I see this attitude as reflecting the "terra nullius" origin of European colonization: Australia is completely empty and undeveloped (as long as we ignore the people who already live here of course!) so there are no consequences of our actions. Plus we're all far away from "civilisation", and nothing we do here interests people "back home" so presumably it doesn't matter what we do.

Add to that the unprecedented (truly unprecedented, world wide) growth of the economy (where "growth" is measured only against the things we choose to measure, i.e. GDP) thanks to being a mining colony of China and presto: we're great! A bunch of pollies were along for the ride while Chinese technocrats happened to channel a bunch of cash Australia's way, and decided that they were responsible for "success" they had nothing to do with. Why plan for the future?

I live now in the USA where the problems are really really bad. I still have hope that the lucky country will come to its senses. Australia has so much wealth to work with. Compare it to, say, Russia, also a primarily extractive economy: the two countries have roughly the same size of economy but Russia divides it over 5X the number of people, and has if anything an even less diversified, and far more corrupt economy.