If Australia hadn't had a federalist model, I hate to think how far ahead of us they would be.

My major frustration this year has not been our Covid approach, but the fact we seem to have given up.

We handled the outbreak reasonably well. We could have isolated earlier, we could have closed the border earlier, we could have done quarantine earlier, but once we got there, it worked, and outbreaks aside, it's gone pretty well.

But that’s where it appeared to end, that's where we seem to have rested on our laurels, we've just spent the rest of the year going “look at us, we are the envy of the world.”

And when any one questions whether we might want to actually do a bit more, they sight Britain or America as reasons why we don’t want to. There are, of course, parts of the world, namely Asia, you don’t hear so much about. That's because the mainstream media is lazy, mainly because it doesn’t suit our cause.

And that cause should be to out shine everyone, to take a great start, and build on it. Sort of like Australia is. Yes, Victoria made a hash of it, but that wasn’t Canberra's fault, it was Melbourne's. Adelaide may be the same, we'll see.

But their Prime Minister is in Japan doing business. Why? Because he's a go getter. Their government job website, as we now know, is enticing workers from here to there. Why? Because they're go getters. Instead of sitting around having meetings, which we are, as to why people can't get workers, they're actually hiring them. They've actually got a bubble going, we aren't reciprocating.

What I want for us is desire. A desire to do better, be better, and to be proactive. If we don’t, we will be left behind. Australia is our greatest destination for talent. The brain drain goes one way and we are in danger of watching it get fired up.

They have tax cuts, less economic damage from lockdown , and a job market with incentives. Just how much more of this do we want to watch and not respond to before we start having the usual panicked conversation about why everyone has moved west?

Our fear, conservatism, and lack of drive will kill us. Yes, we did well, but then we stopped.

Australia didn’t. Scott Morrison said this week never let the fear of going back stop you going forward.

He's living that, and we're paralysed watching.