The last six chapters have sought to bring the two worldviews together. They have sought to integrate them into a single more sophisticated picture of how the world works. And they have sought to build a shared framework in which both sides can run their arguments and make their case. But that isn't all they've done. In integrating the worldviews, they've hinted at a deeper source of Australia's discontent. And a way of fixing it.

Let me pull together the steps of the argument that I have been surreptitiously planting over the course of the book. First, let's recap on the transition from the Australian Settlement to economic rationalism. I argued that this transition wasn't just a shift from one way of organising our economy to another. Rather, they each embodied a set of values. They created different relationships between the people and government, and people's relationships to each other. The Australian Settlement had a strong sense of our collective ability to manage ourselves and it encouraged co-operative relationships between people. It bred high levels of social trust. By contrast, economic rationalism handed responsibility for managing our communities over to the market. It encouraged people to feel that we had no collective control over the society we live in. And it told us that the only way we could ensure our own safety and prosperity was to compete against one another.