The Queensland independent Bob Katter wants a return to an economic past that should be consigned to history.

If you've ever heard Bob Katter speak in his maddening, meandering, madcap way, you'd be very wary of opening up a 400-page book he'd just written.

So it's a relief to discover that the mind under the white 10-gallon hat writes much more coherently than it talks. Or maybe it's just better edited.

In his affectionate, idiosyncratic account of Australia's history, An Incredible Race of People, the founder of Katter's Australia Party reminds us of some traditional virtues worth preserving.

With the national news dominated by ugly examples of politicians with a distasteful sense of entitlement, Katter tries to explain how an MP might develop this sort of mindset:

"When I first went to Canberra a man in a uniform met me at the airport, called me 'sir,' and picked up my ports." (Queenslandese for bags, a contraction of the French portmanteau.) "I was deeply embarrassed. I said, 'My name is Bob, what's yours? And I carry my own ports, please don't touch them. Please don't open that door for me.

"As a member of Parliament, you travel first class on the airlines, have the chairman's lounge at airports at your disposal. A bit embarrassed by all this, I travel economy. But over the years, many maybe get sick of fighting it … Then, maybe slowly but insidiously, they come to expect it. And then they start to think, with all this VIP treatment, that they must be an 'important person'."

More effective than any code of conduct, integrity commissioner or federal ICAC would be the basics of courtesy, humanity and humility.

But the main thrust of the independent MP for the northern Queensland seat of Kennedy is to call for a return to an economic past that ought to remain in the past.

Katter is a nostalgist. He loved the past, and he wants all of it back. He wants the wool industry to be glorious again, Australia's biggest exporter. He looks out on a rugged electorate twice the size of Britain, and wants it filled with government projects. He wants a return to nation-building, governments creating more great projects on the scale of the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric scheme, a return to developmentalism, to an interventionist government, protected industries and arbitrated wages. He is guilty of a wild alarmism: "You have no manufacturing base, you have no agricultural base, you have no tourism base now," he said in a trademark rant on Meet the Press last weekend.

These sectors are all under pressure because of the high value of the Australian dollar. But manufacturing is about 8 per cent of Australia's GDP, about the same size as the mining sector. Australia is one of the world's 10 biggest food exporters. And tourism is still one of the country's top export earners.

Katter could be dismissed as a well-meaning but peripheral fuddy duddy but for two things. First, his Katter's Australia Party won 11.5 per cent of the vote and two seats at its first effort, the Queensland state election in March. Katter is encouraged to now field as many candidates as possible at the next federal election.

His new book is part election manifesto. The former National Party member who declined to support the Gillard minority government has the potential to be a new Pauline Hanson, an economic nationalist leading an insurgent force out of Queensland based on disgruntlement, confusion and nostalgia.

One key difference - Katter doesn't have the most hateful element of Hanson and her One Nation party. Despite the title of his book, Katter is no racist. Hansonism was based on prejudice nurtured in a superficial, modern ignorance of the deeper history of Northern Australia.

When Katter speaks of the "traditional homelands," he explicitly includes China as one of them: "Queensland in the 1890s had as many Chinese as Europeans." Quite true.

This makes Katter a more serious and nationally acceptable force than Hanson.

Second, Katter's assault on the contemporary Australian economy is not a lonely one. This week the national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, Paul Howes, made a startling speech at the National Press Club. "It's time to take control of our own economic destiny," said Howes. He called for a "plan that will deliver secure jobs for Australians - not just profits for the captains of industry".

His solution? It's broadly similar to the one Katter wants. Howes wants a return to an interventionist, highly regulated economy. He does not have the agrarian socialist strand of Katter, but he has the same broadly socialist approach of shouldering markets aside and putting government at the centre of the economy.

He said that Australian industry policy should learn from our Olympics policy: "We pick winners - focusing on areas where we have competitive strength, like swimming," supporting athletes with public monies through the Australian Institute of Sport.

