The belief that relations between the old Australian population and migrants should be governed by the ideal of multiculturalism was threatened by a growing conviction that one or other of the religious-ethnic groups - ''Asians'' first, then after Tampa and September 11, ''Muslims'' - posed a threat to national cohesion. Because of the influence of a crass new cohort of right-wing commentators - Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones, Miranda Devine, Janet Albrechtsen - the cultural struggle against old patterns of racism was reinterpreted as the arrogant attempt of self-appointed thought police to impose their elitist values on the commonsense virtues of ordinary people.

The greatest enemy of Australian self-criticism and reinvention was the man elected PM in 1996. John Howard was disdainful of what he called the perpetual symposium on national identity. During his prime ministership, self-criticism gradually became confused with un-Australian self-hatred.

Howard sought to reduce the shame of the indigenous dispossession to a blemish on the otherwise glorious pages of Australian history. Under his influence, Australians were encouraged to take pride in the success of the postwar migration program but to resist the divisive ideology of multiculturalism. Under his influence, the national imagination was militarised, with Gallipoli increasingly unchallengeable as Australia's sacred soil.

Yet the political and cultural complacency that gradually overtook the nation was more insidious than this. Having demonstrated their political and moral superiority in their defeat of the totalitarian Soviet state, the United States and some of its closest anglophone allies, including Australia, managed to convince themselves that they could do no serious political and moral wrong.

The most striking instance of this conviction came in the case of the invasion of Iraq. Although Iraq was invaded against the will of the UN Security Council; although the invasion was justified on the basis of fraudulent intelligence and immediately plunged Iraq into years of astonishing chaos in which more than 100,000 civilians were killed and millions more forced to flee their homes - the three leaders who had mounted the invasion were handsomely voted back to power in the following elections. Howard increased his 2001 majority in the election of 2004. For his role in the illegal and humanly catastrophic invasion of Iraq, there was no price to pay.

A more important example of the new Australian complacency arose, however, over the question of climate change.

Australia Smug In Its Prosperity