Thursday night shopping on Rowe Street, Eastwood, in the heart of the federal electorate of Bennelong, is a lively slice of modern Sydney. The voices jostling to be heard on Rowe Street are as likely to be talking in Cantonese, Mandarin or Korean as they are in English.

The Eastwood Public School, which dominates half the street, conducts Chinese language and singing classes on Saturday mornings.

This is a near perfect snapshot of how the country is changing. The monoculturalism that John Howard would recall from his early days as a parliamentarian more than 30 years ago has collapsed.

The same is true of Moorooka on the south side of Brisbane, where I grew up in the 1960s. Now, many African families enliven the suburb and, as my mother says (with more than a hint of criticism of my irregular attendance), a lot of them go to mass, helping to fill the once empty pews.

This is where the paradox comes in. For as much as we've changed, we've also stayed the same. Australian culture is a resilient beast and it tends to conquer all. The professional couples flocking to the open inspections looking for the perfectly renovated Californian bungalow in a lovely tree-lined street in Eastwood may have seen the ad in one of the many Chinese-language property weeklies.

But when it comes to that fundamental test of Australianness, the purchase of real estate, we ask the same questions: How do I get a good deal? How much debt is manageable? And will there be a midyear interest rate hike that I should factor in?

I'm sure that the young couple leaning over to inspect the CaesarStone kitchen bench tops will recall the Prime Minister's promise in 2004 to keep interest rates at record lows, but I'll remind them anyway.

epping real estate homebuyers

And I bet all potential homebuyers, whether in Eastwood or Epping - or Moorooka, for that matter - will carefully consider the comments of former Reserve Bank governor Ian Macfarlane. He nailed the interest rate question once and for all in the 2006 Boyer Lectures when he said that it was on John Howard's watch, as treasurer in Malcolm Fraser's government in 1982, that interest rates hit a record high of 21 per cent.

Here are a few other early observations about what I think will be key issues in the battle for Bennelong, the community that I seek to represent on behalf of Kevin Rudd and the federal Labor Party.

Bennelong has a high proportion of working women across the income and occupational spectrum. They are managers, teachers, retail workers, nurses and cleaners, and many of them happen to think that Work Choices is a real stinker.

As The Australian's Paul Kelly noted in these pages recently, Work Choices is now an issue of perception, values and philosophy. What utterly bewilders hard-working Australians, and particularly women re-entering the work force after having children, is why on earth we need a punitive set of industrial laws instead of a creative set of negotiated solutions that will help families fulfil their obligations at work and at home.

I only had to spend a short time helping out in the recent NSW state election to hear the stories. Deputy Premier and local state member John Watkins stood patiently as he copped an earful from a local nurse about a range of grievances. She then insisted she was only voting for him because she feared Work Choices and wanted to send a message to Canberra.

In that lovely Australian way, she returned 10 minutes later, apologised for her ill humour and told Watkins he was a good bloke after all and that she appreciated his efforts. One anecdote doesn't make a case, but all across the country parliamentarians are hearing a similar tune: Work Choices goes against the culture of a fair go. Today it's your neighbour who's lost his penalty payments. Tomorrow it could be you.

What's odd is that John Howard, normally such an astute reader of the political mood, has misjudged this issue. Conviction politics is all very well, but an arrogant disregard for entrenched community sentiment is something else altogether. Indeed, Work Choices may well prove to be an unfortunate political epitaph for the PM. There are other stirrings in Bennelong and they go to the heart of what the academic and writer Judith Brett has identified.

In a recent essay in The Monthly, Brett points to John Howard's longevity in office as a distinct negative and says that "sometimes ageing leaders are reckless with the country's future because they won't be around to bear the consequences". Brett has been one of the more dispassionate analysts of the Howard years. In particular she has understood that voters have stayed with the Coalition time and again not out of fear, as many attest, but because they are cautious.

She's right. But cautious people also need a plan for the future.

And what are voters in Bennelong and elsewhere to make of a leader who has consistently failed to plan for what scientists tell us could be quite dramatic changes in our climate?

What should voters make of a leader who can't see that nation-building, via the fast-tracking of a high speed broadband roll-out, is just the sort of activity needed to boost productivity and to let our innovators loose? And why should the ambitious parents in Bennelong put up for another second with the truly pathetic blame game that goes on over how we can build a first-rate 21st-century education system?

Surely the test for all of us who seek to be political representatives at this point in our history is how we ensure that every Australian child, whether in a school in urban Eastwood or in a remote Aboriginal community, has the best possible shot at upward social mobility via outstanding and inspiring teaching.

The goal for a rich country such as ours has to be the nurturing of a generation that is culturally literate, one that has acquired knowledge, self-discipline and the skills necessary to function in a fluid work environment.

It's time to ask: What's the best we can be? It's time to revive some big ambitions about our future productive capacity, about how we protect the country's rivers and coastlines, and about how we train and resource our teachers, our nurses and our engineers. Ten years from now, the kids wolfing down their pancakes in Rowe Street, Eastwood, will have only one question for us if we drop the baton: "Why did you waste the prosperity?"

Maxine McKew, a former ABC reporter and presenter, is the Labor candidate for the federal seat of Bennelong, NSW.