Australia’s richest people are by far the country’s biggest whingers.

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx highlighted that “constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones”.

These days it’s no longer viable for the rich and powerful and their political servants simply to deny the reality of climate change and other environmental challenges. The new fad is to talk up whatever (inevitably small-scale) green initiatives are happening, and spruik the array of magical technological fixes that, like Forrest’s beloved “green hydrogen”, are always somehow just on the verge of taking off.

The popularity of “build back better” as a slogan reflects that no-one in their right mind would be overly enthused by the idea of “building back the same”.

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, in Crime and Punishment, wrote, “The darker the night, the brighter the stars”.