A blast from the past silenced the room at the Queensland Business Hall of Fame awards last week. It was a reminder of how things used to be, the good things that happened regardless of the corruption that flavoured government well into the 1980s.

It came from the sons of the Dreamworld founder John Longhurst who shared their now deceased father’s experience in building a major tourist attraction on a forestry block well out of the Gold Coast and well out of Brisbane.

Dreamworld, Tony Longhurst told the audience, was a fantasy of his father’s. Approval to develop it took just 45 days in the early 80s. The development approval document from the then Albert Shire Council was just a page and a half.

Mind you, this was when the road between Brisbane and the Gold Coast was mainly two lanes. Now it’s six, sometimes eight but the journey takes longer.

The silence and the smiles came from those who remembered when it was easier to get things done and wished, of course, that it was still so easy.

As it happened, I was sharing a table with Maha Sinnathamby the co-founder of Springfield who knows a thing or two about getting things done. He launched his dream a decade or more later than John Longhurst and it took a lot more negotiation than 45 days.

But he achieved it (and still is). With his partner Bob Sharpless, he has built a city housing 45,000 and growing on a tract of land that (like Dreamworld) was a forest plantation. Both have told me before that they believe it would not be impossible to replicate that achievement.

There are so many other such instances of lasting successes which would no longer be possible. I visited the Longhursts’ neighbour, Mike Gore, when Sanctuary Cove was a construction site. Gore personally flew me over what he said would be a golf course, marina, hotel and hundreds of villas. I doubted it but asked him if he was doing it because he liked golf. “No,” he replied. “It’s a good walk f…..d.”

I went to Port Douglas for the first time the day the then-government announced it was selling a tract of land on Four Mile Beach. It became the Mirage Resort with a twin on Gold Coast’s Main Beach, again the result of the state releasing land to the developer Christopher Skase.

Both Gore and Skase were on the wrong side of the law and have long since gone but what they built has endured.

So here we are 40 years and more later with a state election on the horizon.

And no one – not Labor, not the LNP, not One Nation and certainly not the Greens, is talking about how we can ignite the business spark that builds communities or builds facilities that create jobs for the tens of thousands moving our way.

Instead, the talk is catch-up on housing, on hospitals, on schools, on energy and on water – all the responsibility of government. Queensland, it feels, has ceased to be a place where business thrives in its own right. Instead, business now thrives on winning government contracts, many of them just to create homes.

It’s a travesty – both here and across the nation – that young people now earnestly believe buying a house is out of their reach.

Coincidentally last week, I dropped by for a coffee with Noel Whittaker, the legendary financial adviser who was a financier with a side venture in home building before moving into the advice game.

(I wanted Noel to sign a first edition of his successful Making Money Made Simple. It included a cover endorsement he had persuaded me to write in 1987 when, as finance editor of The Courier-Mail, I published his column. I reminisced that this was akin to asking a virgin to endorse the Karma Sutra as I had no money at the time and little idea of how to get any.)

Thinking of those times, he told me how he and a partner in the early 80s had made a business from buying blocks of land for $4000, building a small family home on them for another $12,000 and then selling them for $20,000. They were rewarded for their risk and hundreds of people got into a home – without a government building it for them.

He also was at the Hall of Fame dinner and was among those chortling at the thought that Dreamworld could be approved in 45 days. The community now has different expectations.

Lest I be accused of living in and on the past, I also took an afternoon last week to be part of the judging panel for this publication’s upcoming 40 Under 40 awards. The winners are all great examples of entrepreneurship. They will be announced in a few weeks’ time and, like some of our business legends, they will have their stories, some of them great stories, to tell in the future.

But they all must look in envy at the idea of any approval from a government, a council or financier taking just 45 days – try weeks if you’re lucky. Any less would be a dream.

(David Fagan is co-author of Greater Springfield – Australia’s Newest City)