The Lucky Country? Reinventing Australia is a clever reprise, using Horne's work as a foil and lens to see what has – and hasn't – happened in the half century since Horne's book first appeared. Its structure is simpler than the original. It reviews changes in the areas of environment, geography, society, and economy, followed by a conclusion called 'Balance'. Its ambition is the same.

Lowe is a public servant in the true sense of the term – a captivating public speaker, a science writer with innumerable articles and books on issues such as global warming and population growth, former chair of the committee that oversaw the 1996 national State of the Environment Report, former president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, a contributor to numerous inquiries on sustainability and nuclear power, and more. This book is full of himself in the best sense of the term. Lowe's autobiographical presence is light-handed, personable, direct – using his long experience of public engagement to authorise his views, enabling him to dwell on issues he has "championed, confronted, or opposed.

By any assessment, Australia has changed profoundly since the mid-1960s. Its population has more than doubled. Waves of immigration from Italy, Greece, the Middle East, and Asia, and the recognition of indigenous rights and culture have added complexity to its Anglo-Irish mix.

When Horne wrote, towards the end of the Menzies era, Australia was deeply conservative politically, firmly in the grip of the Cold War, still embedded in its historical relationship with the Mother Country, but straining culturally and militarily towards its new postwar 'Best Friend', the United States. It was more self-contained economic-ally. Since, Australia has shifted from a manufacturing base producing for local consumption, and rural industries dominated by wool and wheat exports destined for Europe, to a service sector economy importing Asian goods, and an export economy vulnerably focused around three types of raw materials – iron ore, coal, and gas. In 1964 some twenty-nine per cent of Australia's GDP was sent overseas. Imports came mainly from the United Kingdom and the United States. Exports now represent some forty-two per cent of GDP. Half (by value) are sent mainly to China and Japan, and imports come mainly from Asia, predominantly China. In other words, even if Australia still refuses to consider itself 'a part of Asia' – Horne's view fifty years earlier – economically, it is now integrally Asian.

Over the last five decades we have lived through – and been scarred by – two mining booms, a global economic crisis, and the slowing of external resource markets upon which we now desperately depend. We have been involved in five wars – Vietnam, Iraq I and II, Afghanistan, and Syria. More native plants and animals are extinct or threatened by extinction, more land degraded. Our contributions to global carbon pollution are greater.

In all, Australia has become more complex culturally, socially, and politically. We are more globally entangled. Our economy is more integrated globally but is also more vulnerable. Our environment has been devastated by the pressures of industrialisation, urbanisation, industrialised farming, and population growth. Lowe describes many of these changes. He looks forensically at the mining and energy sectors where the production and domestic use of fossil fuels – as opposed to renewables – have made Australia the fifteenth largest national contributor to global warming. He criticises Australia's involvement in the nuclear cycle and spurns the prospect of a domestic nuclear power industry as a slow, dangerous, and uneconomic way to confront climate change.

Immigration has relieved us of the dull, monocultural Anglocentrism that blanketed Australia even through the 1960s, and Lowe recognises the cultural benefits. But he sees continuing high rates of immigration and population growth – flimsily justified by politicians as economically beneficial – as ultimately unsustainable. Cutting immigration to replacement levels (70,000 per annum) would still leave plenty of opportunity for a generous refugee quota, he argues, and relieve the mounting pressures on our groaning urban infrastructure and exhausted environment.

Lowe, who has had a long association with the scientific research and high-er education sectors, details the ways in which both have been run down through a lack of funding and commercialisation, in the first instance, and privatisation in the second. His account of the long-term impact of the Dawkins reforms on tertiary education is stinging and masterful.

Many of these trends and impacts are symptoms, Lowe suggests, of a deeper disorder, namely of a global – and national – economic system based on the fantasy of endlessly increasing resource use and an almost blind faith in markets. Returning to the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth report, he argues that such economic growth has not served us well: it is built on an unsustainable exploitation of the natural world and has also increased disparities in incomes and wealth.

As will be clear by now, this is an ambitious, important, wide-ranging, and provocative book. Yet it is also trouble-some in unintended ways. Lowe is rightly disturbed by the trajectories he outlines, and by their underlying drivers. But he doesn't really answer the question – why is our response so weak? A persistent tyranny of second-rate leadership? If so, why? Are our institutions really up to the challenge? If not, why not? Can we shake the political end economic dominance of neo-liberalism? If so, how?

Lowe's critique is haunted by nostalgia for a simpler and more orderly Australia. This is most evident when he considers 'our critical dependence on the globalised economy', where the book's shortcomings are clearest. Lowe seems implicitly to advocate for a more self-contained society and insular economy as necessary for sustainability. The implications of deglobalisation and 'localisation' need to be interrogated, but Lowe stops short of providing a complex analysis of what disentanglement might mean domestically, politically, economically, and socially. How difficult might such a program be, and what would its implications be for our international relations and security? Perhaps the answer lies in a different sort of global integration – also not for the faint-hearted – with equity and ecological sustainability at its core.

In all, while Lowe's book is a significant contribution to the genre of critical interrogations of our national condition that Horne kicked off fifty years ago, its weakness (like many in this genre) is that it spends more time rehearsing the problems than on the 'reinventing Australia' part – appropriately in smaller font on the cover.