KEY POINTS:
In 1964 the Australian social commentator Donald Horne coined the term "the lucky country". Although Horne was specifically and waspishly referring to mineral wealth - "Australia is a lucky country," he wrote, "run by second-rate people who share its luck" - the phrase caught on.
Thereafter he had to put up with people using it indiscriminately and without a trace of irony.
Still, it couldn't be denied that the Aussie, Aussie, Aussie cheerleaders who hijacked the phrase had plenty to be smug about. Great climate, beaut beaches, wide-open spaces, and a numerically insignificant, pliant, otherworldly indigenous minority - what more could you want in a land of opportunity?
New Zealanders are all too well aware of the lure of the lucky country: every week 600 Kiwis decide a better life awaits on the other side of the ditch.
No wonder our politicians and business leaders fret over a migration pattern which, contrary to Rob Muldoon's famous jibe that it "raises the IQ levels in both countries", has resulted in many of New Zealand's best and brightest opting for Queensland's endless summers or the cosmopolitan diversions and opportunities of Sydney and Melbourne.
But according to the latest in the barrage of increasingly apocalyptic reports on climate change (last month's worst-case scenario is this month's feeble-minded optimism), the lucky country's winning streak is coming to an abrupt and unpleasant end.
The draft report of an - as opposed to the - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that Australia's main agricultural region will get up to 25 per cent less rainfall by 2050, a frightening prospect for a land where drought already seems to be a fact of life.
The outlook for Sydney is particularly bleak. According to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), in less than 25 years Sydney's climate will be similar to that currently endured by the stoic inhabitants of the parched and stifling interior.
Life can't be much fun out there on the edge of the desert but at least they don't have to worry about storm-inspired sea surges that will turn Sydney's coastal suburbs into New South Atlantis.
If the boffins are on the money, the opponents of recycling waste water for drinking (to happen in parts of Queensland as early as next year) will eventually be viewed as the equally deluded descendants of those who campaigned against fluoridation, ten o'clock closing, and Sunday shopping.
Only rabid anti-Australians could see a silver lining in the CO2 layer, but it does raise the possibility that within a decade or two the trans-Tasman migration pattern could be spectacularly reversed. That might sound fanciful, but if you were stuck in a sweltering dustbowl drinking water the origins of which simply don't bear thinking about, wouldn't you cast longing glances in the direction of clean, green, temperate New Zealand where the biggest glaciers are advancing rather than shrinking?
Sure, climate change will probably affect us too, but to take the robust, glass-half-full approach, would a slightly warmer climate be such a bad thing? Besides, in this context, a few extra degrees will be neither here nor there to Sydneysiders for whom a 40-degree scorcher will be a normal summer's day.
All of which prompts the delicate question of how many Australians would be too many. There are 20 million of the sweaty little buggers so if even a quarter of them decided to come, they could just about take the place over. Wouldn't that be a grim irony? Having had to put up with them mocking our accent and complaining about Kiwi dole bludgers for all these years, we wake up one fine day (expected high 30 degrees) to find that we've been invaded by an army of Shanes and Rayleens with accents that make fingernails on a blackboard sound like a choir of angels.
Maybe that's why our exciting new Opposition Leader John Key this week portrayed New Zealand as a tinderbox with a seething underclass that could go to the barricades at the drop of a baseball cap. Perhaps he has been keeping a weather eye on developments in Australia and believes that we need to start re-branding Godzone as a riot-torn banana republic to forestall the great Aussie influx.
If not, if he's, as they say, calling it as he sees it, then the question is: what does he intend to do about it? The conservative side of politics used to take a fatalistic approach to social and economic inequality - as Winston Churchill put it, "some men are more equal than others" - and tended to think governmental efforts to level the playing field were counter-productive, if not actually the thin end of the Commie wedge.
It was left to Labourites like Bob Hawke to wallow in warm fuzzies, as in his 1987 declaration that no Australian child would live in poverty by 1990. (Now that's what I call a lucky country).
But it was the Republican Herbert Hoover who, in the 1928 presidential election, promised Americans a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. What they actually got was the Great Depression.
