It is not known how many of these reports were investigated and if any were substantiated. What we do know is that on Saturday 25 April, the girl vanished. According to the child’s mother, she was put to bed at around 11.30pm that night. She was later seen outside holding the hand of a repeat violent criminal, Jefferson Lewis, an Aboriginal released from prison six days earlier after serving time for various violent offenses. Apparently unwelcome in the community where he’d been ordered to go, he’d washed up in Old Timers and started drinking.

After news broke of the child’s disappearance, hundreds of people joined the search. The nation held its breath. The search turned up Lewis’s shirt, a child’s underwear and a duvet cover. Dread set in. And her body was found on 30 April, in a dry river bed a small distance from her home.

The national debate reignited our fraught argument about Aboriginal disadvantage and collective guilt. But more than that, the young girl’s shocking death reveals the political stalemate that has set in around Indigenous policy since the 2023 referendum to enshrine an Indigenous “Voice to Parliament” was voted down. While daily life brings an onslaught of symbolic gestures — land acknowledgments, Aboriginal place names — in far-off spots like Old Timers, desperate children are abandoned to their fate.

As news of Kumanjayi Little Baby’s fate spread, fear turned swiftly to rage. When police found Lewis, later the same day in another town camp, locals had beaten him unconscious (he has since been charged with murder and two other offenses that cannot be published under territory law). After Lewis was transferred to hospital, about 400 angry people rioted outside demanding he be handed over for traditional justice, “payback”. Police and emergency services’ vehicles were attacked. Businesses were damaged and shops looted, according to video evidence later released by the Northern Territory’s police chief. “What you see is criminal behavior, plain and simple,” he said.

What happened next is instructive. Asked to comment on the public disorder, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reminded the nation that “literally hundreds and hundreds” of people had come together to search for the child. “We want to see the community come together,” he added, “but we certainly understand people’s anger and frustration.” Others agreed. Sean Kelly, a Sydney Morning Herald columnist and former Labor government adviser, reflected favorably on Albanese’s restraint because to immediately condemn the violence would have been “the easiest thing in the world”.

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By Julie Szego

Only, the evidence suggests the opposite is true. For the Prime Minister, and indeed for much of the center-left, it’s apparently the hardest thing in the world to speak plainly about violence in Aboriginal communities — and how that violence too often endures under cover of preserving Indigenous “culture”. If ever the ritual accusations of the intellectual Left about “systemic racism” in Australia were to land with moral force — accusations that erupt each time an Indigenous person dies in custody or is shot by police — it was surely now.

But political progressives have responded with little more than platitudes that this tragedy be a “turning point” on tackling Indigenous disadvantage. That, and homilies on “centering” the little girl’s family in the fallout as they observe the “sorry business”, the cultural protocols around mourning.

After meeting with Kumanjayi Little Baby’s mother, Malarndirri McCarthy, the federal Labor government’s Indigenous Australians Minister, said she wanted to say that it was clear the child was very loved. But, alas, deep love and chronic neglect have never been mutually exclusive.

It fell to the political Right to say as much, and none as powerfully as Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price — also, as it happens, the dead girl’s aunt. In a searing and desperate speech to Parliament last week, she described a “hands-off ideology” that meant officials were silent about alcohol abuse, dysfunction and violence in Indigenous communities for fear of being called “racist”.

“But,” Price said, “it’s not racist to speak the truth.”

The truth, in this case, invites profoundly uncomfortable questions. I’ll deal with them in roughly ascending order of sensitivity, starting with how was a violent repeat offender such as Lewis allowed anywhere near children? Do we need tougher sentencing, even though Indigenous people, especially in the Northern Territory, are already cited as the most incarcerated in the world?

What of Old Timers itself, a place so chaotic and dangerous that, even inside her home, Kumanjayi Little Baby was allegedly prey to someone like Lewis? What of the Indigenous-run, taxpayer-funded Tangentyere Council Aboriginal Corporation, responsible for managing and maintaining Old Timers and the other camps around Alice? What to make of revelations that salaries for senior management at the Corporation doubled last financial year to more than A$1 million, while residents can’t get front-door locks repaired?

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And what of the other town camps, and remote communities more generally, both in the Territory and elsewhere in the country? These camps were established in the Seventies, when discrimination meant Indigenous Australians were prohibited from living in towns; others have since sprung up to accommodate people traveling from remote communities to access services in urban areas.

Around 1,000 people live in the town camps around Alice. Some are reportedly orderly, with residents traveling to and from work. Others, says Price, “can be hell-holes”. “Relics” and “separatist precincts”, says Senator Kerrynne Liddle, also from the center-right opposition. Should governments keep funding these dysfunctional communities? Mal Brough, a former Indigenous affairs minister in John Howard’s conservative government, thinks they shouldn’t — and regrets his own decision to authorize new housing in remote communities. Though he concedes that much investment has been driven by “genuinely good intentions”, that’s “not enough if the practical outcome is that generations of children grow up exposed to violence, trauma, neglect and hopelessness”.

That leaves perhaps the hardest question of all, the one the Indigenous Australians Minister was presumably attempting to head off when she emphasized how much Kumanjayi Little Baby was loved by her family: should at-risk Indigenous children be removed from their families when they cannot be placed with Indigenous kin or carers? The center-Right Territory government has ordered a review into the child protection department, and last week announced existing child protection laws will be changed to ensure child safety is “the primary consideration… regardless of background.” This has angered Indigenous advocates because it sparks memories of the so-called “Stolen Generations” — Aboriginal children wrenched from their families under what is widely understood to have been a policy of forced assimilation, and which left a legacy of dislocation and cultural alienation.

Taken together, these policy dilemmas are about the limits of an idea that has been central to progressive ideology since the Seventies: self-determination for the country’s Indigenous people. The push by Aboriginal Australians to control their own lives came as the nation began to reckon with its racist past, from the frontier massacres of the colonial era to the segregationist policies that forced Indigenous people onto reserves and missions, where they were often exploited as cheap labor. Later, under assimilation policies, many were displaced from their communities — while still facing restrictions on entering towns such as Alice Springs.

But critics argue that the shift to self-governance exacerbated social problems in some regions. Every few years, a scandal like Old Timers pierces through the news cycle to remind the public of the sickening daily violence visited on Aboriginal women and children in Outback communities — and the impotence of officialdom in stopping it. I’ll spare you the roll call of the children raped, in at least one instance gang raped; the toddler raped so badly she needed a blood transfusion; the women beaten to death, stabbed, repeatedly run over or set on fire, at home or in the street; the inquiries and reports with their findings of systemic failures and their urgent recommendations.

Amid these horrors, a pivotal moment came after a landmark 2007 Northern Territory report entitled “Little Children are Sacred”. It found that the scourge of Indigenous violence was widespread, and driven by cheap grog, poor school attendance and social breakdown. Indigenous leader Noel Pearson was asked on TV whether government intervention would be described as “paternalism”. He famously replied: “Ask the terrified kid huddling in the corner when there is a binge drinking party going on down the hall if they want a bit of paternalism.”

The Howard government declared a national emergency, announcing sweeping top-down measures that would become known as “The Intervention”. This involved a raft of measures, from standardized bans on alcohol and pornography, to income management, law-and-order crackdowns, a scaling up of health and employment programs, and the temporary suspension of aspects of self-governance.

Whether The Intervention was successful is hard to measure. A common view among Indigenous advocates is that whatever the short-term gains, they weren’t enough to outweigh the damage caused from undermining the traditional authority of elders and stripping communities of their sense of agency. Some argued The Intervention’s “emergency” framing — even the army was brought in — was cover for a government agenda of socially engineering what anthropologist Melinda Hinkson, in the introduction to Coercive Reconciliation, an anthology of essays she co-edited with Jon Altman, describes as a “normalized” Aboriginal population, “one whose concerns with custom, kin and land will give way to the individualistic aspirations of private home ownership, career and self-improvement”. More than that, critics argue that the “No Pornography” signs at the communities’ entrances were themselves enough to create a debilitating legacy of “shame”.

“Shame” is a word frequently used by progressives in the Indigenous debate, as is “intergenerational trauma” in relation to past wrongs stemming from colonization. Conservatives usually answer with concrete nouns: things like “welfare” and “grog”.

And so it is now. Following Kumanjayi Little Baby’s death, conservatives renewed their calls for federal audits of Indigenous corporations running remote communities, for national inquiries into sexual abuse and violence in Indigenous communities, for bold action. Progressives called for more government funding and resisted calls for better oversight. Governments, said the National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People, Sue-Ann Hunter, needed to focus not on punitive crackdowns but on “services designed by us, delivered by us and trusted by us”.

More frustrating still is that these debates are increasingly engulfed in meta-debates about the moral legitimacy of Australia — and indeed Western civilization more generally. It sometimes feels like extreme voices are all we hear, whether that’s the hard Left re-badging Australia Day as “Invasion Day”, decrying Australia as a “settler-colonial regime”, and peddling myths of the “noble savage”; or else the chauvinistic Right booing Indigenous elders during traditional “Welcome to Country” ceremonies at the Anzac Day dawn services — an ugly spectacle that happened last month for the second year running. Both sap the body politic of the energy and goodwill needed to fix systemic problems.

But a precondition to fixing systemic problems is naming them. On the night the 2023 referendum was defeated, Anthony Albanese promised he would keep working to improve outcomes in Indigenous communities and towards reconciliation. As he told Indigenous Australians: “Maintain your hope and know that you are loved.” But Kumanjayi Little Baby, as we know, had plenty of love. What she needed, what she lacked, was protection.

It is this Australia that my parents, like hundreds of thousands of migrants in various waves, came to in search of a better life for themselves and for their children. Because this Australia gave them a home, in spite of hardships, they dedicated themselves and their deeds to their new country.

There are many such stories. Dai Le, a Vietnamese refugee who escaped Saigon with her family in 1975, now sits as a member of the Federal Parliament in Canberra. In her maiden speech to Parliament in 2022, Ms Le stated, emotionally: “I remember the moment when we were accepted to be resettled as refugees in Australia […] the feeling of acceptance and gratitude. We were filled with hope as we looked out onto the horizon of endless possibilities. Australia, you welcomed my mother, my family with open arms. You gave us comfort, food, and a warm bed to sleep in.”

How is it, then, that in successful, tolerant Australia, on a balmy summer’s eve on one of the country’s most famous beaches, 15 people (at the time of writing), including a 10-year-old girl, were slaughtered, and scores more critically injured, because of their religion?

This was once a proud, egalitarian nation, with a “fair go” for all. It was a country in which, in the words of former prime minister Bob Hawke, there was “no hierarchy of descent… no privilege of origin”. But that country is gone, its demise overseen by a government, led by Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, which has done nothing but increase division.

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As a result, since October 7, 2023, with antisemitism rising, the likelihood of a terrorist attack taking place on Australian soil has been intolerably high. The warning signs could hardly have been clearer. On 9 October, 2023, there was a gathering of thousands at the Sydney Opera House who rejoiced at the atrocities a couple of days earlier, with one Islamic preacher calling it “a day of celebration”, egging on the mob who shouted, repeatedly, “Where’s the Jews?”. This vile episode, along with other Islamic preachers who called for “death to the infidels”, or the pro-Hamas protestors who have called for “global intifada” and aggressively disrupted cities by closing down key intersections, have been met with lukewarm condemnation from Albanese or his ministers. Figures from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) show that, since the October 7 attacks, antisemitic incidents in Australia have increased threefold. The ECAJ report documented more than 2,000 such incidents — ranging from verbal abuse to arson, vandalism and physical assaults — in 2024.

Yet, while equivocating over condemning such hatred, Albanese consistently decries “Islamophobia”, even though no mosques have been attacked in Australia since 2016, even though a Christian bishop was stabbed in his own church by a Muslim fanatic, even though a synagogue was bombed in Melbourne by extremists linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Meanwhile, Albanese’s Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke, has displayed a consistent recklessness in his immigration policy, settling 3,000 Gazans without security checks and overseeing the repatriation of the so-called ISIS brides. One of the shooters at Bondi, Sajid Akram, who was shot dead by police, first arrived on a student visa and then on a partner visa, and it seems he traveled several times to Pakistan. His son, Naveed Akram, who was born in Australia, was on an Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) watchlist in 2019, but it “found no indication of any ongoing threat” as far as he was concerned. Rather than address the risks of immigration and consider the threat of rising radicalism, politicians here seem keener to talk up the advantages of “multiculturalism”.

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Meanwhile, the plight of the Jews is deemed secondary as Foreign Minister Penny Wong refused to visit the site of the October 7 atrocities and supported a UN motion for a permanent Palestinian state. It’s hard not to detect a moral relativism at work here.

In their press conference today, Albanese and Burke did not announce they were canceling the visas of hate preachers, nor that they intended to charge them with incitement to violence. They did not announce stricter immigration controls, in particular from countries where jihadist Islamic ideology is rife. Instead, they announced increased firearm controls for Australians.

In the coming weeks and months, we can expect announcements of new “hate speech” laws, new police powers, new surveillance mechanisms, new ways to monitor what ordinary Australians say and share. We can expect politicians to line up for cameras, pay lip service to unity, and then go back to the same failed settings that have splintered Australia.

And in the meantime, successful, tolerant Australia will have to come to terms with the fact that the most deadly attacks on Jews since October 7 happened here, on a Sunday afternoon, at the beach.

As the great Australian writer Xavier Herbert put it: Poor fellow, my country.

Long ago, it was reasonable to hope that voters thinking of voting for a scary ultra-Rightist in order to annoy the centrists whose policies kept them down might come to their senses the moment that scary ultra-Rightist looked likely to win government. Something like that happened in France in 2002. Back then, middle-class socialists, young ecologists and working-class communists lined up at the polling stations alongside conservatives to give 82% of the national vote to Rightist Jacques Chirac so as to keep ultra-Rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen — the father of the French ultra-Right’s current leader — out of the Elysée. But this is not what happened in France 25 years later, or in Canada or Australia last week.

In 2002, six years before Western capitalism’s near-death experience, Chirac defeated Le Pen because the socialist and the communist parties directed their voters to him. Under the slogan: “We vote for you today, we oppose you tomorrow morning!”, voters who were at odds with the establishment voted for an establishment figure in order to keep a neofascist out. All the while, they retained their allegiance to parties of the Left. In contrast, Emmanuel Macron won by annihilating the parties of the Left.

Working-class voters, who were suffering the consequences of the centrists’ austerity policies, were incensed with Macron, a former banker determined to impose “green” taxes on them while giving tax breaks to his haute bourgeois mates. With nowhere else to go, these voters drifted en masse to Le Pen. Then something startling happened: Macron and Le Pen grew co-dependent, their mutual antipathy notwithstanding. The more austerity he imposed on the many, the deeper their discontent and the higher her support. And the higher her support, the better able he was to appeal to anti-fascists to hold their noses and vote for him in order to keep her out.

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As this dynamic co-dependency grew, the ultra-Right won a staggering 40% of the national vote in the June 2024 parliamentary elections. There is nothing on the horizon to suggest that this trend is unravelling. In this light, history may well remember Macron more as the liberal center’s gravedigger than its redeemer.

Cut to last week and the decisive defeat of the Rightist Canadian and Australian parties that tried, and failed, to ride the Trumpian wave. Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese won because President Trump made it impossible for them to lose. By threatening to annex Canada, and by slapping tariffs on an Australia that not only has never missed an opportunity to bend over backwards to accommodate Washington’s every whim but also runs a trade deficit with the United States, it is as if Trump was determined that his Canadian and Australian copycats lose last week’s elections. Nevertheless, under the surface of Carney’s and Albanese’s victories, it is not difficult to discern social trends similar to those that rendered Macron’s victory decidedly Pyrrhic.

In Canada, after 11 years of ruling, the Liberals failed to appeal to the large sections of the working-class who either abstained or voted for the conservatives. When the Liberals nevertheless secured a razor-thin majority, they did so by cannibalizing, Macron-style, the Left-of-center (the NDP and the Parti Québécois). In Australia, Labor’s landslide victory obscured the fact that it won with a historically low percentage of the primary vote. Although it won most seats in the working-class suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, Labor did so on second preferences, while continuing to bleed first preferences — especially amongst the immigrant communities which used to be the party’s most reliable vote reservoir. As in Canada, Australia’s centrists won by feeding off the only Left-of-center force, the Greens, but had no luck in unseating a significant number of Right-leaning independents (the so-called Teals).

So far, so very similar to the political dynamics in France. What makes these similarities so fascinating is that they have taken place in such different countries. France’s economy is joined at the hip to that of Germany and the rest of the European Union. Australia and Canada, on the other hand, are resource-based economies integrated into the energy-industrial-military complex of the United States.

Because of its location, Canada sells 75% of its exports to America, while also directly investing more of its capital in the US than the US invests in Canada. As for geographically isolated Australia, its economy is also deeply intertwined with US conglomerates, albeit indirectly. While Australian mining companies have long been in the business of extracting fossil fuels and digging up gargantuan volumes of the country’s red earth before shipping it all to Japan and China, this roaring trade with Asia’s two superpowers is predicated on the US sourcing two crucial resources from China and Japan: manufactured goods and savings.

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This is why the political trends in Canada and Australia are similar to those in France. Despite their vast differences, the three economies are hooked into the same US-centric global surplus-recycling mechanism, whose deep crisis is steering their politics in a direction inimical to the centrists’ medium-term prospects. Politicians like Macron, Carney and Albanese may score impressive victories, but they have no plan for stemming the secular decline of their influence over their increasingly restive electorates. For years now, these electorates have been pummeled by the undercurrents of the global recycling mechanism — a mechanism that once drove their countries’ growth and stability.

The essence of this global mechanism (which I once labelled the Global Minotaur) is simple. Since the Seventies, America’s deficits have provided East Asia (first Japan, then China) and Europe (primarily Germany) the demand for their factories’ manufactures. In return, the European Union, Japan and later China sent their accumulated profits to Wall Street to be recycled into US private and public debt, some equities, and real estate. A Chinese official once described this mechanism to me as a “dark deal”. “Our Dark Deal with the Americans,” the official explained, “turns on the US trade deficit, which keeps demand for our manufactures high. In return, our capitalists invest the bulk of their dollar superprofits into America’s FIRE”. (The acronym stands for “Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate.”) “Once this process got underway, America shifted much of its industrial production to our shores.”

The problem with this global recycling mechanism was that, to function smoothly, it had to generate larger and larger imbalances: greater trade deficits for the US and more accumulated savings for Northern Europe and East Asia. But there are limits to how large imbalances can grow. Ruptures are inevitable. The longer they are delayed, the greater the pain they inflict — a truth that centrists never acknowledged, not even when it was tearing down their houses.

Trump’s greatest strength comes from asking the pressing question that the centrists refuse to countenance: what comes after the Dark Deal? What comes after the imbalances built on the US trade deficit have proven unsustainably massive? Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, put it succinctly in a recent speech at the IMF: “Everywhere we look across the international economic system today, we see imbalance… This status quo of large and persistent imbalances is not sustainable… The persistent over-reliance on the United States for demand is resulting in an evermore unbalanced global economy.”

Their proposed solutions may be wrongheaded, half-baked, even crazy, but at least Trump’s team has identified the problem. Voters may not understand that these unsustainable imbalances are at the root of their plight, but enough of them have the sixth sense to intuit that Trump’s people are on to something, unlike the centrists who act like King Canute ordering the tides of discontent to reverse course.

Inexcusably, centrists treat Bessent and the rest of Trump’s economic team as Neanderthals. They forget that the people they celebrate as the architects of the globalized capitalist order, an order which they now mourn, had warned them in good time. On 10 April 2005, when no one was interested in bad news stories, Paul Volcker, the man who had helped design the devastating Nixon Shock and later headed the Federal Reserve during the formative years of the Dark Deal, foreshadowed everything Bessent is now saying:

“What holds [the US economic success story] all together is a massive and growing flow of capital from abroad, running to more than $2 billion every working day, and growing… As a nation we don’t consciously borrow or beg. We aren’t even offering attractive interest rates, nor do we have to offer our creditors protection against the risk of a declining dollar… We fill our shops and our garages with goods from abroad, and the competition has been a powerful restraint on our internal prices. It’s surely helped keep interest rates exceptionally low despite our vanishing savings and rapid growth. And it’s comfortable for our trading partners and for those supplying the capital. Some, such as China, depend heavily on our expanding domestic markets. And for the most part, the central banks of the emerging world have been willing to hold more and more dollars, which are, after all, the closest thing the world has to a truly international currency… The difficulty is that this seemingly comfortable pattern can’t go on indefinitely.”

Three years later, Wall Street crashed. Two decades of centrist denial followed, bought at the price of gigantic money printing for the few and harsh austerity for the many. With Volcker and his ilk sidelined by the governing centrists, the political center began to fragment across the West — with deficit countries like France, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom (not to mention my country, Greece) closer to the eye of the storm. It was only a matter of time before someone like Trump would rise up, the inevitable outcome of the centrists’ refusal to acknowledge that the global surplus recycling mechanism, the Dark Deal, was dead in the water — just as its predecessor, the Bretton Woods system, was before President Nixon killed it in 1971.

Sure enough, Trump’s policies are unlikely to rebalance the world economy. While some manufacturing will return to America, automation will render this a jobless growth surge. Big Tech’s burgeoning cloud rents will further undermine any actual rebalancing. China will probably move on, gradually transforming the Brics into a Bretton Woods-style system anchored by the yuan. The European Union will fail to rebalance its internal macroeconomy, sinking deeper into stagnation. The planet’s climate will go haywire.

But, though Trump’s policies may not work in the US, France, Australia, Canada or anywhere else, his willingness to upend a broken global system is enough to garner political support for, at home, unprecedented authoritarianism; and abroad, a confrontation with China that casts doubt on our species’ long-term prospects. Meanwhile, centrists stuck in their delusion that the Dark Deal can be sustained are condemned to keep losing even when they win.

While a hung Parliament and a Labor-led minority government remains the most likely outcome of the election, Dutton could well get into power sooner rather than later. This would be a stunning turnaround from the previous election in 2022, which ended nine years of conservative rule and delivered the Coalition’s worst result since 1946. Yet, less than three years later, the Liberals are back, in no small measure due to Dutton’s leadership.

Much of the commentary, at home and abroad, has put this down to Dutton’s embrace of Trumpian tropes — though local journalists tend to express the comparison in cruder, more Australian terms. Yet Dutton is no political outsider, having been an MP since 2001 and a minister in multiple Coalition governments going back to 2004.