"But when it comes to our income- and job-generating industries, we expect them to stand or fall on their own two feet." The point, he said, was all about generating jobs.

Howes's speech is startling because he seems to be bristling at the concept of a competitive, market-based economy. This is at the very centre of Australia's economic success.

Howes rejects the entire edifice that Hawke and Keating, then Howard and Costello, put in place. Oddly, he paid tribute to Paul Keating and Bill Kelty as "Titans of Labor" even as he called for the dismantling of the framework they worked so hard to put in place.

Howes called for the re-regulation of the Australian dollar, the re-regulation of the banking system, and for the government to invest taxpayers' money in the industries that will "be producing the goods and services that Chinese consumers want". Assuming, of course, that planning bureaucrats will be able to predict their tastes.

The analogy with Olympic athletes is appealing yet false. In the Olympics, the events and the rules are well established and entirely predictable. Only the most promising athletes need to be "picked". In the economy, even the events of the future of wealth-generation are unknown and unpredictable.

For instance, in the late '90s the internet revolution was raging, the dotcom boom gripped Wall Street, Australia was mocked for being hopelessly old-fashioned with its commodity economy, and a chorus of voices called on the government to "do something".

Of course, the boom became the tech wreck and led the US into recession. Australia sailed through and its commodity economy turned out to be pretty handy after all.

If the government of the day had responded to the faddism and panic of the day and "picked winners", it could have been disastrous. The ever-changing world economy is utterly unlike a predictable sporting event. Flexibility, not rigidity, is central.

Australia spent a century "picking winners". It didn't work. It penalised competitive companies and sectors and propped up burdensome ones. It was quixotic.

Howes, 31, is less than half the age of Katter, 67, so he doesn't have the excuse of nostalgia. He seems to be responding reflexively to the mood of his members. He describes them as angry about the cost of living, confused about the economic future, and feeling left out of the mining boom: "In fact, most Australians aren't better off."

Katter may be coming from the populist right, and Howes from the centre-left, but both are coming from the same place - the past. In fact, their mindset has a common ancestor. Katter's hero is "Red Ted" Theodore, a towering Queensland Labor politician in the 1920s and '30s. He was also one of the founders of the union that was to become the one that Howes leads today, the AWU.

Howes might be dismissed as a peripheral special interest pleader but for two things. First, he carries considerable influence. The AWU is a major force in the Labor movement and caries a bloc of votes in the Gillard government. He is a member of Gillard's Manufacturing Taskforce.

Second, the fact that he can praise Keating and Kelty yet fundamentally misunderstand what they created is a clear warning sign. The inheritors of Australia's success do not understand it. That puts it at risk.

Indeed, one of the architects of the modern Australian economy, the former Treasury secretary Ken Henry, recently told his former colleagues that "the policy framework is under greater attack now than at any time since we put it into place" in the 1980s.

Perhaps even more disturbingly, none of the national leadership is defending it. The bipartisan consensus on the source of Australian prosperity is under siege, but the battlements are undefended by the Gillard government or the Abbott opposition.

To the outside world, this is bizarre. Australia is now recognised worldwide as one of the most successful economies on earth.

In the very week that Katter and Howes railed against the failures of the Australian economy and demanded fundamental change, the OECD named Australia as the country with the best overall conditions among all the rich nations in the world.

Katter cheerfully relates that he's only ever left Australia once, on a trip to Brazil. He needs to get out more. And Howes says that jobs are the whole point of the economy. Australia's unemployment of 4.9 per cent is the envy of the world.

Both men have some sensible things to say, and there is much that Australia can do better. The country that built the Snowy scheme now has grave trouble building a new airport. And the popular anger and confusion that Howes talks of is a clarion call for national leadership.

The mining boom has put tremendous pressure on the non-mining economy. The country could better manage the boom, and it could better support innovation and growth.

But a panicked, uncomprehending wrecking of Australia's modern success would be national vandalism on an unforgivable scale, no matter how you say it.

Those Weren't The Days