never just a compliment; it’s a loaded inheritance. The phrase famously began as a barb from Donald Horne, aimed at a nation coasting on prosperity and geography while mistaking good fortune for virtue. Anthony Albanese flips it into a governing slogan, but keeps the sting: yes, we’re lucky, and that’s precisely why complacency is the real enemy.

The line is built like a soft rebuke. "We are" grants the comforting story Australians like to tell about themselves: stable democracy, resources, institutions that mostly work. Then the pivot: "but we can’t take that for granted". It’s a warning shot to an electorate that can read security as permanence. In a country where politics often revolves around protecting a lifestyle rather than redesigning it, "for granted" doubles as moral language: entitlement dressed up as normalcy.

"We have to work at it" is deliberately plain, almost anti-poetic. That’s the point. Albanese is selling responsibility without the sermon. The subtext is that luck isn’t an economic plan, and it’s not a climate strategy, a housing policy, or a social contract. The "we" is also doing political heavy lifting: it spreads ownership beyond Parliament, implying a shared duty while insulating government from being the sole custodian of outcomes.

Context matters: post-pandemic fragility, cost-of-living pressure, global instability, and the long hangover of underinvestment in public capacity. Albanese’s intent is to recast national pride as a verb, not a noun - a country you maintain, not just inhabit.