Prior to entering Parliament, Dutton was a police officer in the state of Queensland, whose police force had a long history of brutality and systemic corruption. This past and his abrasive style quickly earned him a reputation as an enforcer for the Right-wing faction of the Liberal Party. In 2008, he boycotted the apology to the “Stolen Generations” of Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their parents, theatrically walking out of Parliament and talking about child and sexual abuse in Indigenous communities instead. In 2015, he was voted the worst health minister in the last 35 years by doctors after he tried — and failed — to introduce a patient co-payment for doctors’ visits. As Immigration Minister, he gained notoriety for his tough approach to asylum seeker boats, while hiding behind the secrecy of “on-water matters” when more shady details, including allegations the government paid people smugglers to turn their boats around and return asylum seekers to Indonesia, came to light.

Dutton’s political persona as a bruiser cop from Queensland was established enough for his wife to feel the need to declare in 2019 that “he’s not a monster”. This occurred after he lost the previous year’s party leadership vote to Scott Morrison, who then proceeded to fumble pretty much every aspect of Australia’s Covid management. Having become a laughing stock, Morrison was unceremoniously turfed out of power in 2022. Dutton was elected unopposed to succeed him, but few gave the new opposition leader much hope of regaining power anytime soon.

Three years on, things look very different. Like Trump, Dutton has attempted to remake the Liberal Party by reorienting it around blue-collar, lower-paid voters on the outskirts of large cities, while abandoning its traditional constituencies of big business and affluent voters in the inner-city electorates. This was helped by the Liberals losing many such voters in 2022 to “teal” independents, who campaigned not just on traditional liberal values but also on tackling issues such as climate change, corruption, and women’s safety. Rather than trying to recoup these voters, Dutton instead took the Trumpian route, campaigning hard against the elite in Canberra in the name of the “forgotten people” in the suburbs, while taking down progressive causes with ruthless efficiency.

A turning point for his leadership came in 2023, when he decided to campaign for a “No” vote in a constitutional referendum to establish an advisory body on Indigenous issues called The Voice. While it earned him scorn from Indigenous activists and those who make up polite opinion, Dutton correctly sensed that this was not a priority issue for voters struggling with the cost of living. Instead, he framed the proposal as a progressive preoccupation that would create a “Canberra voice of academics” rather than improving conditions on the ground.

To further bolster his populist credentials, Dutton then got stuck into Australia’s corporations for donating to the “Yes” campaign, accusing them of “lacking a significant backbone”, and only supporting the cause because they were “craving popularity” from the Twittersphere. In the end, the Voice campaign was roundly defeated, with 60% of the country voting against it; afterwards, Dutton triumphantly cited this as proof of just how out of touch the political elite was with its electorate.

Since the referendum, Dutton and the Liberal Party have risen in the polls, while Labor has floundered. Here, too, there are analogues with the situation in the US. Just like Joe Biden, Albanese came to power after voters had become exhausted with an erratic and incompetent government that presided over a chaotic pandemic response. Following his victory, Albanese spoke of a two-term strategy to remake the country after nine years of conservative misrule.

Yet Labor’s victory was built on quicksand: its lowest primary vote since 1932, a non-existent policy agenda, and no organic links to the constituencies it claimed to represent. Once in power, it quickly became obvious that the party had no coherent plan to address pressing social and economic issues such as housing, stagnating wages and living standards, eye-wateringly high household debt, and insufficient infrastructure. Predictably, once inflation started to bite, Albanese’s response of tinkering at the edges while the country experienced the sharpest fall in living standards in the OECD turned the population against him.

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In this context, there’s a real possibility of a re-run of the American script, with voters turning out with their baseball bats on election day to punish those in power and giving someone else a go, especially a character like Dutton who, as one voter observed, “doesn’t sit on the fence […] he says as it is. There’s no wokeness in it.”

Even if that were to happen, the comparisons with Trump only go so far. The American President is not at all popular in Australia, with twice as many Australians preferring Kamala Harris at the last election, so there is little to be gained from embracing Trump and Trumpism wholeheartedly. Indeed, Dutton has rejected the comparison, claiming his role model would be the former Liberal prime minister John Howard, who last year said Trump was “not compatible with democracy”.

What’s more, while Australians are frustrated about the state of the nation, there is little appetite for a Trumpian revolution. A Dutton government would likely implement cuts to the public service, but an Elon Musk-style tearing down of the state is less desirable. Indeed, while Dutton appointed Liberal senator Jacinta Price to be “government efficiency” spokeswoman in January, she has rejected comparisons with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), arguing instead that her lodestar is Margaret Thatcher and promising to give “power back to the people by implementing small government”. Likewise, despite his broadsides against big business, Dutton last year quietly walked back his plan to slash permanent migration by 25% after a backlash from the big end of town.

Given the country’s compulsory voting and preferential electoral system, Australian elections are not won by appealing to the base, but instead require parties to convince undecided voters to give them a go. This generally mitigates against insurgent political projects, something which Dutton knows well.

Similarly, while he’s praised Trump for his “gravitas” and “bold thinking” on international issues such as Gaza, Dutton has also criticised the US President’s proposed tariffs on Australian aluminum exports. Dutton presents himself as better placed than the weak-willed Albanese to pursue an Australia-first policy and stand up to Trump in the national interest. He has no doubt also noticed how Trump’s trade spat with Canada has only benefited the ruling Liberal Party there, as voters rally around the flag and take a second look at the Trumpian Conservatives.

In short, while Dutton may liberally borrow from the Trump playbook, this only translates so far in Australia. Were he to become the next prime minister, he would largely continue previous Coalition policies, only this time with more culture wars thrown in. The Coalition’s campaign has so far been largely free of actual policy proposals, excluding an expensive and unrealistic plan to establish a nuclear power industry, which seems to have been drawn up on the back of a napkin.

Instead, Dutton used a headline speech unofficially launching his campaign to take aim at the proliferation of DEI initiatives in Australia’s public service, claiming they “do nothing to improve the lives of everyday Australians” and promising to fire bureaucrats responsible for them. This might be enough to get him into the prime ministerial Lodge, but it’s unlikely to prove sufficient to govern effectively and address the country’s problems. On this, at least, Dutton is similar to Trump.

Originally initiated by the previous Conservative government and championed by the centre-left Labor Party, the legislation promised to be a watershed moment in Australian media regulation. It proposed stringent controls on information sharing, with a curious twist: some, including legacy media and academics, would be exempt from the most restrictive provisions, while the hoi polloi would face intense scrutiny and potential censorship.

What makes this defeat truly remarkable is the broad coalition that emerged to block the bill. In the senate, an uncanny alliance formed — conservative opposition, the Greens, and Left-wing independent senators all united in rejecting the proposed legislation. This cross-political alignment suggests a growing recognition of the dangers inherent in state-controlled information management.

Progressive media outlets such as The Guardian, which would have been sheltered from the bill’s most severe provisions, were full-throated in their support for the legislation, dismissing opposition as a “scare campaign”. But the fractures within progressive circles proved to be the most intriguing development.

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Musk's two-tier vision of free speech

By Kathleen Stock

The bill’s trajectory exposes a deeper narrative about how contemporary progressive culture has inadvertently become a vehicle for speech control. While I believe the core global actors pushing speech control are centrist, contemporary Left-wing culture has provided an excellent Trojan horse, via its collectivist concerns about public health, identity politics, online bullying and environmental issues. These fears have been systematically leveraged to advance increasingly restrictive information management strategies. Despite our reputation as living among snakes, spiders and emus, Australians have long been a coddled and fragile bunch, tucked into cul-de-sac suburbs, afraid of both the sun and our own shadows. Our Covid response was so remarked upon for this reason. A brutalist contrast between self-image and stark reality.

Harnessing contemporary progressive culture to advance speech controls was effective not only in disarming the field of digital free-expression NGOs, but in many cases those same organisations provided platoons of digital mercenaries to scour the internet and weed out disinformation. Having spent nearly two decades working in digital free expression advocacy, I witnessed first-hand how government and philanthropic funding diverted organic digital free speech movements. towards policing what they define as “disinformation”.

Working on the Twitter Files with Matt Taibbi, I helped map the intricate networks behind this phenomenon. First Draft, a US/UK outfit, emerged as a key player. It coined the term “malinformation” and played a critical role in attempting to suppress the now-verified Hunter Biden laptop story, two months before the New York Post broke the story. It was all carried out under the guise of “anti-disinformation” work.

First Draft also assisted in developing the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation which the proposed legislation was based on and sought to strengthen by providing a “regulatory backstop” and was the only NGO involved in the Trusted News Initiative, a Covid-era legacy media consortium that was integral to pandemic narrative management. Its work illustrates that these are not organic responses to the challenges of a cacophonous internet — but a politicised strategy to shape the public debate.

Through the Australian Twitter files I revealed that, under the existing voluntary code, our security agencies were already flagging remarkably innocuous content to social media platforms. Jokes, political criticism, and accounts with minimal followings were targeted. They even attempted to censor respected academics such as former Harvard professor Martin Kulldorff for questioning lockdown efficacy and promoting the Great Barrington Declaration. Full-scale legislation would only make things worse.

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And the bill’s provisions were breathtakingly broad. Companies could face fines of up to 5% of global revenue, and the bar was lowered to the point where content only needed to be “reasonably verifiable as false or misleading” to count as misinformation. “False” according to whom? Well, this would be the domain of faultless fact-checkers, their cheeks flushed with truthiness and here to rescue you from your misinformed self.

Among the justifications for the bill were the Southport Riots in Britain (triggered apparently by misinformation) and a recent stabbing in Sydney, where the perpetrator was misidentified most significantly by mainstream news, which, in a fabulous irony, is exempt from the bill. The cherry on the cake was the expansive definition of “harm” — encompassing potential damage to the environment, economy, and public health.

But, whisper it, the bill’s resounding defeat could signal that something profound is afoot. Could free speech values be experiencing an Australian revival? Though the Covid pandemic period saw unprecedented restrictions on public discourse, a growing number of people — including those traditionally supportive of such measures — are now loudly speaking out. Nick Coatsworth, a Deputy Chief Medical Officer during Covid and previously supportive of vaccine mandates, has emerged as a powerful critic. Coatsworth has seemingly been to Damascus and back, stating: “Misinformation causes harm. The weaponisation of misinformation as a term to shut down debate causes even greater harm. This bill does the latter.”

Similarly, legal experts, including the Human Rights Commissioner and constitutional law professors, provided crucial intellectual ammunition against the bill. The freedom movement that emerged from Covid managed to move the conventional Right into a more populist free-speech position and those moderate “expert” voices on the centre and centre-left gave permission to progressives to voice their concerns with less fear of being dogpiled.

That said, the failure also owes much to the incompetency of the current Labor government, who littered the bill with hypocrisies and excess largesse making it easier to shoot down. It should also be noted that the Greens’ rejection was a mixed bag – in part wanting legacy media to be included in government policing efforts, and in part a broader critique of Big Tech power.

But while celebrating this victory, realism is essential. Australia remains a fertile ground for technocratic control mechanisms with its penchant for technocracy and over-trust in government. Other restrictive legislation continues to advance, including proposed bans on social media for under-16s that would have serious impacts on adult users and expanding eSafety regulations.

Winning the free speech war requires building a broad, cross-political consensus. The defeat of this misinformation bill suggests such a thing might be emerging. The Left’s partial rejection of speech control narratives is especially significant, potentially creating a “permissions cascade” for other fearful progressive voices.

But the rejection of Australia’s counter-disinformation bill is more than a legislative outcome. It represents a potential inflection point in how democratic societies negotiate the challenging terrain of information control. The emerging alliance defending free expression suggests that the impulse to protect open dialogue might be more resilient than the forces seeking to constrain it.

After slavishly obeying perhaps the most absurd covid diktats of anywhere in the world, today Australia offers a sprig of hope. In a new political atmosphere, reasoned debate, cross-political collaboration, and a commitment to free expression can still prevail against increasingly sophisticated attempts to shut it down.

For much of the past half-century, the US and its Asia-Pacific allies shunned a collective Nato-like approach to security in the region, opting instead for a so-called hub-and-spokes system: with the United States as the hub and various bilateral and multilateral alliances as the spokes of an ideal “wheel of security”. In recent years, amid growing tensions with Beijing, these initiatives have multiplied, with overlapping political, military and economic deals creating, in the words of The Economist, “an ever-thickening lattice on China’s periphery”.

The US, however, now appears determined to take this approach one step further, by transforming its patchwork of arrangements into a full-blown military alliance: an Asian Nato. The first major step in this direction was the creation, in the early days of the Biden administration, of the Australia-United Kingdom-United States pact (Aukus), a new trilateral military partnership that included, as its central pillar, the provision of nuclear-powered (but not nuclear-armed) submarines to Australia. The project was initially met with scepticism and hostility — especially, as one might have expected, from China, which said that the partnership risked “severely damaging regional peace”.

While this led to a sluggish start for the new alliance, Aukus has gained momentum in recent months. The three countries recently announced the launch of Pillar II of the pact, which will see its members collaborate on next-gen military technologies — including quantum computing, artificial intelligence, hypersonic weapons and undersea capabilities — and decide whether to invite new members, such as South Korea, Canada, New Zealand and Japan. Earlier this month, the US ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, wrote that Japan was “about to become the first additional Pillar II partner”.

Over the past year, the US and its allies in the region have emphatically denied that these moves are aimed at establishing an “Asian Nato”. However, such reassurances don’t carry much weight these days — especially in China. After all, the US is very open about the fact that it considers China to be its major “pacing threat” — and several high-ranking US officials have argued that they consider a US-China war in the coming years to be all but inevitable. Indeed, Nato itself has declared China to be a “systemic challenge”. Meanwhile, US allies in the region are deepening their relations with Nato itself through so-called Individually Tailored Partnership Programmes (ITPPs), and the leaders of Australia, Japan, Korea and New Zealand were invited as guests to a Nato summit in Lithuania last year, whose communique called out China more than a dozen times for coercive and destabilising military and economic actions.

The Western narrative is that the military build-up in the Asia-Pacific is merely a response to China’s increasingly assertive posture in the region — and is therefore about deterrence, not escalation, and shouldn’t be perceived by China as a threat. But should we expect China to take our word for it? Indeed, Beijing has made it very clear that it views Aukus, and the growing US military presence in the Asia-Pacific, as a threat — especially in light of the new US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell’s admission that “Aukus submarines are intended for a potential war with China over Taiwan”.

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In this context, Campbell’s argument that Aukus will “strengthen peace and stability more generally” in the region appears naïve at best, and deceiving at worst. Indeed, it’s hard to see how pouring military machinery into an already volatile region won’t lead to the escalatory spiral that Aukus’s strengthening and expansion is ostensibly aimed at preventing: an all-out US-China war.

If all this feels familiar, that’s because it is. In many respects, what is happening with Aukus in the Asia-Pacific is reminiscent of Nato’s post-Nineties expansion towards Russia’s border. Even then, Nato claimed that its expansion was defensive in nature and shouldn’t be viewed as a threat by Russia. Yet, countless US politicians and diplomats, including George Kennan and Bill Clinton, understood that Nato expansion would become a self-fulling prophecy: regardless of Western assurances, it would create a security dilemma for Russia, and invite a retaliatory response from the latter at some point, thus engendering the very security threat that Nato expansion was purportedly defending against. This is, of course, exactly what happened, eventually leading to the tragic events still unfolding in Ukraine.

Today, a similar self-fulfilling prophecy is unfolding in the Asia-Pacific. With regard to the expansion of Aukus, the US is once again adopting the same incremental, or “salami”, tactic as it did during Nato’s expansion: it is cutting off thin slices gradually — moving in small steps — so that no single action can be used by the other side to justify a major response, while over time achieving the desired (and officially denied) outcome.

Throughout Nato’s gradual enlargement, this strategy enabled Washington to dismiss any complaints and to depict Russia’s responses as disproportionate. A similar argument is used today to dismiss Chinese concerns about Aukus’s Pillar II: the latter, the US claims, simply implies greater military-technological collaboration between allied countries, not the creation of a full-blown military alliance. But of course increasing “joint capabilities and interoperability” between countries — just as the US was doing in Ukraine in the lead-up to Russia’s invasion — is a step in that direction.

Another tactic plucked from Nato’s playbook is the “deterrence-cooperation dichotomy” — a term coined by the Norwegian political scientist Glenn Diesen to describe the way in which Nato expanded while continuing to promote cooperation with Russia in several domains. A similar approach today has been adopted in countries like Australia and New Zealand: while deepening their relations with the US and Nato in the context of avowedly anti-China military-security alliances, they continue to express their keenness to maintain solid economic ties with China.

Now, this may seem understandable: China today is the top trading partner for most US allies and partners in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia and New Zealand. But it also speaks to the irrationality of this approach to China. After all, it’s unclear exactly how China represents a “threat” to these countries — unless one construes the end of American dominance of the Asia-Pacific region, and the rise of a more policentric order, to be an instrinsic threat, which indeed seems to be the case. As the former New Zealand PM Helen Clark asked of reports that the government is considering joining Aukus: “Why do we need a military alliance ostensibly aimed at defending us from our major trading partner? This somehow doesn’t quite add up.”

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In response, local politicians might tell themselves — and their citizens — that military alliances such as Aukus don’t compromise their country’s sovereignty, and that they remain in charge of their foreign policy. However, the history of Nato tells a different story: US-led military alliances of this kind create a path dependency that makes it very hard for individual members to disentangle themselves from the foreign-policy decisions taken in Washington, even if they disagree with them. Again, the history of Nato expansion is instructive here. When President Clinton attempted to advance the deployment of strategic missile defence systems in Eastern Europe, he met strong opposition from several European countries. But Washington, as the de facto leader of the dominant security system in Europe, methodically used the demand for “alliance solidarity” to mute criticism from allies. Eventually, Nato allies fell in line — just as they did following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In this sense, countries such as Australia and New Zealand would be naïve to think that they could avoid getting dragged into a future US-China conflict. Aukus means effectively surrendering their foreign policy to the US. After all, the Americans have been pretty open about the fact that they view Aukus as a Nato-like means to assert US hegemony over the region. Campbell, the chief architect of Biden’s Asia strategy, has openly admitted that Aukus is about “locking [Australia] in for the next 40 years” — i.e. subordinating it to America’s geopolitical strategy.

The Australian government has often stated that Aukus “does not involve any ante facto commitment to participate in, or be directed in accordance with, the military operations of any other country”. But they were recently rebuffed by none other than Campbell himself, who, according to the Financial Review, confirmed that “Washington would not transfer the jewel in its crown — nuclear-powered submarines — if it did not have ultimate say over their operational use, especially if a conflict arises with China”. As The Economist recently observed, Australia isn’t destined to become a sovereign partner, but “America’s military launchpad into Asia”.

Our allies in Asia are thus faced with a choice: they can either choose to exploit their unique geographical position and act as a bridge between East and West; or they can choose to become tools of American militarism and great-power confrontation. To see how the latter might end up, they only have to look to Europe.

The statement’s first leg, the acknowledgement of country, has become a ritualised opening of proceedings; meaningful on occasions such as this one was, self-congratulatory tokenism when, say, four white dudes on Zoom are about to haggle over property leases.

The second leg, however, the wholehearted commitment to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, made a number of us true believers quietly wince. First because the outer-suburban punters who swing elections in Australia, and had just ended nine years of conservative rule, were given an immediate cue to tune out. Second, because Albo’s vow trailed danger in its wake. He had forgotten the golden rule of politics: never promise that which is not in your power to deliver.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart is a moving declaration forged by more than 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders in Central Australia, at the foot of the mighty rock, in May 2017. At its centre is a call for constitutional recognition in the form of an indigenous Voice to parliament, an advisory body similar to those that successfully advocate for the Sami people in Scandinavian countries. It is a proposed tweaking of process in the hope of doing better on the substance of tackling entrenched disadvantage in indigenous communities.

True to his word, Albanese made the Voice a first-term priority, such that on Saturday, Australians will vote “Yes” or “No” in a referendum on the proposed constitutional amendment. If the polls are correct, a reform Albanese touts as a “generous” offer for indigenous Australia will fail. (When has the assurance, “this is a very generous offer”, ever sealed a deal?)

For months, activists have warned that a No victory will be Australia’s “Brexit moment”, a warning that inadvertently reveals their elitism. To be invested in the nation’s global reputation makes you by definition a cosmopolitan “anywhere”, and as with Brexit, it’s the reflexively patriotic “somewheres” who need to be convinced the Voice is in the national interest and by extension in theirs.

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That task was always going to be tough because the electoral hurdle is steep — only eight of 44 referendums have passed since federation in 1901 — and voters are innately conservative about fiddling with Australia’s constitution. Plus, past referendums tell us that failure is all but guaranteed when the proposal does not enjoy bi-partisan support, which is the case here. Which was always going to be the case here. The leader of Australia’s Opposition Liberal party, Peter Dutton, has his default setting at total war. His one job, executed superbly, was to sow fear and doubt.

Whatever happens today, we’ll look back on the referendum debate as another dreary episode in an age of political polarisation and media fragmentation. It starred a Trumpian-influenced Right, a take-no-hostages Left, and a progressive centre that struggles to win an argument, the muscle weakened from disuse by the inhibiting impact of identity politics and “no-debate” wokeism.

There’s a Yes poster on display on my balcony, courtesy of my teenage daughter. I’ll likewise be voting Yes tomorrow, persuaded the case for outweighs the most legitimate of the arguments against. The poster reads as follows:

Say Yes!
Recognition
Listening
Better Results

Presumably, the word association is a wink to a specific enlightened audience assumed capable of joining the dots to a coherent argument. “Better results” — for whom, exactly?  And for crying out loud why “Say Yes!” rather than “Vote Yes!”? Unless your priority is policing speech rather than getting a referendum over the line.

By contrast, the slogan of the opposing camp — “If you don’t know, vote No”— is brilliantly capacious. A straightforward reading recalls the No case’s early critique that the Prime Minister was treating the public “like mugs” for failing to provide details on how the Voice would work. But the phrase can accommodate myriad other doubts, from fears about unforeseen legal implications, or new layers of bureaucracy, to cynicism that the Voice will produce better outcomes for indigenous Australians.

