One hundred years ago Don Dunstan was born and 50 years ago, in October 1976, the then South Australian premier published a cookbook. It sounds like a charming eccentricity of the era. It was actually a small expression of a much larger political idea.

Don Dunstan’s Cookbook provides an unexpected window into a conception of social democracy that has largely disappeared from Australian politics. The author was concerned not simply with increasing incomes, consumption or economic activity. He wanted to enlarge what people and society collectively were capable of doing.

That is why the cookbook belongs in the same political story as public housing, multiculturalism, environmental protection, cultural institutions and industrial democracy.

Peter Strawhan, whose doctoral research examined the importance of food and drink in Dunstan’s political and private life, tells us that the cookbook sold around 40,000 copies in two print runs within months. Its recipes ranged across Indian, Malay and European traditions. Dunstan grew food, cooked it, served it and regarded eating as both pleasure and social experience.

In 1976 this was more culturally significant than it sounds today. When Dunstan demonstrated stir-frying on television, his editor did not know what a wok was. Dunstan was telling an overwhelmingly Anglo-Australian audience that the knowledge migrants brought with them was not peripheral to Australian culture. It could transform it.

This was multiculturalism made tangible.

The book made it clear that migrants came with knowledge, skills and traditions that expanded the capabilities of the whole society. That Australian culture itself could become richer through encounter and exchange.

Look across the wider Dunstan project and the same idea repeatedly appears.

Public housing was not simply a residual service for those who failed in the private market. The South Australian Housing Trust provided affordable housing, supported industrial development and helped create communities. Secure housing gave people the foundation upon which other capabilities could be built.

Culture was approached similarly. The Festival Centre, State Theatre Company, Jam Factory and South Australian Film Corporation were not primarily justified through estimates of visitor expenditure or their contribution to gross state product. They helped South Australians make theatre, film, music, glass, furniture and art.

The distinction is fundamental.

A government that buys an event purchases activity. A government that develops artists, technicians, filmmakers, institutions, venues and audiences builds capability.

One disappears when the event leaves town. The other accumulates.

The most radical expression of this philosophy was industrial democracy. Dunstan’s government was prepared to ask a question now almost absent from Australian political debate: if democracy is valuable in political life, why should it largely disappear when people arrive at work?

South Australia established an Industrial Democracy Unit. The experiment encountered resistance and did not survive the political and economic changes surrounding the end of the Dunstan era. But the ambition remains striking. Democracy was being imagined not simply as voting periodically but as participation in economic life.

Put industrial democracy beside Dunstan’s cookbook and a surprisingly coherent political philosophy emerges.

People should not merely consume food; they should acquire the knowledge and confidence to grow and cook it. They should not merely consume culture; they should possess the institutions and skills to create it. They should not merely occupy houses; they should have the security necessary to build lives and communities. They should not simply sell their labour; they should have some influence over their working lives.

This might be called the Dunstan capability state.

It offers a striking contrast with the vocabulary that has progressively colonised Australian political economy over the past four decades: growth, productivity and activity.

Governments celebrate billions of dollars of investment attracted, developments approved, construction commenced and events secured. Housing becomes an asset class. Universities become export industries. Culture becomes a visitor-economy strategy. Public land awaits ‘activation’. Success is increasingly measured by the volume of economic activity generated.

The problem is not that growth and productivity are irrelevant. It is that neither tells us enough about the society being created.

An economy can grow while becoming less capable. A city can experience a property boom while becoming less capable of housing its citizens affordably. A nation can spend hundreds of billions on defence while possessing diminishing capacity to manufacture what it needs. Universities can increase revenues while losing intellectual breadth. Governments can outsource functions while destroying their own institutional knowledge.

Economic activity can therefore increase while collective capability declines. We need another organising framework: capability, sustainability and inclusion.

Capability asks what individuals, communities, industries and public institutions are actually able to do. Sustainability asks whether those capabilities can endure without destroying the ecological and material foundations upon which they depend. Inclusion asks who possesses the resources, security, rights and power necessary to participate.

Dunstan did not govern using this terminology, and the Dunstan years should not be romanticised. His governments made mistakes, faced serious economic constraints and left ambitions unrealised.

But there was a breadth to the political imagination that has become difficult to find.

Government could build institutions rather than merely purchase services. It could shape markets rather than simply facilitate them. It could build housing, develop industries, protect environments, foster culture and redistribute power. It could ask not merely how to make the economy larger, but how to make society more capable of determining its own future.

Which brings us back to the cookbook.

Growing, preparing, serving and sharing food sounds a long way from political economy. Dunstan understood that it was not. A good society consists partly of people possessing the knowledge, time, security, institutions and freedom to do worthwhile things well.

That is a considerably larger ambition than managing economic growth and compensating some of its casualties.

Fifty years after Dunstan picked up a wok and showed Australians another way of cooking, perhaps it is time to recover the larger recipe. The purpose of social democracy should not merely be to help people survive the economy. It should give them greater capability to shape their lives, their society and their common future.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.