Book reviewer COLIN STEELE recently came across a secondhand copy of a book published in pre-internet 1975 in which 15 “leading Australians” forecast how the country would look in 2025. How close did they get?

In 1975 “fifteen leading Australians”, nearly all male, were commissioned to write chapters for Australia 2025, a book in which they envisaged how Australia would look in 2025. 

It was published in Melbourne by Electrolux Pty Ltd, then at the height of its Australian workforce. A sign of the times came in 2016 when the Swedish owners closed its Australian factory in Orange. Refrigerators could now be made more cost effectively overseas, particularly in South-East Asia and Eastern Europe.

What the authors didn’t get right was the impact of the internet, both technologically and socially, climate change, renewable energies and the role of women in society, with several authors commenting on what “man” would be doing in 2025.

The extent of globalisation and free trade and the rise of inequality was not envisaged in the chapters on the global economy and trading futures, nor the rise of China.

John Bronner, the chief economist for BHP, foresaw an annual 5 per cent growth rate in Australia, while Sir Charles Court, in his chapter, saw Australia as a major industrial power in 2025.

BHP’s Sir Ian McClennan (thankfully, knighthood honours were later phased out) predicted a continued major reliance on fossil fuels and the belief that nuclear energy would be the principal energy source and available to produce significant power in Australia by 1990. A reality check for 2025 predictions?

Sir Peter Abeles also saw “nuclear power as proof of man’s ability to harness the forces of nature” but also wondered whether solar energy could be harnessed and that electric cars could be developed. His prediction of vertical takeoff aircraft, airships and wind-driven ships has been less realised.

Melbourne University historian Dr Lloyd Robson, who died in 1990, in his introductory overview, gets quite a few things right –“the pastoral industry in 2025 will be controlled by fewer and fewer people and interest groups”. His low prediction of 20 million people by 2025 missed the subsequent mass migrations, although he does forecast Asian immigration – “exotic newcomers”. He writes: “It would be greatly helped if such immigrants were lower middle class and hence adhering to some of the Australian values.”

 A long-term prediction by Robson was that authoritarian governments will emerge in Australia coinciding with a move to the political right by 2025. Dutton, anyone? He writes: “While they have coins to jingle in their pockets, the Australian people will not care who runs the country”. Will “It’s the economy stupid scenario” prevail in 2025?

Overly optimistic was his view that “vastly improved public transport systems to alleviate the expansion of the suburbs” would occur. In Robson’s 1975 Australia, “where the male still feels the need to express his masculinity”, he credits the unisex trend of fashion as a future factor for change rather than the extrapolation of the activities of the Women’s Electoral Lobby.

He saw Australia’s indigenous community as “being treated as equals by some European Australians”. The chapter entitled “Aborigines” by then Senator Neville Bonner simply concludes by asking for “a fair-go”. Closing the gap still has a long way to go.

Australia Post’s Eber Lane seems to have taken the year 2000 as a benchmark and largely misses out on the scale of the telecommunication revolution, although he is spot on when he warns against “the potential of integrated communications for authoritarian manipulation and control of society”.

Prominent arts advisor, Jean Battersby, who saw the cost of the “computer in the home” as probably costing about “as much as the average family car”, predicts successfully the impact on leisure in terms of Kindle-type book access and the delivery of online services. She warns, however, in that process we may see “our children and grandchildren all turned into bland, passive, wide-eyed nincompoops, drugged by the unimagined excesses of long exposure” to streaming media.

The chapter, “The Australian Home”, by Sir Roy Grounds argues there would be a continuous reduction of the number of multi-storey flats for family occupancy and “many by 2025 will be demolished and replaced by open, landscaped spaces, some of which will be allocated at low rental for individual or family group – used to produce fresh vegetables – because the cost of labour for the production of fresh foods will be beyond the economic means of the average Australian”. Wrong and right!

David Scott, president of the Australian Council of Social Service also presents a rather utopian outlook in his chapter “Social Welfare”, although concluding that this will only be achieved if we are not impacted “by the narrow self-interest of minority groups having excessive power over decisions and communications”.

Making predictions is always difficult, but the relative stability of the last 50 years, despite several economic and military crises, has enabled some of the commentators to be reasonably accurate. Those who wish to predict what will happen by 2075 will have a much more difficult task given present global scenarios.