Reportedly, the most persuasive argument for No is that the Voice will entrench division and “re-racialise” the country. There is, perhaps, a sliver of principle here: prominent indigenous campaigners for No claim that the Voice will be hijacked by “Canberra elites” to the detriment of First Nations elders on traditional lands. Yet to many, the argument is a dog whistle that ignores the fact that — from incarceration rates to life expectancy — Australia is already “racially” divided now and will likely remain so without a circuit breaker.

The argument is also booby-trapped, demanding of Yes advocates the humiliating self-restraint not to take the bait and accuse their opponents of racism, not to further alienate the people they need to convince by insinuating, à la Hillary Clinton, that they’re a “basket of deplorables”. The distinguished Yes advocate, indigenous leader Marcia Langton, was engulfed in a firestorm of criticism last month for claiming many of the No camp’s arguments were rooted in “base racism”.

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Yet it should not have been Langton’s responsibility to stay on message. Arguably, the one voice we needed to hear above all others was that of the person staking his reputation on the referendum: the prime minister. But Albanese essentially outsourced the campaign to an amorphous outfit called “Yes23”, and to indigenous leaders, gaining moral legitimacy but losing an aura of control that’s especially necessary when trying to reassure voters that if the Voice calls for, say, reparations, the government will say no.

Meanwhile, No bolstered its case by being headlined by three powerful indigenous figures. The three have very different motivations for opposing the Voice and speak to different groups in Australia. The first, senator Lidia Thorpe, spoke for the “Progressive No” blak sovereign movement that regards the Voice, in the absence of a formal treaty, as a fatal concession to whitefella law. While the progressive No vote is likely negligible, the fact of its existence reinforced the perception — the accuracy of which is contestible — that the indigenous community is itself ambivalent about the reform. And the existence of Progressive No was constantly reinforced in Thorpe’s volatile persona; in one of several stunts she threw herself on the ground at Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade to protest the presence of a police float.

The conservative Noes comprise Warren Mundine, an intriguing veteran of party politics — he’s operated at high levels in both major parties — and who has also backed a treaty. But the rock star is Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, in her own provocative description, “a Warlpiri-Celtic woman”. A conservative senator from the Northern Territory, Price’s blunt talk and counter-cultural appeal has seen her touted as a future prime minister. During a public address last month, Price said that on the whole European settlement was a good thing because now her people had running water. She denied there were any ongoing impacts from colonisation on indigenous Australians, including inter-generational trauma.

While such sentiments are clearly a-historical — how could there not be lingering trauma from the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families, an assimilationist state policy that only stopped in the Seventies? — they drew attention to the Left’s taboo on questioning any aspect of the dominant narrative about the indigenous underclass, and crucially, gave the public permission to doubt. Or, if you prefer, she offered absolution for white guilt. How to solve a problem like Price? Dismiss her as an Aunty Tom — and then in the same breath lament the unleashing of racist tropes?

What’s frustrating is that the arguments in favour of the Voice are inherently mainstream, even conservative — but the Yes camp has failed to hammer them home. The indigenous elders most prominently associated with the Voice have long rejected the politics of victimhood and noble savage myths about traditional culture pre-colonisation. Langton, who I mentioned earlier, has criticised bureaucratic squeamishness about tackling gendered violence in remote communities. Noel Pearson, leader of the far-north community at Cape York and another of the Voice’s architects, is a contentious figure within indigenous politics for his “responsibility agenda”. “By having a voice, we will be responsible for closing the gap, we will be as responsible as the government,” he says.

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Another central argument for the Voice is economic efficiency, an imperative that chimes with middle Australia. The billions spent on indigenous advancement have only modestly improved lives partly because aloof bureaucracies are making the decisions rather than indigenous people themselves.

But Yes has failed to capitalise on this argument. There was no serious effort to tether the promise of “better outcomes” to concrete examples of where outcomes would have been better had the appeals of indigenous communities prevailed. Last year, a spike in violent crime in Alice Springs was traced to the lifting of alcohol bans; Aboriginal leaders had called in vain for the bans to continue. This case study featured momentarily in arguments for the Voice, but was seldom revived as a talking point thereafter.

Instead, Yes gave us abstract slogans, a cacophony of voices, and even a song, John Farnham’s Eighties hit “You’re the Voice”, which featured in an ad alongside footage of pivotal moments in national leadership as witnessed in the lounge room of a typical Aussie family through the generations. It was intended to rouse the already converted into evangelical fervour — nostalgic Gen X’ers like me dutifully blubbered — but talkback callers expressed their displeasure at the soundtrack to their youth enlisted in the service of a partisan cause.

The more Yes turned up the volume — piping the message through loudspeakers  at the discount chain Big W — the more ordinary Australians thought, in the vernacular, yeah-nah. The Yes campaign was so tone-deaf it partnered with Australian airline Qantas, which unveiled a new fleet of passenger planes carrying a Yes23 logo just weeks before a court ruled it had illegally sacked 1,700 ground staff. If the national carrier, and its grotesquely over-renumerated former chief executive, Alan Joyce, represented anything in the public consciousness, it’s the diminution of the national interest as a guiding principle in public life.

Meanwhile, the Victorian Trades Hall Council’s union volunteers were explicitly instructed to convince voters that the anti-Voice movement is punching down on indigenous voters, and “seeking to divide the working class”. The working class, it seems, is united enough: a poll in August showed that while support for the constitutional amendment is at 54% among university-educated Australians, those without a degree are 61% against, and tradies are 65% against.

Bigotry, and unconscious bias, may well be more prevalent than I’d like to believe. But pollster Kos Samaras, whose RedBridge Group does not advise either camp, said in an interview that amid a cost-of-living crisis “a lot of people are voting No because they feel like the PM is not paying attention to them economically”. Still, it remains true that more than 60% of Australians supported the Voice at the start of the year, and most would still support a limited constitutional amendment recognising First Nations peoples.

When, two weeks out from D-day, the Yes campaign’s UK launch featured a drag queen performing “You’re the Voice”, the narcissism and self-absorption of Australia’s activist class seemed complete. As the final week kicked off, historians exhorted the public to align with The Right Side of History. “Come Sunday,” Niki Savva moralised in an 11th-hour column in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, “we will either see ourselves as measured, generous people, ready to set aside the daily woes of our lives… to consider the place and state of Indigenous Australians… or as a frightened, resentful people unable or unwilling to see through the scares and the lies, prepared to use the ballot box to punish the government and in the process punish Indigenous people trapped in cycles of poverty and abuse.”

Yet as a practical necessity, should the Voice fail the blame must rest with the Albanese Government because only they can make restitution. Indigenous people will only remain “trapped in cycles of poverty and abuse” if we let our leaders off the hook from now on, wallowing in defeat, reflecting on nothing but our own righteousness, of which we need no convincing.

“They’re going to put the windmills in there, aren’t they?” said Tommy, my Aboriginal guide, as we looked down at the forest from a secluded bluff. “They want to really rip this whole country up.” Looking out across the landscape, with an industrial wind turbine development just a ministerial tick away from final approval, it seems a bad joke — an indictment of the skewed judgement of Australian governments for whom the race against climate change trumps everything else. The pledge of Net Zero emissions by 2050 is driving a 21st-century gold rush, forcing renewable energy companies deep into the hinterland.

Ark Energy, a Korean-backed renewables corporation, plans to bulldoze 1,100 hectares of trees at Chalumbin, which is almost twice the size of Melbourne and on the edge of a world heritage area. Dynamite will be brought in to blast ancient rocks and hilltops will be flattened to accommodate platforms for the turbines and cranes. More than 100km of roads will be carved through the forest to facilitate hundreds of truck movements delivering thousands of tonnes of concrete, gravel and steel. Engineers will supervise the smoothing of gradients and rounding of curves to ease the passage of oversize vehicles more than 100 metres long and carrying giant turbine blades from Cairns Harbour.

Once completed, the 86 towers will rise 200 metres above the tree line, polluting the view for miles. The federal government can ill-afford to press pause. It has pledged to make the east coast electricity grid 82% carbon-free by 2030. It will be no mean achievement for a grid that relies on coal and gas for more than 65% of its electricity.

The Australian Labor Party is making the task considerably harder by refusing to remove the long-standing moratorium on nuclear power. Of the dozens of jurisdictions with grids running on 80% clean energy or more, none have achieved it with wind, sunshine and water alone. Nevertheless, Chris Bowen, Australia’s pugnacious energy minister, told a business gathering last month his targets are “very, very achievable for Australia”. His timetable is ambitious: installing a 7mw wind turbine and 16,500 solar panels every 18 hours until 2030, supported by some 10,000km of new transmission lines.

Chalumbin’s fate is in the hands of environment minister Tanya Plibersek, who is expected to make a decision next month. It will be a pivotal moment, ranking alongside the decision by the Labor government of Bob Hawke 40 years ago to block the construction of a hydroelectric dam in Tasmania’s World Heritage-protected Franklin Gorge. Like this one, that decision demanded trade-offs between nature and low-carbon electricity production.

This time, however, the environmental movement that mobilised to stop the Franklin Dam is nowhere to be seen. Their single-minded attention to climate change leads them to regard the destruction of natural biodiversity as a necessary evil. And so they plough on, blind to the realisation that, in Australia as elsewhere, the expansion of wind and solar is constrained by the scarcity of land. We are re-learning the lesson that broke the hearts of Australia’s pioneering farmers in the late 19th century — that even in a country as vast and sparsely populated as this one, you eventually run out of usable terrain.

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It was only a matter of time before the iron law of energy density checked the headlong rush for wind and solar. A report last month, jointly sponsored by the Universities of Melbourne, Princeton and Griffith, calculated that 120,179 square kilometres of land would be needed to produce enough renewable energy to achieve Australia’s Net Zero target. That is an area equivalent to 90% of the landmass of England, or half the size of the state of Victoria.

Understandably, not everyone supports the colonisation of this land. In April, Apple pulled out of a deal to buy power from a proposed wind development on the edge of the North Queensland rainforests at Upper Burdekin after a devastating environmental impact report. It found that constructing the wind turbine plant would destroy 769 hectares of koala habitat.

Elsewhere, politicians and environmental bureaucrats are quietly making trade-offs. A proposed wind farm on Robbin Island in north-west Tasmania will only proceed if the operators agree to it shut down for five months each year so as not to disturb the migration of the orange-bellied parrot. Construction of a wind farm in Victoria has been curtailed because of the threat to a local wetland bird species, the brolga.

Chalumbin, meanwhile, has more than its share of vulnerable species, including the greater glider — a cat-sized tree-jumping marsupial with big furry ears, large, round eyes and enormous feather boa-like tail — and the strikingly coloured magnificent broodfrog, so named because of its black and bright-orange marbling. It is also the hunting ground for the red goshawk, one of Australia’s most endangered birds of prey, whose unfortunate habit of flying into hills to gain greater uplift makes them peculiarly vulnerable to turbine strikes.

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Tim Nevard, an adjunct professor at the Cairns Institute at James Cook University, describes the application to build on the site as ludicrous. “Biodiversity can’t be destroyed in order to stop climate change,” he said.

A virtue often ignored is the power of the forest to enrich the human spirit. The natural beauty of the rainforests and the Great Barrier Reef attracts 400,000 tourists a year to the region. But it also has a deeper, sacred significance to the Jirrbal people, whose ancestors were here long before the birth of Christ. Those who retain an attachment to the land through blood lines and tradition are distraught by the proposal.

“We are the people of the rainforest,” Jirrbal woman Georgina Weiden told me in a tearful interview. “That’s where life comes from for us. That’s where life begins. Nothing good can come out of it. Our people will start to get sick and suffer. Our spirits will suffer ’cause we’ll start losing connection. It’s a spiritual connection that we’re supposed to look after and protect.”

Her frustration and sense of powerlessness are shared by other Jirrbal people to whom I spoke. It underlines the hollowness of the land rights agreements that have been struck since the Nineties and now cover half the Australian land mass. Jirrbal country is held in trust by the Wabubadda Aboriginal Corporation, a commercial organisation run by an imperfectly elected clique that is only lightly accountable to the people whose interests it represents. The agreement the Corporation has struck with Ark Energy giving its blessing to the Chalumbin development is widely met with scorn by those outside the tribal elite. There is virtually no transparency about the compensation that will be paid, or how those funds will be distributed.

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In response, the Jirrbal people, in alliance with local conservationists, are trying to raise funds to fly to Canberra, a distance equivalent to London to Moscow, hoping to put their case to the minister face to face. It is a measure of the unequal battle between a small regional community and the renewable energy companies that they are relying on charity for the fare. For the defenders of Chalumbin, it’s an all-or-nothing fight. If this land isn’t safe from colonisation by big renewables, where is?

“It’s my own Kakadu,” said Patricia, a Jarrbal woman, as we sat on a log overlooking the forest. “We call it Mother Earth. Like a mother looks after you, so you look after your mother, respect your mother.” Patricia recalled with some bitterness the fate of her ancestors, whom she says suffered at the hands of early settlers. She described the wind farm proposal as “just another trick”.

“It’s very cruel to First Nation people,” she said, slowly warming to her choice of words. “Yes — very cruel.”

At least Davey appeared to know what was going on. Barnaby Joyce, Australia’s former deputy prime minister, posted celebratory photos after inadvertently watching an old game rather than Australia’s quarter-final win over France. But the broader point is the same: politicians in both the UK and Australia have been desperate to leap aboard the bandwagon.

In the UK, the Lionesses’ successes have been splashed across front as well as back pages. Viewing figures have been extraordinary, particularly given games are being played in the mornings: 7.2 million people watched England’s quarter-final win over Colombia (only 300,000 fewer than watched the finale of Happy Valley) and, given the final of the Euros last year drew 11.2 million, it’s safe to assume Sunday’s final against Spain will attract well over 10 million. it may even challenge the Coronation, which drew 12.03 million, as the most-watched programme of the year. What that means is far harder to say.

It is common in the wake of sporting successes to make great claims about their wider significance. Yet history isn’t always a helpful guide. Despite South Africa’s rugby union World Cup win in 1995 and footballing success at the Africa Cup of Nations the following year, it is not a happy and harmonious rainbow nation. Nor did the victory of France’s “Black-Blanc-Beur” side at the 1998 football World Cup end prejudice and racial tension there. Which is not to say that those triumphs and the celebrations that followed were worthless: symbols can still have value even if the ideal they represent remains distant, perhaps unattainable.

Jules Rimet, the French Fifa president who oversaw the birth of the men’s tournament, believed the World Cup would be a force for good, fostering greater understanding and brotherhood among nations. Even at the first World Cup, in 1930, it must have been hard to maintain that idealism as the Argentina captain Luis Monti received death threats from Uruguayan fans before the final, after which Uruguayan property in Buenos Aires was stoned and torched. By 1934 in Italy, when Mussolini took charge and turned the tournament into a celebration of fascism, it became impossible.

But then what can be expected from sport? The Olympic Games was launched in 1896 with similarly high-minded ideals; its sixth edition, scheduled for Berlin in 1916, had to be abandoned because of the First World War. Nobody, though, could realistically say, as a result, that Baron De Courbertin had failed. 

So, what are major sporting events for? The expense of the London Olympics, which in retrospect can feel like a halcyon fortnight of success and national pride, was justified in part by the supposed health benefits brought by increased participation. As it turned out, participation decreased in each of the three years that followed, although there were economic benefits. 

Again, it would be easy to be cynical but the context is important. The Games were awarded to London on 6 July 2005. A day later, 52 people were killed and hundreds injured in attacks on the city’s transport network by four suicide bombers. As Emeli Sandé’s rendition of “Abide With Me” at the opening ceremony made clear, the two events were linked: the Games became about defiance, about the assertion of De Coubertin’s ideals of human striving in the face of terror. Munich in 1972 and Atlanta in 1996 faced that issue far more directly.

In Australia, this World Cup has created an unprecedented buzz around football and women’s sport. The semi-final was the most watched TV event in Australian history, surpassing Cathy Freeman’s 400m gold medal at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Yet the example of Freeman shows how fragile the supposed lessons of sport can be. At the time, it was claimed that Freeman’s success heralded a new, more inclusive Australia, yet just a year later the Australian government turned away the Tampa, a Norwegian freighter laden with asylum seekers it had rescued from the seas north of Christmas Island. 

This year, nobody is making any grandiose claims about the broader significance of England’s progress to the final. Attempts to draw sweeping lessons from the fact that England are thriving under Sarina Wiegman when they struggled under Phil Neville are probably best avoided, unless the lesson is simply never to appoint Phil Neville. 

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Sport, after all, rarely offers straightforward messages. Consider England men’s success in the 1966 World Cup. After the various embarrassments of the Fifties, it was a reassertion of English supremacy, the mother of the game striking back. But what did that mean? The greatest of those embarrassments had come at Wembley in November 1953 with a 6-3 defeat to Hungary, the first time England had ever lost at home to non-British or Irish opposition. The symbolism of that result seemed obvious: dynamic, modern, socialist Hungary upsetting moribund old imperial England at what was then still called the Empire Stadium. It was a footballing precursor of Suez — even if, as British troops landed in Egypt in October 1956, Hungary was rising up against its Communist leaders; the narrative of British decline was far more solid than that of the Hungarian future.

The wider context of 1966, however, was not the return of imperial might but of Britain — or at least England — embracing the new reality and undergoing reinvention as a home of a vibrant and irreverent youth culture. Alf Ramsey may have been a (very) unlikely leader of it, but his England side, captained by the ineffably cool Bobby Moore, became part of swinging London. That mood was embodied in the tournament mascot, World Cup Willie, a lion with a Beatle haircut in a Union flag jersey, which chimed with the use of the flag and roundel in pop art and by bands such as The Who. The imperial lion had been transformed into something cheeky and welcoming, but it was also a commercial ploy, the first time a World Cup had thought to devise a mascot whose image could transform T-shirts and tea-towels into saleable souvenirs.

While there was certainly celebration in 1966 — it was, an AA spokesman said, “like VE Night, election night and New Year’s Eve rolled into one” — the sense is of something more contained. In the week after the final, newspaper follow-ups tended to consist of apologies from writers who had doubted Ramsey and reflections on what success might mean for the popularity of English domestic football. Nobody was talking then about a post-imperial nation rediscovering its roar, but with an ironic edge.

“Sunny Afternoon” by the Kinks was displaced at number one in the charts on the Saturday of the quarter-final but, as Dominic Sandbrook notes in White Heat, it captured the general mood: the weather was good, wages were up, and, with Britain feted for everything from James Bond to Mary Quant, David Hockney to David Bailey, The Beatles to The Rolling Stones, the World Cup win was confirmation of the self-confidence of the age. Thirty years later, England men’s progress to the semi-final of Euro 96 felt similarly linked to a blossoming of British culture, to Blur and Oasis, Damien Hirst and Danny Boyle — who, of course, would shape much of the narrative around London 2012 by directing the opening ceremony. Even Bond had emerged from a six-year hiatus with the release of Goldeneye eight months earlier.

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It is different when you’re not hosting, of course, but this World Cup hasn’t felt part of a cultural moment, even if it has been far more mainstream and of a far higher standard than any previous women’s tournament. Quite rightly, there are concerns about the disparity in funding in the women’s game in different regions, but none of the debutants have looked out of their depth; there have been no thrashings like the 13-0 defeat Thailand suffered against the USA four years ago.

Quality of football is one thing, but what makes a tournament is moments and narrative, and this is a World Cup that has had both in abundance: the Lauren James stamp, the Sam Kerr equaliser, the doomed beauty of Japan’s play, the early exits of Germany and Brazil, Megan Rapinoe’s missed penalty against Sweden, Linda Caicedo recovering from cancer to score against Germany, Thembi Kgatlana’s late winner for South Africa against Italy, Spain’s progress despite the mutiny against their coach, Ella Toone’s thunderous finish…

England, in particular, has been provided with a new clutch of role models, from the buccaneering Lucy Bronze to the rapid Lauren Hemp to the scheming Keira Walsh. Available again after suspension for her red card against Nigeria, there could yet be a redemption tale for Lauren James. At the heart of it all has been Wiegman, who has reached her fourth final in her fourth major tournament. Commanding and undemonstrative, she was able to field the same starting XI in every game in leading England to the Euros last summer; this time, with injury ruling out three key players, she has had to be far more flexible and the result has been football that, while less expansive, has probably been all the more impressive. (Although, of course, it is indicative of the advantages England enjoy over other nations in terms of funding that they could afford to appoint the Dutch coach).

But perhaps the specifics matter less than the fact that England are playing well in a tournament that palpably matters. Success at the Euros did raise participation, with 32% of girls now playing football at break-time at school compared to 22% before that tournament. Women’s Super League attendances also rose dramatically last season and will presumably keep going up, increasing revenue and opportunity.

Whether this is part of some wider cultural movement, whether that matters and how long any impact lasts, it is almost certainly too early to tell. But this is undoubtedly very good news for women’s football in England. As to how good, perhaps the best guide would be to ask Davey or Joyce what they made of a game in a year or two.

Advocates for the independent Indigenous Voice to Parliament body, upon whose shoulders the burden of colonial guilt weighs heavily, are perplexed. Who wouldn’t want to end the torment of the powerless and erase the nation’s shame, especially when the 24-strong panel’s considerations would be merely advice and not constitutionally binding?

Most of Australia, apparently. Talk of equity, inclusivity and compassion is failing to soften hearts. In February, support for the Voice was at 56%. A Newspoll survey in mid-July found support had slipped to 41%, compared to 48% for the No case.

Its supporters blame ignorance, disinformation and lingering prejudice. Yet the polling tells a different story, of revolt against what the American economist Thomas Sowell identified as “the vision of the anointed”, one that will be familiar to followers of the Brexit referendum. As with the UK in 2016, the Voice is popular in the metropolises of Sydney and Melbourne, but has failed to win support in the regions. It is favoured by millennials and Gen Z, particularly those with a university education; baby boomers and those even older will vote No by a large majority. Support splits along party lines: highest among Greens, but widely rejected by seven out of 10 Liberal and National voters.

Whatever the result, it is clear that the referendum won’t be the “unifying Australian moment” Albanese hoped for when he announced it at a national Aboriginal gathering a year ago. And faced with potential failure, his supporters have proved reluctant to understand how those who reject their modest proposal could be motivated by anything other than hate. “While it is not true to say that every Australian who votes No in the Voice referendum is a racist,” says columnist Niki Savva, “you can bet your bottom dollar that every racist will vote No.” Marcia Langton, a distinguished Melbourne-based Aboriginal leader, says it would be “terribly unfortunate” if the referendum were to sink into “a nasty, eugenicist, 19th-century style of debate about the superior race versus the inferior race”.

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Yet the most commonly heard objection to the Voice is anything but discriminatory. At its heart, the notion of special treatment for anyone offends the Australian spirit of egalitarianism, hardwired in since the convict days. Every citizen stands on an equal footing regardless of why they came here. It makes no difference whether your Australian ancestry goes back 60 years or if you took the Citizenship Pledge 60 minutes ago. Here, no one gets special favours simply because of their race.

In the last referendum about the standing of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders, which was held in 1967, Australians voted nine-to-one in support of amendments to remove the last vestiges of official discrimination against native people. Like the dismantling of the White Australia policy — a set of historic racist laws designed to limit non-European migration, the last of which was abolished in the Seventies — it was an affirmation that the state was blind to colour.

But campaigners for the No vote have argued that the referendum would reintroduce a racial element to Australian politics, granting special privileges to one group to the disadvantage of others. If there is to be a voice within government for Indigenous peoples, is it not also unfair to exclude the voices of other ethnic minorities? Why not appoint an Asian voice to parliament, a Greek voice, or even a Pommie voice, since immigrants from the UK have formed a relative majority of new arrivals since the early Sixties? Opponents fear that the Voice will effectively become a de-facto third chamber in the bicameral Parliament of Australia, one with political muscle over legislation if not a power of veto. They also fear the mischief that an activist Supreme Court might wreak in interpreting its output.

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Most of all, opponents worry about what comes next. After all, the Indigenous Voice to Parliament could yet prove a mere staging post on the road to the more substantive structural reforms outlined in the “Uluru Statement from the Heart”, a 2017 petition by Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders which called for separate sovereignty over land and reforms to address structural “powerlessness”. The petition has since risen to the status of a sacred document among Voice supporters, and its proposals have been accepted in full by Albanese. It describes an Indigenous Voice to Parliament as the first step towards a truth commission and a Makarrata Agreement — a treaty — empowering Aboriginal Australians to reclaim control over their economic and social destiny.

Some Indigenous activists would go further still, and are not afraid to say so. Thomas Mayo, a prominent Yes campaigner, says the Voice will be a vehicle to force non-Indigenous Australians to “pay the rent” for living on stolen land. In a series of tweets from 2020, Mayo claimed the “Blak [sic] rep body” would have the resources to demand “reparations, land back, abolishing harmful colonial institutions, getting ALL our kids out of prisons & in to care, respect & integration of our laws & lore, speaking language, wages back – all the things we imagine”. Unsurprisingly, Mayo’s various social media posts and similar intemperate remarks by other pro-Voice supporters have been widely used in the No campaign’s advertising script.

Yet perhaps the Yes campaign’s strongest card is the appalling poverty that blights the lives of roughly one-tenth of Australia’s Indigenous population. The most confronting poverty is found in remote communities that were given partial autonomy by well-meaning reformers in the Seventies. The disparities between indigenous Australians are as stark as they appear intractable. Australians have the eighth highest life expectancy in the world; 86 years for women, 82 for men. Life expectancy in 2018 for Aboriginal women in remote communities is 70 and 66 for men, roughly on a par with Ethiopia.

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Decades of welfare and countless government programmes have barely shifted the dial. Indeed, the social fabric in remote Aboriginal communities has rapidly deteriorated. The prevalence of alcoholism, domestic violence and child sexual abuse is badly under-reported in the mainstream media; editors have self-censored for years to avoid stigmatising Aboriginal people. Few have taken the trouble to spend time in Australia’s own developing world to see the empty schools, the runny eyes, the overcrowded settlements beset by feral wild dogs. Those of us who have will never forget.

Supporters of the Voice, however, have conspicuously failed to explain how a Yes vote will change these conditions. Presenting contemporary welfare challenges as the legacy of colonialism and lingering prejudice had fallen out of fashion in Australia until the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement revived it. Even then, it failed to take off in the same way as in the US. Perhaps its lack of an empirical basis was more obvious in Australia. Is historical injustice causing higher rates of cardiac illness and cancer? Or might it be a tobacco consumption that is more than five times higher in remote Aboriginal communities (59%) than in the general community (11%)? Might the high incidence of kidney failure be related partly to patterns of alcohol consumption? Could higher rates of type-2 diabetes partly be due to poor diets?

Faced with such widespread cognitive dissonance, it is hard not to be reminded of Sowell’s empirically grounded arguments about the US Civil Rights movement: that the political advancement of an ethnic group does nothing to reduce social and economic disparity. That is an observable fact in Australia, where the political influence of Indigenous Australians has been steadily increasing since the late Sixties. The Aboriginal population is disproportionately represented on the floors of the Commonwealth Parliament, and the Aboriginal political class holds significant influence in the corridors of power and the media. Corporates have enthusiastically backed periodic reconciliation campaigns and the acknowledgment of the traditional owners of the land has become a secular prayer recited at the start of corporate meetings, uttered by airline stewards upon landing, and appended to corporate emails. Yet the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is barely closing.

There is little doubt that an Indigenous Voice to Parliament would enrich and empower the Aboriginal political class, giving them an even stronger hand on the levers of power. Every new inquiry, committee or compliance board established is a job creation scheme for a subset of Indigenous people who are suffering no apparent disadvantage themselves. Yet it will be a further blow for Indigenous people firmly grounded in the country, the “somewhere”, as opposed to the “anywheres”, in this debate.

In Australia as in America, the most grievous effect of insisting that everything boils down to race is the theft of agency from people who, by dint of their genetic inheritance, are considered incapable of changing their lives, for good or ill. Administering welfare in compensation will only make matters worse. As an increasing number of Australians plan to make clear, the tyranny of low expectations it breeds is anything but emancipatory.

Whether or not this commandment was ever read out in its Australian HQ — and the evidence suggests it was not — it certainly now makes for uncomfortable reading. In May, accusations that had been bubbling under the surface since late last year exploded into the headlines. Between 2013 and 2015, PwC Australia allegedly advised the government on how to design a system to get more tax out of multinationals — and then used its insider knowledge to advise corporate clients on how to dodge the very same measures.

At the centre of the scandal is PwC Australia’s former head of international tax, Peter-John Collins, though as many as 160 other staff could be implicated. Collins signed three confidentiality agreements with the federal government between 2013 and 2018, before circulating information about the tax plans to 63 PwC partners and senior managers in a long email chain — yes, in writing. His interlocutors didn’t seem too perturbed, either.

In the ensuing kerfuffle, politicians, including prime minister Anthony Albanese and treasurer Jim Chalmers, clamoured to express their outrage at PwC’s conduct. The company was dragged through the coals before a parliamentary inquiry and promised to publicly name all responsible staff. To save the firm, PwC parachuted a new British boss into its Australian division and then sold off its government consulting arm for $1. This section of the business, by the way, employs 1,700 staff with an annual turnover of $300 million — around 20% of PwC’s income in Australia. It seems reasonable to assume the bargain price represents the possible extinction of its entire income stream.

While PwC’s days of having it both ways appear to be over, it remains unclear whether the scandal will be enough to force the Government to wean itself off the consultancy sector. Australia’s management consulting market is the world’s biggest per capita, and fourth-biggest overall, remarkable for a country of only 25 million. And the federal government has been leading the way. Between 2013 and 2022, its annual spending on consultants shot up from $352 million to $888 million per annum. Over the same period, the Big Four professional services firms — PwC, KPMG, Deloitte and Ernst & Young — pocketed $1.2 billion in federal government consultancy contracts, and a whole lot more in professional services fees. Fellow consultancy giants McKinsey & Co. and BCG have also been having a swell time in Australia, rapidly expanding their government business.

Inevitably, since these firms all provide services to both the government and the private sectors, conflicts of interest risks abound. This week, for instance, KPMG launched its own internal review of its contracts advising both the Government on quality and safety audits of aged care facilities, and operators on passing these audits and gaining accreditation. Even the Australian Federal Police, which is now investigating Collins for potential criminal conduct, has awarded PwC consulting contracts worth over $20 million over the past two years, and another $30 million to the other “Big Seven” consulting firms (a group that also includes Accenture). Rather ironically, PwC is also the AFP’s external auditor.

As ever with giant professional services firms, the rot runs deeper than mere conflict-of-interest problems. While these matter, focusing solely on conflict of interest is to miss the bigger point about government consulting; even if it were addressed by splitting up firms, as PwC is doing now, administrations would probably remain reliant on external consulting — and that is far more concerning prospect.

In Australia, as in many other countries, external consultants have become integral to core government operations, winning lucrative contracts without tangible improvements to performance. This became impossible to ignore during the Covid-19 pandemic. In one notable example, the federal government outsourced the planning, logistics, monitoring and delivery of vaccines. It awarded McKinsey $3 million in contracts for strategic planning, consulting and professional services, while Ernst & Young received over $1.5 million to conduct vaccine system readiness reviews.

Did they get a return on their investment? Not quite. Until it was centralised under the command of Lieutenant-General John Frewen, the bungling of Australia’s vaccination campaign became the stuff of legend, earning the nickname “the strollout” — the Australian National Dictionary’s 2021 word of the year. State governments also relied heavily on consultants in their pandemic responses, to much the same effect. In Victoria, the public service’s consulting expenditure jumped by over 300% between 2014 and 2022. KPMG, for example, earned $36.7 million in Victoria in 2022, with almost $20 million coming from its work with the Department of Health on the pandemic response, including for contracts entitled “Covid-19 emergency management support”. And yet, the state government’s response to the pandemic was notoriously underwhelming, with Melbourne becoming the world’s most locked-down city.

When criticising the increasing reliance of our political elites on this new consultancy class, it’s common for critics to refer to the “hollowing-out of the state”, whereby functions previously performed by government are increasingly outsourced to private providers. This process has a self-reinforcing dynamic: once work is done outside government, public servants lose vital skills and capacities, becoming even more reliant on the private sector, especially in a crisis.

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A common error, however, is to attribute this process solely to the neoliberal ideology of “small government” and to public administration fads such as “new public management”. It’s certainly the case that outsourcing is often justified on the premise that the private sector is inherently superior to cumbersome public bureaucracies; moreover, the erosion of capacity within the public service also provides fodder for those who would like to see governments become even smaller. But in Australia, even as the public service’s share of the workforce has shrunk since the Seventies, government spending’s share of GDP has increased. If neoliberalism isn’t to blame, what is?

In Australia, at least, the bigger story behind governments’ increasing usage of external consultants is the erosion of democratic accountability. Here, outsourcing to the private sector is one of several measures designed to provide governments with plausible deniability by distancing themselves from policymaking and implementation processes. In the same vein, there has been a growing trend towards empowering state agencies whose operations are insulated from democratic politics. The Reserve Bank of Australia, for instance, became operationally independent in the Nineties and was given an inflation target that has since overridden other possible policy goals, such as full employment, higher pay or the survival of manufacturing. Just as in the UK with the Bank of England, elected governments lost the ability to set monetary policy.

Crucially, however, this has suited them well — since they could claim that the distributional outcomes of monetary policy decisions were no longer their responsibility. Indeed, the government has recently expressed its displeasure with the RBA’s rapid interest rate hikes and its calls for higher unemployment to stem inflation. Yet at no point did political leaders suggest reclaiming authority over monetary policy. At most, the government is proposing to tinker with the RBA’s process for setting interest rates, while maintaining the Bank’s independence. The logic here is straightforward: better to blame the RBA than open up yourself to criticism.

Here we can see the real issue behind such excessive use of consultants: the existence of a political class that has no genuine interest in representing the society it supposedly governs. Where once political parties were anchored in civil society, a yawning “void” now exists between the rulers and those they rule. And it is into this void that an army of consultants have marched. In doing so, they have allowed Australia’s political elites to claim they are following “best practice”. And if things go awry, all they need to do is blame particular contractors — and quickly move on.

At the moment the artist still somewhat recognisable as Kylie Minogue has a new single out, and it’s being touted as the song of the summer. It is indeed great. Padam Padam is spooky, shivery, synthy, and insanely catchy. Its rhythm is basic enough to make your hips twitch even while you’re imploring them not to.

The title is a vague tribute to a 1951 song by Edith Piaf of the same name. But whereas Piaf’s voice is unmistakably distinctive, Kylie’s vocal is delivered with all the bland anonymity of a virtual assistant. The song is just short and sweet enough to edge the listener into mindlessly clicking and re-clicking the back button, desperate for an aural climax that never comes.

The whole experience is gloriously artificial: fake instruments, fake voice, fake emotion. So perhaps the extension of this theme into the realm of the physical shouldn’t matter too much. But it does. Once the home of extravagant youthful mobility, Kylie’s facial muscles now seem confined to tiny asymmetric movements — disdainful lip curls or slightly demented eyebrow arches.

Memories of freer, more playful earlier selves — Kylie from Neighbours, “SexKylie”, Indie Kylie and so on — seem full of suppressed pathos and are almost painful in their recollection. This is surely the wrong way round. Youth was supposed to be the relatively blank slate, not the moment of peak self-definition.

MailOnline says of the accompanying video that “the quinquagenarian sizzles in a series of racy red numbers” and calls her “every inch the vixen”. And indeed, within the highly controlled context of a music video or publicity shot, the imprisoned celebrity face can still look reasonably normal. It can even look quite hot — at least, as long as everything is carefully posed, expertly lit and retouched afterwards.

But unless you have extraordinary luck, this period of aesthetic remission won’t last. Once further along in your journey, all the good lighting and photoshopping in the world won’t help you. At this point, tabloids will likely switch from gushing to goading. Readers apparently love cautionary tales of stars who went from fantastic to plastic overnight. And there’s a whole genre of articles where journalists ask expert investigators to forensically talk readers through possible celebrity alterations that everybody can already see from space. So-and-so speculates that such-and-such “may have had an upper eye lift”. He reasons: “The distance between the brow and her eye is much smaller than before.” No kidding.

It’s a modern day sorites paradox: how many grains of sand make a heap? There’s no obvious cut-off point. Likewise, no one can say at what point precisely all the injections and incisions start making you look like a startled alien. Over several iterations, surgeons seem to gradually lose track of what the visual baseline ever was for a person. They start off replacing the timbers in Theseus’s ship but end up building a hovercraft.

The reductio ad absurdum of all such procedures is Madonna, who now resembles a living cartoon character. It was recently reported that she is looking for a surgeon to “return her to a more natural look”. This presents the intriguing possibility of a new market for the distressing of overworked celebrity faces, a bit like the deliberate antiquing of sideboards.

Criticism of cosmetic interventions for women is often interpreted as sour grapes. It must be envy. It must be ageism. It must be fear of the confident expression of female sexuality in older women. It’s not any of those things, though. Plenty of men still adore their partners, ageing at roughly the same rate as themselves. And there are also younger men out there — and younger women too, of course — who fancy older women in a way that eroticises ageing female features specifically. It’s not as uncommon as you might think. Think of Roman Roy in Succession, flirting outrageously with Gerri.

In contrast, what celebs tend to do to their faces has nothing to do with positive sexiness. It’s purely defensive. It’s a way of satisfying nagging managers, publicists, and agents; of blindly following the lead of competitors to blend in. And it’s ultimately about staving off troubling intimations of decrepitude and death for as long as possible. So no — it’s not about sex.

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Feminism has offered many plausible critiques of cosmetic alteration and I don’t wish to add to them here. Instead, I’d rather focus on the sheer weirdness of the direction which appearance norms seem to be taking. In any case, the lure of radical alteration is not limited to women. Simon Cowell is reported to have given up injectable face fillers after his young son collapsed in hysterical tears at the sight of him.

Though tabloids are quick to smell blood in the water whenever a celebrity face has moved into the twilight zone, until that point there is relatively little comment on the fact that so many people in music and television are altering their features in generic ways. In doing so, these people influence the standard for what’s normal aesthetically: both surgery and non-surgical “tweakments” have become much more commonplace for younger and younger age groups. My own dentist now offers patients Botox injections.

I sometimes marvel at what the effects might be, and how no one really seems to mind. During Covid, some rightly worried about the negative effects upon human communication of wearing masks — but at least we could take them off at night. Last week, journalists and Twitter were alight with excitement, supposedly watching the furious tension between Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby play out on This Morning. I wondered how they could tell.

The human face has evolved partly to enable social interaction through the expression of emotions. Generations of poets have captured the subtle gradations of feeling that can flicker across a countenance like lightning and ripple outwards to those around you. So, what effect does it have on children, watching your mum’s face get more rigid and expressionless over time? The good news is she can’t frown at you much — but she can’t really smile with her eyes like she used to, either.

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The 19th-century philosopher and psychologist William James suggested that “we don’t laugh because we’re happy, we’re happy because we laugh”. He thought that the capacity to feel emotion partly depended on its physical expression, and not just the other way round. His underlying idea was that emotions are just perceptions of physiological changes happening in the body. If we didn’t have the physiological changes in question, we wouldn’t have the emotions.

Subsequent theorists have found a lot to criticise here — not least, the fact that the bodily changes that accompany different emotions are often very similar, so they cannot account for the identity of those emotions on their own. Whatever the truth of this, a more recent finding, that the use of Botox not only inhibits facial expression but also inhibits activity in emotional processing circuits, is very Jamesian. There is even evidence that Botox messes with our ability to read other people’s emotions correctly, as well as dampening our own.

Some clinicians now argue that Botox should be used to treat depression. Perhaps this sounds great to you, but to me it sounds dystopian — trying to deal with existential dread by paralysing someone’s face so they can’t feel it. The potential for using Botox to manage other negative emotions has not gone unnoticed either. In a journal article from 2021, academics argued that mask-wearing during Covid increased perceptions of frowning and other marks of negative emotion in the top half of one’s face. Incredibly — or not — they suggested that adding Botox in visible parts of the face “may offer a positive solution to decrease negative emotions and promote well-being for both the mask-wearer and all who come in contact with that individual”.

Whether they are promoted to stave off wrinkles, social disharmony or cosmic suffering, ultimately cosmetic interventions are aimed at insulating us from the inescapability of human mortality and our finitude. Which is quite funny when you think about it: because what we actually seem to be doing with all those treatments is moulding a death-mask out of still-living flesh. There will, of course, be a time in future when we stop feeling anything at all, and our faces relax in perfect expressionless repose. But not yet.

The temptation to keep wiping and re-wiping the slate clean in life is a strong one. In the words of Piaf, there’s a habitual desire “to go back to zero”. Or, if you prefer the words of Kylie, we yearn to “step back in time”. It’s an impossibility though. An older face stretched tight is still an older face; and difficulties persist in the world, whether or not you anaesthetise yourself from feeling them.

Twitter is still full of otherwise seemingly nice people, fantasising about a world in which Farage had died horribly in his 2010 plane crash. And where Posie — AKA Kellie-Jay Keen —  is concerned, the murderous fantasies are even more openly expressed. Over the weekend, Keen faced a baying mob of counter-protesters at her Let Women Speak event in New Zealand. She left without addressing the crowd, and later described the swarm around her, whipped up by calls to “kill the Nazi”, as “completely rabid”. She claims she thought that “this was it” and she was about to be crushed to death.

The mob smashed down barricades and roared their rage, one spattering her with red soup designed to symbolise blood. Keen, five feet nothing, seemed almost swallowed by the seething mass of haters.

What happened last weekend in New Zealand isn’t confined to one side of an otherwise principled political debate, in which a few bad actors are spoiling things for everyone else. It’s the latest instance of a post-democratic style of politics now well on its way to being the new normal.

It follows a pattern inseparable from the viral power of social media and its anonymous denizens: a fusion of “high” and “low” politics, in which Farage was a definitive innovator. But if Farage pioneered this populist style, it’s now being wielded far more widely — including to defend the status quo.

I’m perhaps a relative outlier among Britain’s broadly liberal-Left-inclined Terf sorority, many of whom were horrified by Brexit. I was on the ground in 2016 handing out Vote Leave flyers. Even then, it struck me as significant that there were not one but two Brexit campaigns. When it came to boots on the ground, the two “sides” worked together amiably enough — but the class and cultural differences were palpable.

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The split was roughly along the lines I have characterised as Virtuals and Physicals: knowledge workers and real-world workers. Vote Leave addressed itself to the “respectable” mainstream, which is to say, the Virtuals. They put up media spokespeople who said carefully tuned things about regulations and democracy and taking back control. Its volunteers were mostly, like me, middle-class. Farage’s side, Grassroots Out, recruited from and spoke more to those among the Physicals who supported Brexit. To this end, GO used much more direct language and populist tropes, and was far less restrained than Vote Leave about referencing certain less polite aspects of the issue: such as the fact that, for some, Brexit really was about immigration.

Farage and Keen have a great deal in common. Both are Marmite figures, as iconic in look, manner and rhetorical directness as they are loathed by the bien pensant. Both are gifted communicators, skilled at being heard beyond their bubbles. Both have, as a result, faced accusations from their own side of turning their respective campaigns into a “cult of personality”.

And both are accused of flirting with “the far-Right”. This is as you’d expect. In the 21st century, Progress means the unbounded forward march of commerce and technology. And any effort at all to set any limits on that forward march, by calling for limits on the free global movement of low-skilled labour, for example, makes you far-Right by definition. As for asserting a sexed limit to self-identification, this also amounts to standing athwart the march of commerce and technology, yelling “Stop!”. Sorry, Posie: you’re also far-Right.

This definition expands, too, beyond Keen to everyone who knows biology exists, making any effort at positioning oneself as “one of the Left-wing Terfs” mostly a futile exercise in self-muzzling. Even so, it’s applied with particular vehemence to anyone who, like Farage and Keen, demonstrates a talent for mobilising protest campaigns among the masses upon whom this model of Progress imposes the highest cost and least upside.

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But this is only one side of an effective 21st-century political campaign. Even as Keen’s voice has reached mainstream women, the other gender-critical campaign — the side analogous to Vote Leave — has also flourished, at one remove from the rambunctious, plain-speaking populist one. This growing ecosystem of campaigning groups and other bodies stays meticulously within the norms of civil discourse, and orients itself less toward public awareness than regulatory and policy shifts. Transgender Trend, for example, produces resource packs to help schools support gay and gender diverse youth while protecting appropriate sex segregation. Sex Matters seeks to uphold the political and legal salience of biological sex across the board. It is, in essence, the Grassroots Out/Vote Leave model.

It is meaningless to say one or the other is more effective: they are complementary. And in this new, twin-faced digital-era template for politics, the official electoral process is rendered largely irrelevant. Its Virtual aspect is led by named figures, who play ostentatiously by the liberal rules: open debate, civil discourse, equality before the law and so on — all while working assiduously behind the scenes to capture supposedly neutral institutions and deploy their power in service to campaign objectives. This form of pre-political politics then uses institutional power to shape the parameters of the political space itself, thus controlling what is or isn’t on offer to voters at the polling booth. On the liberal side, the transactivist behemoth Stonewall was a trailblazer in this form of politics, and still exerts a startling degree of influence over sex and gender norms via its organisational accreditation programme.

The other face will have controversial lightning-rod front-men or women such as Farage or Keen, but is powered mostly by anonymous social media accounts, whose bios usually carry a plethora of hashtags and insignia announcing their allegiance to campaigns or issues. This side can be swiftly mobilised to fill in petitions, show up to protests, and dogpile opponents. Being anonymous, they’re also largely exempt in practice if not in theory from the formal rules of liberal civil discourse. As such they serve as crucial shock troops in any single-issue campaign.

But this Janus-faced campaigning model, first seen during the EU referendum, isn’t just for dissidents. Rather, its success during Brexit set a new political template that has since been widely adopted. Recently characterised by political economist Thomas Prosser as “low liberalism”, this social media-driven form of political discourse pursues liberal aims via sometimes starkly illiberal means, for example the emerging “liberal defence of no-platforming”, or the wholesale delegitimisation of opponents as evil or bad actors.

Prosser sees low liberalism as emerging in the aftermath of the Trump/Brexit revolt, as a popular defence of the status quo against Right-populism. Its first UK manifestation was probably the #FBPE movement that sprang up, first on social media but subsequently in new publications and sometimes very large street demonstrations, to give mass voice to those who rejected Brexit and sought to reverse the referendum; it has since mutated to encompass multiple issues.

The mob that gathered to dogpile Kellie-Jay Keen in New Zealand over the weekend is a textbook example of low liberalism. And such low-liberal mobs serve exactly the same purpose as any other swarm of hashtag ideologues. That is, they serve as authoritarian shock troops for others who benefit politically from their actions but prefer not to be tainted with their methods. The antipodean politicians and journalists who first demonised Kellie-Jay Keen as undesirable, then refused to condemn the mob who left her in fear for her life, can serenely deny any complicity with the violence unleashed upon her. But I dare say a great many of them privately think what low liberals say out loud: Keen deserved everything she got.

And it’s no use wringing our hands and lamenting the loss of civility in politics. We stopped forming liberal democratic citizens a generation ago, as we began to transition from a print-first to a digital-first culture.

And in this new age, the older norms of neutrality, debate, long-form writing, evidence and so on are meaningful and effective only among a shrinking minority. For this group, the principal vector for political influence isn’t the electoral process, but some distance upstream of it. For the rest, whether it’s in service to the onward march of Progress or arrayed against it, demagoguery is the order of the day. Hashtags, video clips, insinuations — and, increasingly, violent mobs.

This post-democratic form of politics now operates by coordinating formal and informal campaign styles, all with the right measure of deniability. You can’t move the political needle if you only have internet crazies — because (as the Capitol rioters discovered in America) you can riot all you like but if you’re not backed up by any institutional power, you’re toast. Equally, without a convincingly large mob of online crazies who can be mobilised to defend your programme, you’re vulnerable to accusations of being one of the “sinister elites” of conspiracy mythology.

Of course, this game is heavily rigged in favour of one team. Covid debates saw the creeping politicisation of everything propagated, with ever greater shamelessness, under the banner of liberal neutrality. And under this order the Good Internet Crazies, the “low liberals”, are routinely given a pass for levels of illiberalism and overall derangement that would have their enemies permanently tarred as beyond the pale.

But the larger point is that in a digital-first culture, there’s no stuffing the post-democratic genie back in the bottle. There’s nothing to be gained from lamenting the end of civility, or reasoned discourse, much-missed though these are. And there’s no point complaining about egregious asymmetries in how bad behaviour is punished, between the Good Crazies (who are just passionate) and the Bad Crazies (who are evil). The only way forward is to stop singing threnodies for a vanished political order, and start thinking strategically about how to survive in the one that replaced it.

The atrocity brought national attention to a brutal gang war that had, until then, been raging only in the outer reaches of the city. The subsequent need to escape the spotlight focused the minds of gang leaders on their core business model — which is, quite simply, making billions of dollars from the drug trade. Since the infamous airport attack, Australia’s powerful bikie gangs have turned their considerable brawn into brains, evolving into sophisticated transnational criminal organisations that are reshaping global drug networks.

Police say that there are 38 outlaw motorcycle gangs operating in Australia, with around 4,600 patched members and hundreds, or even thousands, of hopefuls waiting in the wings. Culturally, the reach of this relatively small group is great. Bikies have strong connections to Sydney’s nightclub scene, and rugby league and AFL players are frequently chastised for socialising with them. A Home and Away starlet was sprung on a bender with a bikie in 2009 — losing her billionaire media heir boyfriend in the fallout — and last year, a sitting Victorian Senator was forced to step down as deputy leader of her party after it was revealed that she had dated a former Rebels leader while she was on the Joint Law Enforcement Committee.

Bikies have long sat at the top of domestic drug distribution networks, and they’ve no shortage of customers. Australians are notorious fiends for anything in powdered form, buying it at several times the going rate in the United Kingdom or United States. A gram of cocaine retails for around £75 in London, but you’ll pay at least £175 in Sydney. The bikies make an estimated £1.7 billion per year from dealing, a figure that represents a third of the total Australian drug trade — and is rising.

But bikies are increasingly turning their attention to the really lucrative business of importing. This shift became evident in 2021, when Mark Buddle, exiled leader of the biggest and most brutal gang, the Comanchero, sent a message to other leading Sydney criminals stating that he was setting up a Mafia-style “commission”, to control who was importing gear via taxation and price-fixing. The cost of meth had dropped from $250,000 to $80,000 per kilogram in a month, his message lamented, “because there is NO STRUCTURE, no rules, no reasoning and to be honest there’s NO SENSE”.

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Strengthening vast global supply chains and creating new ones, the bikies are collaborating with bona fide mafia organisations like the ‘Ndrangheta and Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel. A network of these gangs are working together, having set up outposts in south-east Asia, to be at the forefront of the methamphetamine trade. Indeed, a 2019 United Nations report found that, while established players from China, Hong Kong and Thailand remain central to methamphetamine and heroin manufacturing, outlaw motorcycle gangs from Australia and New Zealand had recently “sought to gain a foothold in the region”. Heightened law enforcement attention in Australia was seen as a driving factor.

The domestic crackdown on the gangs was partly caused by the public outcry following the Airport brawl. Before then, bikie elites were often derided in Australian popular culture as Instagram-obsessed “Nike bikies” — roided-up gym junkies who don’t even ride Harleys. (One leader was known as the “Bathrobe Bikie”, because he had a tendency to pose in Versace loungewear.) But if leaders are more cosmopolitan, their gangs are comprised largely of young men from Sydney’s severely disadvantaged western suburbs, who do the dirty work. The city has seen a spate of high-profile bikie attacks in the last few years, including a bitter drug distribution feud between two bikie-linked clans, the Alameddines and the Hamzys. Scores of shootings which almost wiped out the latter family entirely, and the bloodshed was met with wide condemnation — from talkback radio callers demanding swift action, to then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd denouncing the brawl as “absolutely unacceptable”. The police promised to step up.

The Alameddines and Hamzys are fairly low-ranking clans, but infighting has plagued the big boys, too. In 2018, a former Comanchero boss, Mahmoud “Mick” Hawi — who was charged with the manslaughter of Anthony Zervas — was murdered by a friend with financial motives. (The accused man was subsequently acquitted and then murdered himself last year.) A report last year from Deakin University challenges the narrative that what drives the gangs is endless patch-on-patch warfare; they are, rather, looking for new ways to do business. “OMCGs have changed in the past 10 to 15 years,” author Professor David Bright said. “Before this, they were very much about the brotherhood and that antisocial bikie lifestyle, but now they’re inviting young members to join simply because they have a criminal history the club finds useful.” The study also found that young men looking to get into bikie gangs aren’t motivated less by being their brothers’ keeper and more by the cash that can be made.

The focus on money-making, as well as the police crackdown, has seen an exodus of senior bikie leaders, who want both to escape the law and oversee offshore operations. Estimates suggest that a third of senior leaders live outside of Australia — in places such as Dubai, Cyprus, Thailand and Turkey — although this trend has been dented in recent months by the extraditions of key figures. Mark Buddle, exiled leader of the Comanchero — and considered the most wanted man in the country — was dragged home late last year with a series of security measures worthy of a war criminal.

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Bikies don’t elicit a lot of sympathy, but there’s clear evidence that they’re being over-policed. Data from the two states that provided it shows that the failed prosecution rate for members of OMCGs (outlaw motorcycle gangs) was up to four times higher than the general population. States routinely try to enact anti-association laws, which included bans on operating clubhouses and working in tattoo parlours, and jail time for consorting in public in groups larger than three. These laws are often struck down by the courts.

But it’s the “501 law” that has had the profoundest effect. Brought into effect in 2015, it gives the Immigration Minister the power to deport people born in another country if they’ve spent 12 or more months in jail. Freedom of movement laws between Australia and New Zealand, and the opportunities present in former’s organised crime scene, mean that ambitious young Kiwis travel over the Tasman to ply their trade in Sydney. The 501 law has seen many of them sent back to New Zealand. The irony of Australia effectively creating a modern penal colony isn’t lost on the Kiwis, who have been critical of the practice. New Zealand is decidedly anxious about importing Australian problems to its shores, and with good reason: the Comanchero turned the challenge presented by the 501 law into an opportunity, by opening a New Zealand chapter. It is estimated that Kiwi gang membership in total has doubled to over 8,000 since 2016. Indeed, the nation has had to do some deporting of its own, to the Pacific Islands.

Inevitably, the oceanic drug highway has blossomed as a result. Small island nations, such as Fiji and Tonga — which are in many ways beholden to the two regional leaders — have become fundamental hubs in the trade between the Americas and Australia. Bikie gangs have established chapters in many of them, often thanks to members who have been deported. A report last year by the Lowy Institute found that, in the Pacific Islands, “drug trafficking has evolved significantly with the rise of local actors in transnational criminal networks”. It blamed the deportation policies of Australia, New Zealand and the United States for “exacerbating crime and addiction within Pacific nations”.

Last month, two prominent news stories underlined the extent that the drug trade is now very much a regional issue. A record-breaking 3.2-tonne haul of cocaine, valued at £260 million, was discovered floating in bales in international waters north-east of New Zealand. Greg Williams, director of New Zealand’s National Organised Crime Group, claimed that it had to be bound for Australia — because Aussies would only take 12 months to get through the drugs, while the same amount would take Kiwis 30 years. Then there was the curious case of a group of men found clinging to an ice box off the southern coast of Western Australia. The men claimed that their boat had capsized fishing, but in the following days, both it and 365kg of cocaine had washed up on nearby beaches.

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Traffickers are now specialising in these kinds of drug dumps in the poorly-policed international waters in the Pacific, where floating bundles of cocaine are left at particular coordinates to be collected by another waiting vessel. Police don’t patrol these waters to catch these drops, so unless they have inside information, it’s a relatively successful practice. We know that these kind of bold drug importations are now favoured by Australian bikies thanks to an-FBI led international operation where leaders such as Mark Buddle had their conversations monitored by a police-operated encrypted app called ANOM.

Indeed, the role of bikie gangs in the drug trade is set to become a key election issue in New Zealand later this year. The conservative National Party has been emphasising the importance of law and order — pointing out that the new Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins, was police minister during the early and enormous explosion in gang recruitment. Back in Australia, the state of New South Wales, of which Sydney is the capital, goes to the polls in March — and bikies are a big issue. Premier Dominic Perrottet has announced that he’ll be adding a further 30 police to the force’s Raptor Squad, which tackles outlaw motorcycle gangs, a move supported by the Labor opposition. Yet in spite of the law and order frenzy on both sides of the Tasman, there’s an issue that nobody wants to face: there would be no illicit drug trade to control if it wasn’t for the global war on drugs, now into its second century of failure.

Oceania is a fascinating case in the way the global drug trade is changing. Traditional gang hallmarks like loyalty to the badge and firm local control are, like so many other things in this world, giving way to bean counters. Organised crime from all over the world is coming together to maximise profits, and becoming more ruthless in pursuit of them. After all, getting caught means a long jail sentence whether it’s 20kg or two tonnes — so why not go all in?

The small boats coming in increasing numbers across the Channel could similarly become the image of the collapse of the authority of Rishi Sunak’s government — if Keir Starmer is willing to learn lessons from Australia, and in particular Tony Abbott’s relentless assaults.

Politics is a contact sport. Effective oppositions put their opponents in the wrong — and keep them there by returning to the attack again and again. This normally starts with framing. Australian Liberal Prime Minister John Howard defined the debate about refugees when he said that “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”. Australian Labor never found a way to make the humanitarian needs of refugees sound appealing — it just sounded like open borders.

There is a Maslowian hierarchy to the demands voters make of politicians. At the bottom is security, in the middle is competence and delivery of public services — and it is only when these fulfilled that voters are willing to listen to political parties’ visions of the future. Put bluntly, the most effective attack the Labour frontbench can make on Rishi Sunak’s government is to say again and again that the Tories have lost control of our borders.

This is not a time for subtlety; whatever “Stop the boats!” lacks in elegance, it gains in punchiness. This is the second lesson that Starmer needs to learn from Tony Abbott — winning from opposition isn’t pretty, but it can be simple. Two or three-word slogans can sum up an attack. They should simplify more detailed or complex arguments rather than be simplistic, but they must be instantly understandable.

It’s fortunate, then, that the solution to tackling the small boats crisis is relatively straightforward. Shift processing from the UK to France, so asylum seekers don’t need to risk the crossing. Speed up the processing of claims, which will lead to quick deportations and cut the credibility of the people smugglers. At the same time, launch a war of intelligence and policing against these gangs, with the support of the governments of the countries they operate from and through. This last part is particularly difficult for the Conservative government to achieve with France because of the suspicion, and at times hostility, their ministers and MPs have shown to us since Brexit. Like most good plans, this will take time to arrange, so Labour needs a clear strap-line.

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The template Tony Abbott successfully copied was Michael Howard’s contract with the country in the 2005 UK general election: “More police. Cleaner hospitals. Lower taxes. School discipline. Lower immigration.” Few voters read political manifestos. When they complain in focus groups that they don’t know enough about Labour’s policies, they don’t mean they would like to read a 200-page manifesto. What they want is the “retail offer” — the pledges that set out simply and clearly the difference that Labour will make for them directly and personally. What does Labour mean for the NHS? Less waiting. And for crime? More police. For schools? Smaller classes. Voters need to know why Labour is the answer — and to which questions.

Since Labour conference, Starmer’s team have brought a sharpness to his language and performance. This is largely thanks to the recently appointed speechwriter Alan Lockey, the return to frontline politics of experienced Blair strategist Peter Hyman, and the newly promoted Executive Director of Policy Stuart Ingham (who is probably the most important political figure you’ve never heard of). Their success shows the importance of having competent wordsmiths on the books. A similar approach needs to turn the insights of Starmer’s Director of Strategy Deborah Mattinson’s research into persuasive soundbites that are repeated again, and again, and again.

This is where the final thing on Starmer’s shopping list comes in: a frontbench of committed campaigners who are convincing message carriers. If there were an inspectorate for political communication, there would clearly be a number of Labour frontbenchers in special measures. Shadow Justice Secretary Steve Reed, for one, seems to have vanished without trace in his portfolio. And at DDCMS, Lucy Powell has been unable to punish the Government for failing to protect children by weakening or even failing to pass the Online Safety Bill. Opposition is never a time to carry passengers; the task is now to present Labour as an alternative government. According to Sir John Curtice, Labour’s regular poll leads mean that a clear majority is now a real prospect.

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It’s time, then, for Starmer to pick the team who will be his first Cabinet after he wins the next election. He will never be stronger than he is now. Labour regularly polls around 50% — that means one in two voters you meet are thinking of voting Labour. The Shadow Cabinet needs to be his choice of the talent that can seal the deal with the voters. Experienced Labour hands, veterans of the New Labour days, note that Starmer campaigns best with strong women politicians; he looks and sounds more relaxed and connects with the public more deeply. So, he needs to be out and about with Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Deputy Leader Angela Rayner. They are his Gordon Brown and John Prescott, and he should remember how well surrounding himself with very strong and very different politicians worked for Tony Blair. Starmer now has talented female frontbenchers such as former leadership contender Liz Kendall, who has returned from maternity leave, and Merseyside campaigner Alison McGovern. Both would strengthen the Shadow Cabinet by replacing stale, male, and pale underperformers.

Hunger for office is the key. Oppositions can tear down a government, but they need to get up every day wanting to do that. Starmer is spoiled for targets. If it’s not energy prices driving up the cost of living, it’s higher interest rates raising mortgage repayments. If it’s not NHS waiting lists lengthening, it’s the crime rate rising and police detection falling. And yet, too often the government successfully projects the narrative that they are grappling with events out of their control, when everything going wrong is the consequence of a decision made by one of the five Tory Prime Ministers over the last six years. If he’s going to win, Starmer needs to put down his toy gun and show the bludgeoning skills of successful opposition.

This is partly why, just a few months ago, the ARM issued a celebratory statement titled “Australians reject King Charles”. According to the ABC survey the ARM was referring to, 53% of Australians did not want Charles to become king, while only 35% were in support. Today, then, despite the fact that the government’s flags are flying at half-mast and Parliament has been suspended for two weeks, the republican cause in Australia seems in strong shape. Indeed, the newly elected Labor Party government is the first to appoint a Minister for the Republic, Matt Thistlethwaite, whose job is to prepare the grounds for a future referendum on Australia becoming a republic.

Such a vote will be necessary, as any change to Australia’s system of government requires a constitutional amendment, which can only be done via referendum. Yet the government is currently preoccupied with its proposed referendum on enshrining an indigenous voice to parliament. Senior ministers have therefore suggested that the republic referendum would likely have to wait until the government’s second term, which will be in 2025 if the ALP is re-elected.

Despite this delay, republicanism is clearly back on the political agenda and is enjoying substantial support at the highest echelons of government. An unpopular King now sits on the throne in Britain. What could possibly go wrong?

While the circumstances are certainly propitious, if the ARM believes that a favourable result would simply fall in its lap, they could end up bitterly disappointed. Let’s not forget: we have been here before. In the Nineties, when Australia was gearing up for its first referendum on the republic, a majority of Australians supported the change. Successive polls showed the margin in favour of a republic was roughly two-to-one. Yet in the 1999 referendum, the republican cause lost by 45% to 55%.

Of course, the circumstances today are not entirely similar. Whereas the current Labor government and its leader, Anthony Albanese, is in favour of a republic, John Howard, who was Prime Minister at the time, was a staunch monarchist who put forward an unpopular model, in which the Head of State would be elected by parliament, not by voters. Malcolm Turnbull, a future Liberal prime minister, who was leader of the “yes” vote, later told Howard that he had broken “the nation’s heart” by manipulating the referendum to get the result he wanted. This was largely true, though the republican defeat was also enabled by a split within the movement over the preferred model for electing an Australian Head of State.

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Still, the Nineties would turn out to be the highest point of support for the republic. Recent polling has shown that more Australians do not support a republic than those who do. At 34%, support for the republican cause is at its lowest ebb since 1979. Perhaps surprisingly, only 26% of voters aged 18-24 said they would support a republic, the lowest of any age group. A large share, over a quarter of all respondents, said they were uncertain how they would vote. If many of those decided to vote “yes” the republic vote could still win, but they would need to be won over to the cause. The biggest challenge facing the ARM, then, appears to be a debilitating one: public apathy. The republic just does not seem to excite Australians anymore.

This in itself is surprising, given the way the monarchy and its unelected representative in Australia, the Governor-General, have significantly intervened in Australian politics. Only this year, newly released documents showed how Governor-General John Kerr corresponded with the Queen’s Secretary throughout the dismissal of the ALP Whitlam government in 1975. The letters revealed how Kerr railed against the Whitlam government, attacking its policy decisions, and even asked whether the monarchy would consider using its powers to dissolve it. And more recently, it was uncovered that Australia’s current Governor-General, David Hurley, secretly swore in former prime minister Scott Morrison to several ministerial roles during the pandemic. These appointments, which could have had a monumental impact on government operations, were not recorded anywhere on Hurley’s publicly available schedule, again raising questions about the powers vested in the Governor-General’s office.

And yet so many Australians, including younger citizens, just don’t seem to care about introducing a republic. In part, this reflects the ARM’s firmly middle-class characteristics. The Movement was established by prominent journalists, academics, lawyers, corporate figures, and some politicians in 1991. The same professions dominate today. Although these individuals undoubtedly bring a wealth of relevant expertise and knowledge, one negative consequence is the ARM’s heavy emphasis on the symbolism of becoming a republic and on designing the perfect selection process for an Australian Head of State, while paying relatively little attention to articulating precisely how a republic would benefit ordinary Australians.

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This is the most important issue because the fate of the republic will not be decided in meeting rooms. For the constitutional amendment to take place, Australians need to vote “yes” in a referendum. And symbolism and identity, seen as self-evidently important to the ARM, don’t appear to be vote-winners. Absent a stronger positive case, many Australians might just vote to keep what they know.

To make matters worse for the ARM, the debate for a republic is now happening in a context of serious decline in Australians’ trust in their public institutions and democracy. A spike in trust in democracy during the early stages of the pandemic swiftly fizzled out, and was followed by the second biggest recorded decline in 2022. This explains Queen Elizabeth’s remarkable and enduring popularity. Many viewed the Queen as dutiful and publicly minded, a source of continuity and stability in contrast to their feckless politicians and globally oriented elites. Irrespective of King Charles’s personal standing with Australians, their declining faith in democracy makes this a difficult moment in which to argue for the inherent benefit of elected office.

Queen Elizabeth’s death should therefore be a moment of collective reflection and debate for Australia. The end of her 70-year reign represents a major fork in the road — a time to assess where we came from and, perhaps more importantly, where we would like to go. Tragically, there seems to be little appetite for this: republicans seem to expect the transition to happen almost by itself, while monarchists are also counting on inertia to keep things as they are.

Neither side seems capable of, or interested in, mounting a compelling, positive case for their cause. And given the void left by the Queen’s passing, the monarchists’ job appears to be the easier one.

This summer has been different: politics has been on pause while Boris Johnson has partied and holidayed and the Conservative Party has been deciding who will replace him. The Labour Party is now polling so strongly that some predict they would even scrape a narrow majority if a General Election were held today — an impressive turnaround from the Tory landslide of 2019.

Truss faces an unenviable in-tray. The climate crisis is real and proximate — whether locally, where just weeks ago the London Fire Brigade had to fight more fires on one day than at any time since the Blitz, or globally, with a third of Pakistan’s land mass flooded. Meanwhile, the NHS is having a summer as bad as any winter. The Russian war in Ukraine continues and could still go nuclear.

Faced with the likelihood of a new Prime Minister fighting and failing on multiple fronts, the Labour Party could just sit back and enjoy the chaos. After all, as the saying goes: “Oppositions don’t win elections; governments lose them.” But this would be a huge error.

In unprecedented times, precedent is a poor guide to success. In August, Keir Starmer showed just how significant an opposition intervention can be by offering a simple solution to rising energy prices: don’t let them rise in the first place, and fund support for households with a windfall tax on energy companies’ bumper profits. His proposal was so popular that three in four Tory voters supported it, leaving Truss caught in a trap: ignore Labour’s policy and leave millions to suffer in poverty, or adopt it and show that Labour is driving the government agenda.

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This shows what should be at the heart of Labour’s strategy going into the autumn and beyond: look, sound and act like an alternative government. In this respect, Labour could do worse than study what Tony Abbott and the Liberal Party pulled off in Australia in 2013. For most of 2012, Abbott had relied on aggressive parliamentary tactics to disrupt the business of the minority Australian Labor Party (ALP) government. But in January 2013, after the long post-Christmas summer break, Abbott and his team styled themselves as the adults in the room, offering a short, crisp list of policy proposals. They looked and sounded the part, and provided a stark contrast to a divided Labor administration.

It worked then for Tony Abbott — who won a landslide victory that year — and it would work well here for Starmer. That’s why senior officials in UK Labour are now looking at the most recent Australian election and concluding that a “small target” strategy is the best way to win power, and that policy proposals are hostages to fortune. The problem is that Australian Labor beat an unpopular incumbent. In the UK, the unpopular incumbent has been removed by his own party and, if Truss uses the powers of government effectively, she is perfectly capable of being the change the country wants.

Starmer, therefore, has to propose change, using Labour’s conference at the end of the month to showcase just a few of its most popular and core policies. This would kill two birds with one stone. It would signal what Labour would do differently, while also answering the voters who tell pollsters they haven’t heard about the party’s plans. In reality, Labour has announced some 200 policies since 2019. But to cut through, these announcements need to be few and pointed: cap energy prices; insulate more homes; cut NHS waiting times; buy British; fix Brexit. These could be expanded in a pledge card, but they need to be focus-grouped to death and then stuck to. As the saying goes: “By the time you’re sick of saying it, the public are just starting to hear it.”

Critical to delivering the message is having the right team – one that can command attention and persuade. So if Shadow Cabinet members aren’t up to the task of campaigning, they should be replaced now with those who are. Starmer needs to be fielding the team who will be ministers after the next General Election — and voters need to see them early and often.

Optimism and positivity must be central to Labour’s campaign. Yet for most of the last decade, the party has been afflicted by miserabilism, as if it needs to bludgeon voters into a depression before they can bring themselves to vote Labour. Of course, it will always be tempting to lean into the vision of “Broken Britain” that is increasingly cropping up in conversations around the country. The problem is that miserabilism is paralysing — it leads to acceptance not activism. Labour’s frame must be upbeat: “There’s nothing wrong with our great country that couldn’t be sorted with a change of government.”

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None of this is to say that there is no role for negative campaigning. Voters will always tell you they hate it, but then their behaviour shows that it still affects their vote. Politics is a contact sport, so Labour needs to “punch the bruise”. Is the government hurting on an issue? Starmer’s team needs to focus on it. The cost-of-living crisis will be central, but if it were not for inflation, then the NHS would be on every front page. In normal times, the collapse of the ambulance service would lead to ministerial resignations. Labour’s health team should make that their aim. And if it weren’t for the cost-of-living and NHS crises, then the current crime wave and the failures of the police to keep the streets safe would dominate politics. A nimble and opportunist opposition should be able to make hay.

So Labour should be thankful for the wealth of material provided by Truss and Sunak during the leadership election. Starmer should exploit this by appointing a Shadow Minister for Government Splits whose job would be to use and re-use the best material from the campaign and relentlessly publicise it on social media — and then add to it when the inevitable divisions emerge after Truss’s first reshuffle and ministerial appointments.

With four leaders in six years, the Conservatives have shown that regicide is addictive. For once, the fate of the self-destructive Napoleon should be ignored and Labour should interfere while its enemy is making mistakes. Politics is shaped by struggle and Starmer and his team need to lead the fight — or their next campaign will share the same fate as Sunak’s.

Consider some of the basic facts. While narrow victories are not new to Labor — it ran a minority government last time it was in power from 2010 to 2013 — the Coalition has been smashed. With vote counting still ongoing, it is staring down the barrel of losing nearly 20 seats. Its primary vote plummeted by 5.6% since the last election to 35%.

But it is where the seats have been lost that tells the bigger story. At least seven are in the former heartland of the Coalition’s senior partner, the Liberal Party: affluent, inner-city seats in Melbourne, Sydney, and Perth that have reliably voted Liberal since before Scott Morrison was a twinkle in his father’s eye. For example, the Melbourne seat of Kooyong, which former treasurer Josh Frydenberg lost to independent Monique Ryan, was held for 32 years by Australia’s longest serving Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies. This is the man who literally founded the Liberal Party in 1944 to promote “the true revival of liberal thought which will work for… the full development of the individual citizen, though not the dull and deadening process of socialism”.

Yet it is not the socialists who triumphed in the leafy boulevards of Kooyong. Indeed, all seven seats have been taken by so-called “teal” independents, committed to traditional liberal values, but disgusted by the Liberal Party’s lack of action on issues such as climate change, corruption and women’s safety. The teals — not incidentally all professional women — would have been members of the Liberal Party in another time, and represented an appealing option to traditional Liberal voters, especially women, fed up with the conservative direction and buffoonish leadership of the Party, under self-proclaimed “bulldozer” Morrison. The few remaining party moderates now fret that these seats may never be won back, even with Morrison gone.

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That so many independent candidates succeeded electorally in the context of Australia’s preferential voting system, which strongly tends towards the status-quo, is truly historic. That the Australian Greens, long disdained by Australia’s conservatives and the Murdoch press, are also poised to grab lower-house seats representing some of Brisbane’s most affluent constituencies off the Liberals adds to the astonishment.

Morrison’s impact on the election was not confined to the blue-ribbon heartland. Described as a “psycho” and a “horrible, horrible man” by his own colleagues and as “smirking, unkempt, immature and dishonest” by voters, ScoMo’s time has run out. Relatively unknown when he led the Coalition to a “miracle” victory in 2019, Australian voters have spent the last three years getting to know all about their Prime Minister’s shortcomings: his rabid tribalism, his clownish stunts, his tin ear on social issues like women’s safety, and most importantly his aversion to responsibility when it came to addressing challenges like climate change, the Covid-19 vaccine roll out, disaster preparedness, or stagnating wages.

Even his leadership of the country during the pandemic, highlighted by some commentators as a key achievement, didn’t amount to much. Contrary to hot takes on social media, Morrison did not lose the election because he supported lockdowns and closed borders; rather he was punished most drastically in those states, such as Western Australia and Victoria, where he attacked the state Premiers for their popular Zero Covid policies. The electoral map of Melbourne, for example, now resembles a red wall that the British Labour Party would kill for. WA voters could never forgive Morrison’s support for billionaire Clive Palmer’s legal challenge to Premier McGowan’s hard border policy, or his quip that they should stop hiding in their cave like The Croods and reconnect with the rest of the country.

Yet the Liberal Party’s woes do not mean that the ALP will enjoy smooth sailing. Its strategy of fighting the election with a policy-lite agenda and a focus on Morrison’s character and incompetence will likely suffice to scrape through a small majority when the counting is done. But governing will not be easy, for some of the same reasons that hammered the Liberal Party’s vote: most Australians appear to have had enough of the major parties.

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For one, even if it does win an outright majority in the lower house, the ALP will have to contend with coterie of Greens and independents on the Senate crossbench to pass legislation through the upper house, setting up endless fights over its levels of ambition, especially on climate change. This will prove especially challenging as the country confronts myriad problems: a cost-of-living crisis, skyrocketing house prices and massive household debt levels, stagnating wages, an uncertain global geopolitical environment. Then there is climate change, which the election revealed to a top priority for many voters. This is perhaps not so surprising, as Australia’s eastern seaboard is seemingly alternating between fire and flood these days. But the ALP lacks a coherent policy agenda to address these issues, or a strong mandate to implement ambitious responses. Indeed, its share of the vote was even lower than the Coalition’s. At 32%, the ALP’s primary vote is the lowest-ever in the postwar period for a party to form government. This vote-share only translated into an election victory thanks to the magic of Australia’s preferential voting system.

This points to a deeper issue, too. Labor will now confront the same dilemmas that other social democratic parties have faced around the world for some time. The original Third Way innovator in the Eighties, the ALP will have to reap what it helped sow: an atomised society, divided by a growing income, wealth, and cultural gap between a stagnating working class and professional and progressive middle classes; a deindustrialised economy reliant on primary commodity exports and a financialised housing bubble; and widespread lack of trust and faith in democracy, at least in the major parties.

The ALP confronts this context without strong organic links to society. The unions now account for a marginal part of the workforce, while many NGOs and civil society groups are professional outfits with a narrow social base. In this context, the government will find it difficult to unite its various constituencies behind an ambitious policy agenda to tackle Australia’s various challenges.

If experiences elsewhere are anything to go by, the likely outcome is disappointment followed by disillusion, as Labor fails to respond seriously to issues that matter to these voters, and resorts to symbolic and performative gestures to maintain an illusion of governance. As Joe Biden’s Democrats are currently finding out, this is not a sustainable basis for governing. The professional middle classes — whether in the ALP, the Greens, or the ‘teal’ independents — won the latest round. There are no guarantees, however, that their gains would be sustained against the impact of the strong economic headwinds facing Australia.

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Meanwhile, the Liberal Party, having lost its silvertail supporters and nearly all its small-l liberal parliamentarians, seems destined to travel another familiar route — towards Trump-lite populism and further to the Right. It is hard to see how the party could win back its old base, something which the majority among the remaining parliamentary cohort seems both incapable and disinterested in achieving.

Instead, the Party, likely under the leadership of ultra-conservative former Defence Minister Peter Dutton, has already indicated that it sees its pathway to victory via Labor’s historic heartland — blue-collar, lower-paid electorates on the outskirts of Australia’s major cities. Few doubt that the cost-of-living crisis and rising interest rates will have a worse impact on these communities. Rising petrol prices also bite hard when people rely on motor vehicles for long commutes. But whether the Liberals succeed in their new strategy, and whether these constituencies, combined with the Nationals’ support in the bush, would be enough to win elections remains to be seen.

One thing is certain, though. Australia’s antipodean exceptionalism is gone. No more will Australia be a relic of “end of history” stable politics, amid the wider crisis engulfing western democracies. Although its preferential voting system somewhat blunts the transition, the 2022 election results clearly show that the end of the end of history has finally arrived in Australia.

One explanation is that “Albo”, as Albanese is affectionately known, and his strategists got it right with their policy-lite, “small target” strategy. Labor unexpectedly lost the 2016 General Election by standing on a policy-rich programme which created many targets for their Liberal opponents to scaremonger about. This time, nothing was left to chance. The ALP’s promises were so minimal that there was no threat to any existing or potential voters. Their campaign was run, in Roy Jenkins’s famous phrase, like a museum curator carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished wooden floor — avoiding any slip at all costs.

Labor’s primary vote — the number of people making the ALP their first choice — dropped to a historic low, but while voting in some regions is set to go on for days, and indeed weeks, Labor are likely to get to the 76 seats they need to form a majority in the small 151-seat House of Representatives. That’s because the Liberal party, who govern in coalition with the National party, has lost at least 21 seats.

Why such a big loss? The simple answer is that, in the words of the Australian journalist Laura Tingle, this was “the climate change election”. Neither of the two main parties wanted the election to be on these terms — Labor because of their massive defeat at the hands of Liberal party leader Tony Abbott in the “carbon tax” election, and the Liberals because of a deep split between realists and deniers in their party. But voters had a different view: the increasing frequency of bushfires and flooding in Australia in the last few years ensured climate action was top of their agenda.

The Australian electoral system is an Alternative Vote (AV) system), in which you vote for first and second-choice parties. This entrenches the two largest parties by channelling the votes for smaller parties votes towards major parties once first preferences have been counted. But this time around, the system was derailed by the creation of a new party: the “Teal” Independents. The “Teals”, named for their campaign colours and for their political positioning — green-leaning “blue” politicians — are in effect an Australian form of Macron’s En Marche.

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First, they ran as a “start-up”, and like all disruptors were free of the constraints of legacy organisations. I remember being told by Ismael Melien, Emanuel Macron’s adviser and campaign strategist, that the most important book he read before setting up En Marche wasn’t a political campaign textbook but a book by the CEO of a successful software start-up, which gave him the confidence to “make it new” from top to bottom.

The Teals brought new people into politics. In the “Teal” target seats of Goldstein and Kuyong in Melbourne, and Warringah and Wentworth in Sydney, 800-900 volunteers came out: mainly cashed-up female retirees in their first ever political campaign. The Teals, then, are an expression of the continuing feminisation of Australian politics. The Liberal party had resisted positive action for women in selections for parliament. The Liberal leadership’s view, as often with incumbents. was that conservative-leaning women had nowhere else to go. They were wrong — and the Liberal party learned two hard truths: sisters could do it for themselves; and that once you break one link of party discipline (membership) you find it easier to break others (on policy).

And so they hit the streets, leafleting shopping centres and malls, and they hit the doorsteps, in many constituencies knocking on every single door. It was a tsunami of “Teals”. And they used humour, producing “Throw them out” posters that could be stuck on wheelie bins, so that at least once a week their message was rolled out through the electorate. One, now former, Liberal MP Tim Wilson, ill-advisedly took legal action to ban some posters opposing him; he won in court, but lost in the court of public opinion.

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There was a nimbleness and flexibility about the “Teals” that neither the Liberals nor Labor could compete with. They were a network rather than a party — a vibe as much as a movement.

In a sense the rise of the Teals is all about demographics. Since Liberal Prime Minister John Howard won a series of victories over the ALP by winning over “battlers” — the lower middle class, small business, “tradies” — Australian politics has focused on swing seats in the outer suburbs. The small ‘l’ liberal women voters in the inner suburbs were dismissed as “doctors’ wives” — well-meaning, bleeding hearts who wouldn’t determine any election. Well, it turns out they matter. They’re not “doctors’ wives” any more — they’re doctors, themselves or surgeons, lawyers, accountants, and executives. More importantly, professional women as a class are now larger in number than tradies. Demographic change isn’t political destiny, but it sure feels like it when you have been chucked out on your ear.

However, on the rare occasions Labor did win federally, it was when it offered a meaningful alternative to the Coalition. In the 1972, 1983, and 2007 elections, the ALP presented big ideas to an electorate ready for change — and won. By contrast, when the ALP tried to pass itself off as Coalition-lite, voters opted for the full-strength option.

The next federal elections, scheduled for 21 May, could break the mould. Despite some early hiccups, and an apparent lack of enthusiasm among voters for its leader, Anthony Albanese, Labor’s strong poll position has so far held. Labor comfortably leads the Coalition on a two-party-preferred basis 54% to 46%.

Remarkably, this is despite the fact that Labor’s election pitch can be boiled down to being nicer and more competent than the incumbents. Gone are its serious plans to reform the tax system, which increasingly favours high income earners and the asset-wealthy. Although Labor promises to increase the share of renewable energy, coal exports will not be touched. On foreign policy and national security, the major parties’ platforms are almost identical. So why is Labor still looking poised to win?

For one thing, the public has clearly tired of the government and its responsibility-shirking leader. Historically, though, this hasn’t been enough. Enthusiasm for the Coalition hit rock-bottom ahead of the 2019 elections, after successive internal coups removed two election-winning prime ministers in three years. Yet the Coalition still won. This time, however, circumstances may have conspired against another Morrison miracle.

The most difficult thing about governing, according to the British PM Harold Macmillan, was “events, dear boy, events”. And “events” may finally be on Labor’s side. All Albanese has to do is grab the popcorn and watch.

As a rule, Australian voters tend to see the ALP as stronger on health, education, and social services. The Coalition tends to poll better on national security and economic management. Unfortunately for Labor, while the former strengths win state elections, the latter issues appear more decisive in winning federal elections.

Coming into this election, the Coalition has again campaigned heavily on its national security and economic management record. It has sought to paint itself as the David that stood up to the Chinese Goliath — by, for example, introducing tough anti-interference laws, calling for an international inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus, signing up to the AUKUS alliance, and committing to substantial increases to defence spending. It also claims to have delivered strong economic results, such as historically low levels of unemployment, despite the ravages of the pandemic.

The Coalition’s election attack ads, under the slogan “It won’t be easy under Albanese”, routinely denigrate Labor’s national security and economic credentials. They claim that Albanese would be “soft on China”, extending earlier smears that sought to present Labor as “Beijing’s pick” in the election. Morrison even called ALP deputy leader, Richard Marles, a “Manchurian candidate” in February. The Coalition’s ads also highlight Albanese’s earlier support for unpopular tax reforms and his lack of economic experience in government.

How fortuitous for Labor, then, that two unrelated events, both occurring in the middle of the election campaign, have severely undermined the government’s national security and economic management narrative. The first is the 19 April security agreement between China and Solomon Islands, an archipelagic country of around 650,000 people located approximately 2,000km to Australia’s northeast. Although the agreement is secret and its final wording unknown, a draft version was leaked by local opponents and published on Twitter in March. It caused a political storm across the entire region, especially in Australia.

Under the draft agreement, Solomon Islands could request policing and military assistance from China. If the Solomon Islands government consents, China could also “make ship visits to, carry out logistical replenishment in, and have stopover and transition in Solomon Islands, and relevant forces of China can be used to protect the safety of Chinese personnel and major projects in Solomon Islands”. Although permanent bases are not mentioned, many analysts have suggested that the agreement opens the door to China establishing an operations base for its navy, allowing it to potentially block shipping routes between Australia and the US, and across the wider South Pacific.

While other observers, more familiar with the Solomon Islands context, strongly disputed the likelihood of a Chinese military base in the country, Australia’s election campaign was set alight. In a country already anxious about China’s growing power, the agreement seemed to confirm the most alarmist security predictions for a region politicians like to call Australia’s “patch” or “backyard”. Shadow Foreign Minister Penny Wong pounced, calling it “the worst failure of Australian foreign policy in the Pacific since the end of World War Two”. Albanese also called it a “massive foreign policy failure”. Both blamed the agreement on the Coalition’s mismanagement of the relationship with Solomon Islands and other Pacific countries. Wong pinpointed Australia’s declining aid disbursements to the country since the Coalition took over in 2013.

Wong’s claims are obviously hyperbolic. Experts argued that Australia’s influence in the region should not be exaggerated, and that the agreement was also motivated by domestic political considerations in Solomon Islands. Additionally, Wong’s claim that aid declined under the Coalition was also judged inaccurate.

Nonetheless, Labor’s punches had the government rattled, with Morrison struggling to defend his record in the Pacific. He was not helped by a fair bit of exaggeration from his own side, including Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce’s statement that the Solomon Islands could become Australia’s “little Cuba”, and Defence Minister Peter Dutton claiming he now expected “the Chinese to do all they can”. Worse, from the Coalition’s perspective, a survey has found that 72% of voters were “concerned” or “very concerned” about the agreement. The Coalition’s lead over Labor on national security narrowed dramatically from almost 30% in August 2021 to 14% in April 2022.

To make matters even worse for the Coalition, in early May, Australia’s independent central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia, raised interest rates for the first time in 11 years to combat the growing problem of inflation. The RBA’s decision exposed the deep holes in the government’s economic management success story. Sure, unemployment is low, but underemployment has been worsening for decades, reflecting the fact that many of the jobs created in Australia are casual or part-time. Wage growth has also been stagnating for almost a decade, such that rapidly rising living costs have become a major political issue. Inflation has reared its head in Australia, as in many other countries, but the cause is not a wage-push, as in the Seventies; it is disruption to supply.

Rate rises are, therefore, only going to compound the cost-of-living crisis for many Australian families by making their mortgage and credit card repayments more expensive without an offsetting increase in pay. The problem for the Coalition is that many of the worst-affected are likely to live in the exact same outer-suburban seats it needs to hold in order to stay in government. Tellingly, the rate hike and rising inflation have sparked the first substantive fight between the major parties in this campaign, over how much wages should rise.

None of this is to say that Labor has a clear plan for addressing the cost-of-living crisis — but it’s clear that neither does the government. If Labor wins on 21 May, it should thank its good fortune, not its campaign managers.

In the blue corner, we have the conservative Coalition government, led by the current Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. In power for nine years, the Coalition’s record isn’t exactly inspiring. There’s the harsh immigration policy of indefinitely locking up asylum seekers in camps across the Pacific that even Donald Trump found objectionable. There’s the $144 billion tax cut, 80% of which benefitted the top 20% of income earners. There’s the ongoing internal warfare over climate policy, which has resulted in emissions going up and no credible plan for decarbonising one of the world’s most fossil fuel intensive economies. There’s the billions wasted on defence equipment, including submarines that won’t surface until 2040, ships that are too slow, fighter jets that don’t fly, and tanks that the country doesn’t need. Meanwhile, wage growth is the weakest it’s been since the Thirties, inequality has increased, and housing in increasingly out of reach for those without rich parents.

Rather than address any of these issues, the Coalition has instead spent its time in office attacking enemies and rewarding friends. In regards to the former, the unions and universities have been its preferred targets, while the government has distinguished itself by outsourcing everything — from service delivery to policy design — to favoured private providers, with spending on consultants more than doubling during its tenure in power. Even then, it has failed to deliver the industrial relations reforms demanded by big business, or the religious freedom laws sought by the churches, simply giving up rather than trying to negotiate them through Parliament. All this tells the tale of a government lacking organic links with society, happy enough to rule the void between citizens and the state by simply remaining in power and kicking problems down the road.

The one area where the government does claim success is its management of the pandemic. Certainly, by international standards, Australia’s Covid-19 death toll was low, and the government provided unprecedented economic support to people losing their jobs and businesses struggling to stay afloat during lockdowns. But while the economy has bounced back impressively, with respectable growth rates and record low levels of unemployment, the pandemic response was also marred by multiple failures of the government’s making. These included a botched vaccine roll-out which prolonged lockdowns around the country, an aged care system which failed to protect the most vulnerable, and a failure to prepare a rapid testing regime for when the country opened up during the Omicron wave.

In any case, even as the government tries to brush over these failures, the reality is that the public has moved on. Covid-19 isn’t a major election issue; instead voters are concerned with rising inflation and cost of living, the state of the health system, climate change, stagnating wages and housing affordability. On all of these issues, the Coalition has done little, and the public know it. Only 35% rate its performance as good or very good.

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Yet the polls show that the government and opposition are virtually tied, with neither party’s primary vote currently high enough to govern alone and a hung parliament a real possibility. Why is this?

Enter the Australian Labor Party (ALP). The centre-left party — out of office for 20 of the last 26 years — is still haunted by losing the “unlosable election” in 2019 against a Coalition government riven with divisions and tanking in the polls, which had only recently installed Morrison as leader in a Hail Mary play to save the furniture. During the campaign, the ALP put forward a relatively ambitious Third Way agenda, proposing to wind back tax cuts for the rich, close loopholes for investors and speculators to increase housing affordability, ramp up spending on social services, health and education, and commit the country to modest action on climate change.

But on election night, it was Morrison who pulled off a “miracle” win for the Coalition, thanks in no small part to low and middle-income voters who would have most benefited from Labor’s redistributive agenda. The reasons for this, according to a post-mortem internal review, were Labor’s deeply unpopular leader, Bill Shorten, the party’s inability to communicate its diffuse policy agenda, and a highly effective scare campaign from the Coalition that Labor represented “the Bill that Australia can’t afford”.

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But the rot ran deeper, with the campaign exposing the void between the ALP and society, with its once-strong links to the union movement, community organisations and civil society eroded by decades of Third Way centrism. In such a context, it’s difficult for a Left-wing party to offer an ambitious agenda to a sceptical and depoliticised electorate more concerned with maintaining slipping living standards. Faced with an agenda full of promises made by a party they didn’t really know or trust, these “Quiet Australians”, as Morrison called them, chose to stick with the devil they knew.

In response, rather than trying to reconnect with society, the ALP’s lesson from 2019 was to abandon having an agenda altogether. It junked most of its key policies, and spent the past three years adopting a strategy of “bitch and fold”: criticising government policies in Parliament only to vote them through for fear of becoming the target of a new scare campaign. The end result is a party scared of its own shadow, with a small-target agenda that apes most of the government’s policies while promising to do them better, coupled with small spending commitments in areas such as health, childcare and education.

Absent a policy agenda, the ALP has instead framed the election as a contest on personality and competence between Albanese and Morrison. Certainly, they’ve got plenty to work with. Recently leaked messages from Morrison’s own party have revealed his colleagues think he is “a fraud”, “a psycho”, “a horrible, horrible man”, and “a hypocrite and a lair”. Likewise, his cosplay as a scruffy suburban dad has increasingly worn thin with the electorate, with voters describing him as “smirking, unkempt, immature and dishonest”. After his vaccine roll-out failure, and his shirking of responsibility during the Black Summer bushfires of 2019 and recent devastating floods in Queensland and New South Wales, Morrison’s reputation is of a leader who is always “a day late and a dollar short”. In this context, he makes an easy target.

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Yet the problem for the ALP is that two can play this game. Labor’s leader, Anthony Albanese, is a party-machine man who, despite spending 26 years in Parliament (six of them as a minister in the previous Labor government), remains an unknown quantity to the electorate. Focus groups describe him as “dull” and identify the fact that he “wasn’t Bill Shorten” as his only strength. Likewise, he had a terrible start to the campaign, unable to remember key economic data such as the unemployment and interest rates. So much for competence. The Coalition could scarcely believe its luck, quickly rolling out another scare campaign, warning voters that “it won’t be easy under Albanese”.

In short, the upcoming Australian election is shaping up to be a contest over personality and competence between two parties led by men who exhibit neither. Nevertheless, both seem happy to fight on this terrain to compensate for the lack of a political agenda, and to paper over the void between their parties and the rest of society. In this context, it’s not surprising there’s little enthusiasm among voters, with one describing the election as “like going to a restaurant and you look at the menu and there is nothing you are really desperate to eat”. Faced with nothing appetising on the menu, the voters might just end up ordering the same as last time.

Why would the PM be playing a forgotten Seventies hit on his ukulele in the middle of a pandemic? Well, it must be election time! Australia’s next federal election has to be held in May at the latest, and Morrison’s government is trailing the opposition Australian Labor Party (ALP) by 10 points. The PM’s personal approval rating has fallen 20 points since June, although he is still ahead of his opponent, ALP leader Anthony Albanese, by 5 points.

Accordingly, Morrison has also had to contend with growing ructions within his own party over his performance. Most bizarrely, at the National Press Club, journalist and Liberal Party insider Peter Van Onselen read out private text messages allegedly exchanged between former New South Wales Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, and an unnamed cabinet minister, in which the PM is described as “a horrible, horrible person” and “a complete psycho”. Van Onselen then asked the stunned Morrison for his reaction to the texts, in the process taking Australian politics to a cringeworthy new low.

In an effort to save face, Morrison has tried to win back some of his popularity by being tough on borders. This is far from surprising since Morrison first came to national prominence when, as Immigration Minister in the Tony Abbott government, he “stopped the boats” of asylum seekers arriving via Indonesia to Australia.

This time, however, Morrison’s target was somewhat different. He and current Immigration Minister Alex Hawke, a close political ally, first detained and then deported Novak Djokovic. But this did not turn out quite the political coup the PM was hoping for: a prolonged legal battle only made the government look even more incompetent than most people already thought it was.

And so, thwarted on borders, the PM and his Defence Minister, Peter Dutton, leapt on another shibboleth of political opportunism: threats to national security. At a Senate hearing earlier this month, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) chief, Mike Burgess, reported that his organisation had uncovered a plot by a rich “puppeteer”, on behalf of a foreign power, to bankroll friendly candidates for an unnamed political party in the upcoming federal election. Although Burgess provided few details, it soon became known that the alleged puppeteer was Chinese-Australian businessman Chau Chak Wing, the foreign country was China, and, perhaps most importantly, the political party was the ALP.

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Conveniently forgetting that Chau Chak Wing’s identity was only made public because Labor Senator Kimberley Kitching named him under parliamentary privilege, and that similar allegations were previously made against their own side, the government pounced. Defence Minister Dutton, not renowned for his subtlety, claimed during parliamentary question time that China had picked opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, as its preferred candidate. The ALP, he said, could not be trusted to defend the nation against Chinese aggression. Not to be outdone, the PM called ALP Deputy Leader Richard Marles a “Manchurian candidate”, referencing a speech he gave in China way back in 2019, in which he called for greater cooperation between the two countries, including on defence.

Morrison forgot to mention that the defence cooperation Marles was referring to, which saw Australian troops travelling to China a few weeks before his visit, was a Coalition government initiative from 2015. Morrison was eventually forced to retract his comments, and the government was rebuked by ASIO’s Burgess, who rejected the notion that one side of politics was more compromised by China than the other. But that was not the end of the matter.

To add fuel to the fire, former diplomat Bruce Haigh wrote an article in the controversial Chinese state-run newspaper, Global Times. Haigh, who represents no one, blamed Australia’s current leadership for the sorry state of the China-Australia bilateral relationship and expressed his hopes that, if elected, Albanese could provide a reset. Cue more inflammatory comments from the government and its supporters that China wants Labor to win. Although there isn’t much to distinguish between the government and the opposition’s public statements on China, the contours of the Coalition’s scare campaign for the upcoming election campaign are already pretty clear.

The buffoonery, and worse, of the past few weeks is obviously an indication of an increasingly desperate PM, and government, trying anything and everything to stay alive. It does, however, have deeper roots in the growing void between politicians and the societies they govern.

Australia is often maligned, including by some Australian pundits, as a political backwater, faithfully copying a few years later political trends set in its bigger Anglosphere cousins, the United States and Britain. This characterisation is unfair and historically ignorant. If anything, the flow has often been in the other direction.

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Australia, for instance, had the world’s first “third way” government, when the ALP, led by Bob Hawke, came to power in 1983. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, then bright-eyed newcomers, came to Australia on a study trip in 1990 to learn about the ALP’s policies, and later copied its brand of neoliberal centrism in the UK.

A key difference between the two countries is that in the UK, the union movement was defeated in open conflict by the Thatcher government in the Eighties. Australia’s historically powerful union movement was defanged by its own political representatives, via the ‘Accord’, after which unions agreed to restrict wage demands. As a result, union membership plummeted from 51% of the Australian workforce in 1976 to only 14% in 2016.

The ALP was thus untethered from its foundations in the union movement. Already in the Sixties, under the leadership of the urbane Gough Whitlam, it began to attract middle-class voters, especially among university graduates, by focusing on a wider range of social issues, such as indigenous rights. From the Eighties, because union membership was getting smaller, Labor became increasingly reliant on progressive middle-class votes to win elections, turning further away from its working-class roots.

On the other side of politics, things were changing too, and again Australia was at the forefront of developments later felt elsewhere. While Britons were astounded when Boris Johnson smashed Labour’s “Red Wall” in the 2019 elections, in Australia the conservative Liberal Party was already taking hitherto safe, working-class, ALP seats in the Nineties — a phenomenon known as “Howard’s battlers”, named after then Prime Minister John Howard. These seats, usually at the fringes of Australia’s major cities became hotly contested swing electorates, the main battleground on which most elections are fought.

In short, as society became disorganised during the shift from the industrial to the post-industrial age, political parties lost their organic connection to society. Unsurprisingly, political party membership in Australia fell from 4% of the population in the Sixties to 0.5% today. Of course, people continue to be involved in political campaigns in other ways, for example by volunteering to help independent candidates. Yet Australia’s parties and politicians have had to learn to appeal to an amorphous mass of atomised voters.

Two consequences of this underlying shift are immediately apparent in the political buffoonery dominant today. First, the personal branding of leaders has become a lot more important than before. No one exemplifies this better than Scott Morrison, a graduate of one of Australia’s most prestigious independent schools, a rugby union fan and former player, and a religious wowser. A few years ago, Morrison completely altered his persona to appeal to his party’s growing working-class constituency. He began to call himself ScoMo, parade a love for his local National Rugby League club, the Cronulla Sharks, and talk often about how much he loved to have a beer with his mates.

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The authenticity of Morrison’s new persona was always on shaky grounds, but for a time it did work. He led the Coalition to a surprising win in 2019 because working-class voters often preferred him over his opponent Bill Shorten, a former union leader. But now Morrison is no longer the underdog. Facing a genuine political challenge, he appears to be floundering, so unsure what to do he has been dialling his made-up persona up to 11.

A second consequence is the growing appeal of the politics of fear as politicians desperately search for ways of finding legitimacy. Politics in Australia over the past few decades seems to have become an endless parade of scare campaigns — drugs, terrorism, climate change, Covid-19, China. The point is not that these issues do not merit our attention. It is that approaching them through the lens of fear is often no more than a mask for political ineptitude and for encroaching authoritarianism. The government’s recent attempt to smear the ALP with the “reds under the beds” tag would have been amusing if it were not for the introduction of undemocratic laws under the guise of managing foreign powers’ interference in Australia — legislation that the ALP supported.

With the election still a few months away, there is no doubt plenty more buffoonery to come. Yet Morrison knows that schmaltzy ukulele songs will only distract voters for so long. Even in Cuba, the April sun must set. And when that happens, the void between Australia’s voters and its politicians could prove insurmountable.

I suspect that Putin is all of these things. But none of that matters to the Ukrainians who find themselves living on Europe’s new Eastern Front because, more than anything, the Russian President is simply… “lucky”.

He’s lucky: lucky that the current leaders of the Western world are plagued by ineptitude, lucky that they can’t formulate a coherent response to his menacing of Ukraine, and lucky that none of this will change anytime soon. If ever there were a good time to carry out aggressive mischief like invading — or just destabilising — Ukraine, it is surely now.

Ultimately, this is a tale of division, one that starts with voters at home and concludes with the collapse of Nato. The Trump administration had already raised the alarm about the way key European countries — in particular Germany — do not contribute enough to their own defence. And in the years since, Western attempts to foster military unity have been marked by chaos. “Stab in the back!”, was the verdict of one national newspaper after Australia decided to renege on a submarine deal signed in 2016 with France, in favour of buying nuclear-power subs from the US.

An embittered EU responded with talk of creating a European army, hailing the “strategic autonomy” it would provide. But this is fantasy. Brussels is hardly the geopolitical powerhouse it thinks it is: the EU can scarcely maintain its own border force — let alone deploy a fully equipped fighting force. And looking at America and Britain’s shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan, it’s hard not to conclude the same about every Western country. Their people were left behind; their leaders left fumbling to explain the almighty mess.

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Yet for Putin, perhaps the obvious division within the West — the one that really allows him to act with impunity — relates to energy and the environment. No doubt climate change is a real and pressing problem. The rational approach to coping with it is through long-term investments designed to improve existing technologies such as nuclear fission and to develop new ones such as nuclear fusion. In the meantime, there are encouraging ways to make our use of fossil fuels more efficient and less polluting.

However, this is not the approach favoured by today’s leaders in the West, who have all but embraced Greta Thunberg’s worldview. Fracking is pretty much impossible in Europe. Nuclear power has been shut down in Germany. And the European Commission has set out a variety of measures to raise the cost of carbon. What happened next was entirely predictable: a manufactured energy crisis, a cost-of-living emergency, and the threat of social unrest. And for Putin, there was a bonus: the increased reliance on Russian natural gas through projects such as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Yet there is another, less obvious source of division within the West that has fuelled the Ukrainian crisis: Covid-19. No Western democracy has managed to minimise excess mortality without significant restrictions on individual liberty. At least in some cases — such as Australia and New Zealand — the restrictions kept mortality down. But in Britain and North America, people have had to endure the worst of both worlds: high mortality and heavy restrictions.

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Only now, just as these countries should be putting on a united front, are the longer-term repercussions coming into view. In the UK, voters remain incensed to learn that lockdown rules against parties were repeatedly broken. In Canada, a protest against a rule that requires cross-border truckers to be vaccinated against Covid has thrown the supposedly liberal government into a spasm of illiberalism.

Given the unrest springing up across the West, perhaps it’s unsurprising that the approval ratings of its political leaders have been sliding over the past year. Consider the leaders of the “Five Eyes” group of Anglophone countries that not only share classified intelligence but are also widely regarded as its core. Their most recent approval numbers are remarkable — not least because the hapless Joe Biden comes top: Joe Biden, 41%; Justin Trudeau, 40%; Scott Morrison, 39%; Jacinda Ardern, 35%; Boris Johnson, 25%.

Of course, today’s Western leaders are unpopular for a host of reasons. Plagued by weakness, they have alienated large sections of their electorate — both by yielding to progressive policies and flirting with increasingly draconian policies. And as we are now seeing, this weakness has been magnified onto the global stage.

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Yes, the Anglosphere and eurozone may give the impression of a united front — not a day goes past without some politician warning that Putin will face the harshest sanctions ever seen if he invades Ukraine. But all these threats ring hollow. Nothing our leaders say will dispel the sense that we are being led by a group of King Lears: “I will have such revenges that all the world shall… I will do such things… What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be the terrors of the earth.” Their words are empty — and that is precisely why they seem destined to fail as a deterrent.

So we can still hope that Putin will relent and spare the people of Ukraine the scourge of war. We can also hope that the Chinese and Iranian governments will not follow Putin’s example in the coming months and years. But we should also hope, just as fervently, that the next time we get the opportunity, we elect more capable leaders than these weaklings.

And now that Omicron has arrived at its shores, the bastion of Zero Covid is recording daily cases in the thousands. Even New Zealand’s government admits it is time for a new strategy. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has ruled out further lockdowns. And earlier this month, Chris Hipkins, the minister responsible for the pandemic response, admitted that “everybody would agree [they are] not feasible”. Indeed, the large case numbers in recent days have not brought the sort of anxiety and panic that previous, much smaller, outbreaks did.

Undoubtedly, this shift has been a long time coming, presaged by many false starts. The international border remains closed, for instance, despite an initial plan to allow the gradual return of citizens from 17 January. The government promised that his reopening was “locked in”, but it was suspended in late December, sparking dismay and anguish from stranded citizens unable to get one of the very few places in the country’s quarantine hotels.

The government was unrepentant, however, proceeding to suspend the allocation of new quarantine places for a month, claiming the system was struggling with Omicron. Its cruel and arbitrary nature was highlighted by the story of a pregnant Al Jazeera journalist, Charlotte Bellis, who was denied an emergency place to return home to give birth, forcing her to turn to the Taliban for protection. After international outcry, a place did mysteriously materialise, but the government continues to defend the system as having “served us well”.

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The original re-opening plan will now begin at the end of the month: citizens living in Australia will be able to return from 27 February, if they quarantine at home. There will then be a slow and gradual reopening to citizens from elsewhere, as well as international students and visa holders. Even then, it’s a case of two steps forward, one step back, with “Fortress New Zealand” not due to fully open to the rest of the world until October 2022.

Nevertheless, the government and its supporters defend such caution, arguing that over the past two years it has enabled the New Zealand to buy time to prepare for the pandemic, and learn from countries’ experiences. But is New Zealand making the most of its late mover advantage?

On the one hand, there are positive signs. Observing the benefit of boosters against Omicron, the government acted swiftly, slashing the waiting period between doses, and ramping up its roll out. As a result, 2 million people — out of a total population of 5 million — are now boosted. New Zealand also took notice of the “pingdemic” in the UK in 2021 — and the food shortages, closed businesses and supply chain chaos in Australia, when Omicron forced the isolation of essential workers — and planned accordingly. Under “phase 2” of its Omicron Response Strategy, the isolation period for positive cases has been shortened and the definition of a close contact relaxed. Essential workers with a positive case in their household will be allowed to continue working if they return a negative test.

This certainly contrasts positively with the bungled policymaking in Australia over the summer, where federal and state governments made up new rules and requirements on the hoof; Prime Minister Scott Morrison actually suggested enlisting minors to drive forklifts to ease the supply chain shortages. Instead, the New Zealand government confidently predicts “we’re ready”.

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And yet, two years into the pandemic, the health system remains perpetually “stretched to its limits”, with warnings that Omicron will tip it over the edge. New Zealand remains near the bottom of global rankings when it comes to ICU beds per capita, more than 50% below the OECD average, and below countries like India. In December, funding was finally allocated to increase that number, but the new beds won’t be ready until June. Experts predict the country is about 90 beds short of what is required. There is also a shortage of critical care nurses to serve them, and dire warnings of the dangers of delayed care for cardiac and surgery patients. Ironically, this situation is made worse by closed borders, and the lack of priority given to nurses waiting in the immigration queue.

Meanwhile, for all the forward planning, the government has dropped the ball on the most important element: testing. Rapid antigen tests (RATs) remain scarce in New Zealand; the government failed to secure enough ahead of the Omicron wave. Like Australia, it only seems to have caught on to the importance of RATs once Omicron was raging around the world, by which time the global market for them was tight. Most of its rushed orders since are not due to arrive for weeks, and there are currently only 7 million RATs in the country, with more arriving by the end of the month. This has led to rationing, with RATs restricted to essential workers through a convoluted bureaucratic system. There are examples of the government confiscating tests ordered by private businesses, sparking ugly public recriminations.

Lacking RATs, New Zealand continues relying on the PCR testing system, which is struggling to deal with exploding cases, leading to long wait times for results. Consequently, businesses in Queenstown are already closing and reducing trading hours due to staff shortages.

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In short, despite talk of lessons learned and readiness, it looks like New Zealand may end up repeating many of the mistakes made by other countries. And there will be consequences for the Ardern government, which has a lot riding on the next few months. For the past two years, the Labour government has remained wildly popular due to its pandemic response, even if that popularity took a hit during the Delta lockdowns last year. But this year, the nation having finally reached the Covid crossroads, the government’s handling of the pandemic has increasingly come into question.

Polling shows 44.3% of the population believe the government hasn’t prepared well enough for the Omicron outbreak, and the net number of those who feel the country is heading in the right direction has decreased from 15% in January to 1% this month. And the opposition National Party — under a new leader, former businessman Christopher Luxton — has been zeroing in on the government’s shortcomings, and is being rewarded for it in the polls.

Meanwhile, a “Freedom Convoy” made its way across the country, arriving in the capital last week and blockading the streets outside Parliament. One of many demonstrations inspired by the Ottawa truckers, it demands an end to vaccine mandates and Covid restrictions. New Zealand requires workers in a wide array of industries to be vaccinated, including in health, education and police and emergency services, as well as — crucially — workers in ‘close-proximity’ businesses that require a vaccination pass for customers to attend, such as hospitality, events and gyms. Estimates suggest that this could include up to 70% of the total workforce, with bosses having the power to sack workers if they refuse to get vaccinated.

In this context, the protesters insist they will continue their occupation until the mandate is removed, and restrictions eased. They include a very diverse range of people, often with wildly contrasting politics. What unites them is their growing marginalisation from everyday life as vaccine mandates create a two-tier society.

Unsurprisingly, the response from the government — and the wider political class — has been one of disdain. Politicians from the main parties refuse to meet with the protesters, labelling them violent and anti-social, and dismissing any discussion of their demands. (While there have been instances of abusive and violent behaviour, for the most part the protests have been peaceful.)

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The parliamentary authorities have resorted to underhand tactics to disperse them, turning on sprinklers, and blasting loud music — strategically, the greatest hits of Barry Manilow — to wear them down. With ridicule failing to do the trick, the government is turning to repression: police have attempted to clear the camp and arrested more than 120 people. Even the army was called in to remove the protesters’ vehicles. Yet the protestors remain.

While local residents have little time for the protests, a recent poll found that 30% of the population support them — which creates another dilemma for the government. Having already dismissed them as beyond the pale, it is unlikely to backtrack. But a violent crackdown to remove them will further marginalise a large portion of the electorate.

In short, New Zealand’s once oh-so-cohesive Covid policy is falling apart. And as disenchantment grows, its government could soon find itself overwhelmed by a crisis of a very different order.

But as the pandemic inches towards its two-year anniversary, any warm feelings are but a distant memory. Today might be Australia Day, but the mood isn’t one of celebration. Australia is having a bad summer, and Australians are angry with their governments, especially the federal government led by Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

A few months ago, the Morrison government looked as though it would cruise back to power in the upcoming federal election, which must be held by May this year. This month, however, the Opposition Labor Party’s primary vote climbed past the Coalition’s for the first time ever. Morrison may still be leading Opposition leader Anthony Albanese as preferred Prime Minister by 7%, but he had a 23% lead in August. The trend is clear.

The immediate cause for the government’s political woes is the acute shortage of rapid antigen tests (RATs) across Australia. Although the federal and most state governments were right to shift to a ‘living with Covid’ approach late last year, they failed to anticipate the entirely predictable surge in demand for testing as society opened up and the highly transmissible Omicron variant took hold.

To manage mounting pressure on testing and supply chains, the National Cabinet, with the notable exception of Western Australia, agreed to redefine ‘close contact’ more narrowly, reduce the required period of isolation for positive cases, and permit the use of RATs instead of only relying on PCR tests. However, having failed to stock up on RATs, test kits rapidly ran out and could not be found for love or money. Actually, that’s not quite right. The small number of RATs that could be found cost a lot of money — in one case $500 for two tests.

What followed was immense public confusion and consternation, as well as crippling staff absences, since negative test results are necessary for ending mandatory isolation and international arrivals. The federal government responded by washing its hands of the problem, only providing free kits to six million low-income earners, and blaming state and territory governments since testing is their purview. In return, the states blame the federal government for failing to ensure a reliable supply of RATs to the country.

Yet behind these problems lies a more profound political failure: the Government’s inability to explain Australia’s almost overnight decision to drop its ‘Zero Covid’ approach. For almost two years, Australians were told that they should avoid Covid at all costs; today, they are accommodating very high daily case numbers with minimal restrictions.

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Given Australia’s very high rates of vaccination and Omicron’s milder symptoms, this is arguably the right approach. Nonetheless, Australian leaders and public health officials, with few notable exceptions such as Queensland’s Chief Health Officer John Gerrard, have failed to make a sustained case for the new strategy publicly. And that has left many Australians concerned and confused, wondering if the Government is just winging it.

So rattled is the Prime Minister by his rapidly declining popularity that he attempted to distract from these problems by using the oldest trick in the Australian political playbook — looking tough on borders. Yet even the detention and subsequent deportation of Novak Djokovic has failed to revive his political fortunes, instead turning into a prolonged farce that made the federal government look even more useless.

So far, Australia’s anger has mainly been directed at Prime Minister Scott Morrison. And most of it is justified: Morrison’s incompetence, preference for soundbites over substance, and propensity to shirk responsibility have meant that Australia suffered from a leadership vacuum in the middle of one of the worst crises in its history.

But the dysfunction runs much deeper. Indeed, the problems exposed during Australia’s summer of discontent are symptomatic of the country’s entire pandemic response — but they can no longer be papered over by lockdowns. At the root of the problem are changes to the Australian state that began decades ago and whose negative impacts have finally come home to roost. Having set out to create a state that is less responsive to popular demands, Australia’s political elites have ended up creating a state that is incapable of addressing serious crises.

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Australia went through a deep political and economic crisis in the Seventies, which, at the time, political elites attributed to unrealistic popular expectations from an overburdened state. In response, from the Eighties, both centre-Left and Right-wing governments sought to dismantle the Keynesian compromise that underpinned a relatively equitable distribution of income. Although justified in terms of efficiency, rationalisation and competitiveness, the main purpose of Australia’s neoliberal transition over subsequent decades has been to reduce the state’s responsiveness to society.

Policymaking and implementation processes increasingly transformed the Weberian ‘command-and-control’ structures of the post-World War II state into a diffuse array of quasi-independent agencies, both public and private, loosely coordinated by the central government. State capacity was hollowed out, while fragmentation impeded central agencies’ capacity for direct action, and blurred lines of control and accountability. This was a design feature, not a bug of the emerging Australian regulatory state. Having shed direct control, political leaders could claim plausible deniability over policy decisions and their outcomes in many areas.

Federalism has only made these problems worse, routinely hampering Australia’s response to the pandemic and generating an endless blame game between the federal and state governments. Just like the federal government, state and territory governments’ capacity has also been hollowed out. They have also struggled with federally imposed budget austerity, weakening their capacity to deliver important public functions, such as health.

All of which made it impossible to coordinate a national response to the pandemic. States and territories have often acted as independent countries, paying little attention to the federal government and to each other. They have exercised unilateral discretion over state borders and even over the international border via their hotel quarantine systems. Even now, Western Australia alone remains committed to a Covid elimination strategy and is yet to reopen its borders to other states.

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In this context, Morrison’s incompetence is far from unusual — it is inherent to the kind of state Australia has. But even a leader keen to take control during the crisis would have struggled to get things done because of the very significant constraints on top-down direction in the Australian state.

And so Australia’s reckoning with its real pandemic record must extend beyond dissatisfaction with the performance of its current political leaders. Unless state structures change to become more responsive to elected leaders, and through them to the wider public, the same pathologies will continue to reappear. Australia has paid a high price for its dysfunctional state during this crisis, but it could be much higher in the next.

Covid-19 doesn’t discriminate, or at least does so on the basis of age and health conditions rather than politics. Why, then, have views on how we should manage it — and particularly how we should treat vaccination — become so heartless, judgemental and politically tribal?

We have a milder case of it in Britain than some countries. But there’s a correlation between (broadly Remain-affiliated) liberal urbanites and the new hygiene-authoritarianism. This has been emerging for a while: back in 2020 the research group UK In A Changing Europe noted that while “it’s not the case that all Leavers are lockdown sceptics” nonetheless “it’s pretty much the case that all lockdown sceptics are Leavers”. More recently, 99 Tories voted against Covid passes before Christmas, compared to 22 in Labour.

In the US, analogous (and angrier) patterns emerge. Free-wheeling, mask-optional Republican Florida is pitted against Democrat California, which mandates indoor mask-wearing, including for all children over the age of two, and announced in October that vaccination would become mandatory for in-person school attendance. Vaccination is already mandatory for employment in the police force and healthcare on public-health grounds.

More interesting than arguing for either one side or the other, though, is what the arguments reveal about our ongoing political realignment. In particular, it sounds the death-knell for a relatively mild-mannered twentieth-century version of progressivism characterised by a desire to ensure the world is fair, and to avoid harming others.

What’s emerging to replace it is more bellicose, more ruthless — and increasingly religious. So-called “secular liberalism” has, in other words, stopped pretending to be secular. It’s been received opinion since the end of World War II that authoritarian religiosity was exclusive to the Right. Theodor Adorno’s 1950 The Authoritarian Personality cited batteries of research to argue that fascism, and the Holocaust, could be explained by the prevalence of an ‘Authoritarian Personality Type’. This ‘personality type’, he argued, was characterised by blind allegiance to conventional beliefs about right and wrong, respect for submission to acknowledged authority, and a tendency to project one’s own feelings of inadequacy, rage and fear onto a scapegoated group.

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In turn, Adorno’s conviction that these behaviours are characteristic of the Right crops up again in a far more recent, but also influential book: Jonathan Haidt’s 2012 The Righteous Mind. Here, Haidt argued that the reason ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ routinely misunderstand one another is that there exist five ‘moral foundations’ on which we all base our political views: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation. Haidt argues that liberals are only interested in care/harm and fairness/cheating, while the Right is attuned to all five foundations.

Does this apply in the Covid debate? Certainly at the surface, calls for coercive measures tend to start off with arguments about protecting people. For example, Scottish public health adviser Jason Leitch told BBC Good Morning Scotland that the aim of Covid passes was “to allow people to attend events and environments safely”.

At the core of this argument is the not unreasonable point that when it comes to physical wellbeing, we can’t be wholly individualistic. The moment you get ill or injure yourself as a consequence of having taken some risk (for example after breaking your leg skiing), you need care and are thus, by definition, no longer taking sole responsibility for your wellbeing.

Does this mean vaxx authoritarians have a point? Hiltzik points out that mandates have long existed on other health grounds where risk-taking imposes costs on wider society, such as seatbelt-wearing, smoking, or drink-driving. Insisting on the individual right to choose whether or not to be vaccinated therefore “places a perverse conception of individual “freedom” in opposition to the communal interest”.

We might simply shrug, and say this is just another data point for that 2021 study which showed that contra Adorno, there is abundant evidence for authoritarianism among left-liberals. Certainly, calls from self-identified progressives to “crush the resistance” to vaccines by making the lives of the unvaccinated a “total misery” might challenge the idea that the ‘authoritarian personality’ can only flourish on the Right.

But it’s the character and chosen terrain of the emerging progressive authoritarianism that’s distinctive. For it’s not merely a matter of progressives waking up to the possibility that they, too, may use coercive measures to pursue their chosen ends. It’s also the nature of those ends. Consider, for example, the fact that in 2020 fentanyl killed more Californians than Covid. But unlike Covid, the drug epidemic inspired few coercive measures — only safe injection sites, billboards encouraging users to take drugs with friends or programmes that pay them not to use.

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If avoiding harm justified coercive interventions, surely we’d have seen more of them in Californian drug policy. But their absence in the case of drug abuse, and fervent application in the case of virus control, suggests there’s a different motive at work than the prevention of harm.

In an Evening Standard piece last week, former editor Emily Sheffield argued that our capital city’s unvaccinated residents should “pay with their freedoms, not ours”. And on social media, we saw the same punitive ferocity recently when one American mother reported that when her son tested positive she didn’t just quarantine him but also “took the X-Box”, a measure more consistent with chastisement than infection control. The only reason she didn’t also confiscate the phone, she says, “is so he can text for food and water”.

Recently, we’ve had news that Omicron appears to be more infectious but milder, and research that indicates vaccination does very little to prevent transmission of the virus. So rationally, none of these vengeful attitudes make much sense. What’s going on?

The recent furore over the entry into Australia of (unvaccinated) tennis superstar Novak Djokovic offers a clue. One Melbourne journalist tweeted about how, since he was allowed into the country, fans “won’t want to come” to the tennis matches. Objectively, one single unvaccinated tennis player would make a negligible difference to someone’s risk of catching Covid; the only possible reason someone might skip the Australian Open because of Djokovic’s presence is if the fear was of a subtler, more metaphysical contagion.

In the Bay of Kells, in Ireland’s County Kerry, there’s a small secret graveyard that until recently was overgrown with brambles and largely forgotten. It was a place where grieving parents buried babies who died before they could be baptised — for the unbaptised were spiritually unclean, and therefore not permitted burial on a churchyard’s consecrated ground.

In Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), GK Chesterton observed that “it seems quite natural to our politicians to enforce vaccination; and it would seem to them madness to enforce baptism”. Today the prescience of Chesterton’s remark is clear, as is the convergence in terms of social meaning between vaccination and baptism.

The growing tendency for ‘the vaccinated’ to treat ‘the unvaccinated’ as other or impure recalls the willingness of an earlier age to deny others simple forms of inclusion on the basis of baptism. Never mind what studies say about the efficacy of Covid vaccination in protecting us from severe illness (which evidence strongly suggests it does) or mitigating further infection (perhaps more debatable). Increasingly, vaccination carries a social meaning as well as a medical one. It’s a ritual infusion — albeit via injection, not anointment — of sacred liquid, whose application confers freedom from spiritual taint.

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Perhaps it’s just that the correlation between left-liberalism and secularism in both Britain and America has left progressives especially hungry for something to fill the God-shaped hole, and the yearning for measures that speak to the fundamental moral instinct Haidt calls ‘sanctity/degradation’. This might help account for the ongoing, fruitless, rationally debunked but nonetheless persistent obsession Tom Chivers recently noted, with disinfecting surfaces ‘because of Covid’ despite mounting evidence that the virus is airborne.

An increasingly post-Christian West, then, finds itself grabbing gratefully onto Covid hygiene theatre, in pursuit of a purity more metaphysical than bacterial. And as we’ve now spent two years clapping for carers, sharing dancing nurse videos, and creating window iconography and even altar-cloths to venerate medical professionals, it’s probably a bit late to rein this blossoming spiritualisation of hygiene.

For to imagine we can do so would be to say we still live in a world of reasoned debate. And when ‘experts’ offer ‘evidence’ to counter rumours of Covid propagandising, only to be met with derisive accusations of using fact-checking to propagandise, we might as well abandon ‘reasoned debate’ altogether and, in the words of Edmund Blackadder, stick two pencils up our noses and wear underpants on our heads.

Or, alternatively, start praying. Progressives spent half of the twentieth century telling us that this was pointless: the search for metaphysical purity was low-status, ‘authoritarian’ or simply obsolete, and reason replaced all that. Their children, though, have discovered that purification rituals don’t have to be confined to the individualistic realm of ‘juice cleanses’ or ‘clean eating’, but can be imposed on entire societies.

We can expect them to go on chasing that high. And meanwhile, it seems enough of the rest of us like having something to worship, and a suitable group of sinners to despise. If you don’t already pray, you might as well start; we all once again live in a religious world.

The mood is a far cry from the breathless commentary during the first 18 months of the pandemic, when New Zealand was held up as an extraordinary case of pandemic management, contrasted with the disasters in Europe, the UK and US. Indeed, the country’s tough border closures, skilful contact tracing, tough lockdown restrictions, commitment to Zero Covid and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s empathic and inclusive leadership were lauded as a model for the rest of the world.

And yet, contrary to ill-informed hot takes half a world away, New Zealand’s approach had its merits. Following an initial lockdown last year, the country recorded only 1,500 cases and 22 deaths from Covid-19, and succeeded in eliminating the virus in the community. Importantly, this was achieved without significant restrictions on individual liberties or substantial cost to the economy. While the rest of the world has spent the past two years in crisis, New Zealanders have lived remarkably normal lives. Undoubtedly, there was some luck involved, given New Zealand’s isolation from the rest of the world. But, as its neighbour Australia illustrated, isolation is no guarantee of success.

However, this New Zealand model came with two important caveats. First, the cost of normality enjoyed by citizens at home was paid for by its citizens abroad. The country’s harsh border regime, which allocated a limited number of places in a 14-day hotel quarantine system, meant that thousands were stranded abroad, unable to return home, often left facing destitution. Likewise, while the economy thrived, the cost was borne by the tourism industry — 18% of the economy — whose reliance on international visitors left it on the verge of collapse.

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Inside Melbourne's eternal lockdown

By Tom Chodor

Secondly, the New Zealand model could never be sustained long-term, once it became clear that global elimination of the virus was unlikely. As such, there was a need for an exit strategy, which seemed to centre on vaccinating the whole population before the virus got in. This was always a gamble and a race against time; one which Ardern lost this August, when a cautious re-opening of the border to Australia led to the arrival of the Delta variant, and sparked a new outbreak.

Despite the fact no country had managed to eliminate Delta, the Government reverted to its tried and tested approach, closing the limited openings at the border, announcing a snap lockdown, and re-committing to eliminating the virus. But this time, it didn’t work.

While the outbreak was contained to Auckland, the key pillars of New Zealand’s model — contact tracing and tough lockdown restrictions severely curtailing people’s movements — proved no match for the infectiousness of the Delta strain. Case numbers refused to budge, totalling more than 8,400 for the current outbreak, while deaths have nearly doubled to 43. Admitting defeat, the Government formally abandoned elimination as a strategy in October. Nevertheless, Auckland’s “snap lockdown” — meant to last for two weeks — has now dragged on for over 100 days, with predictable consequences for children’s schooling, mental health and the economy.

While the situation still compares very favourably to many parts of the world, New Zealand’s sheen has started to come off. Contrary to its claims of exceptionalism, throughout the current Delta outbreak, it has shown itself to be a normal country just like every other: faced with the same dilemmas, failures, trade-offs and divisions when it comes to dealing with the pandemic. What’s more, it hasn’t necessarily dealt with them any better.

Take vaccination. One consequence of the New Zealand model was complacency when it came to the roll-out, with many convinced that the country could take its time while the pandemic raged elsewhere. As a result, less than 20% of the population was fully vaccinated when Delta arrived in August, leaving it unprepared for the outbreak. In response, the government tied the lifting of lockdowns to the vaccination rate, setting a very high target of 90% before restrictions would be eased.

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Still, while this was eventually abandoned, 86% of New Zealanders are now double-jabbed, making it one of the most vaccinated countries in the world. As we also saw in Australia, nothing concentrates the mind when it comes to vaccinations like a prolonged lockdown.

This is not to say that the issue hasn’t been divisive. Behind the high overall rates, there remain significant pockets of unvaccinated people in New Zealand, especially in the regions, and among the indigenous Maori population. Higher rates of poverty and disadvantage, and low levels of trust in the Government mean that only 68% of Maori are fully vaccinated, despite repeated efforts to roll out culturally specific and targeted programmes.

Meanwhile, the high rates of poor health outcomes have left the Maori more vulnerable to the virus, leading to demands that any re-opening be delayed until vaccination rates exceed the rest of the country. The Maori Party has been warning of a “modern genocide” if lockdowns are lifted while the virus remains in the community, with some local iwi (tribes) threatening to set up roadblocks to keep Aucklanders from visiting their regions once freedom of travel is restored.

More broadly, despite the high vaccination rates, the Government has not shied from introducing controversial vaccine mandates. With the country slowly opening up, Ardern has described vaccination as “the golden ticket to freedom“, requiring vaccine passes to enter most workplaces, hospitality, retail and entertainment venues. At the moment, unvaccinated people can do little more than shop for essentials, creating a two-tier society and sparking bitter conflicts. The Government has doubled down, stressing the mandate will continue into next year, and showing little sympathy for the unvaccinated minority.

This, in turn, has sparked protests for the first time in the pandemic. When the current outbreak started, commentators mocked a lone demonstrator at an anti-lockdown protest in Auckland. Since then, crowds have grown, with thousands recently marching across the country against lockdowns and the vaccine mandates. While they have not matched the numbers or violence recently seen in Europe, these protests bring together a similar constellation of far-Right agitators, conspiracy theorists, wellness gurus and ordinary citizens increasingly marginalised and excluded from society. It’s part of a wider fragmentation taking hold in the country, with support for the Government’s handling of the pandemic dropping from 80% to 46%. Ardern’s personal popularity has also declined to 34%, while more people now think the country is heading in the wrong direction for the first time since 2008.

This is a far cry from the ‘Team of Five Million’ approach championed by the Government in the first 18 months of the pandemic. And Ardern seems fully aware of this: the Government recently rushed through new laws to lock in many of the draconian restrictions on the unvaccinated, bypassing the usual means of oversight and scrutiny, in a move labelled “a constitutional disgrace” by legal experts.

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What's the point of Australia?

By Shahar Hameiri and Tom Chodor

In short, over the course of the past four months, many of the key features of New Zealand’s pandemic response have been found wanting. Yet old habits die hard. While the rest of the world has largely opened up and travel has begun to stage a comeback, New Zealand’s plan for reopening its borders announced last week remains extremely cautious.

Fully vaccinated citizens will only be able to return from Australia from mid-January, provided that they quarantine at home for seven days. This will be extended to other countries in mid-February, while foreign nationals will not be allowed to enter until the end of next April. There is no detail yet on how long the seven-day quarantine requirement will remain in place, and the tourism sector has reacted with dismay, describing the plan as a “body blow” that will delay its recovery until 2023. For a country approaching a 90% vaccination rate, this seems needlessly restrictive, a relic of the Zero Covid mentality, rather than the long-promised exit strategy.

And this was before the emergence of the new Omicron variant. Here, New Zealand has been depressingly ordinary, following many other countries in shutting the border to non-citizens from the nine ‘high risk’ countries in southern Africa, and holding out the possibility of delaying the border reopening plan. While labelled as ‘temporary’ and intended to buy time to learn more about the new variant, this response highlights the continuing reluctance to finally begin living with Covid.

As the pandemic enters its third year, New Zealand might end up with the worst of both worlds: facing the same problems as everyone else, but persisting with an unsustainable Zero Covid approach to them.

Decades ago I changed my position on the issue of “gun control”. Even though I still believe liberals are correct about the unfortunate predicament created by our founders, I now hold that we must tolerate privately held guns and all that comes with them. That may sound like a paradox, but once you understand the tensions internal to the mind of an armed American liberal, you will understand something fundamental about the American experiment.

Portland, where I live, is an absurdly progressive city on the compulsively liberal Pacific coast. But that isn’t the whole story. Washington, Oregon, and California, the three left-coast states, vote as a Democratic block. But that’s not because we lack for conservatives. We have lots of them. They are just consistently outnumbered and outvoted.

I should probably explain here that, although I believe that liberals are right about the unacceptable cost of our second amendment rights, conservatives are closer to correct, as I see it, about the governing of our cities — a fact that becomes glaringly obvious if you visit Los Angeles, Seattle or San Francisco and compare it to any major city in conservative Texas. American liberals don’t seem to understand that their values cannot simply be implemented locally. That’s partly why I’m armed like a conservative despite my liberal values. But I digress.

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That day at the gun shop, most of the people I stood in line with were conservatives who felt like they could use a bit more firepower. And I couldn’t fault them. So did I, apparently. I imagine they sized me up and read me as a liberal. I’m pretty sure I look like one. But I felt welcome, or at least as welcome as one can in an environment where there is a run on guns and ammo.

And there was indeed a run, as there always is when the population is on edge. When Americans worry, they buy guns. Some of that is irrational, as the guns they bought in previous panics are likely to last a good long time. Some of it is people arming themselves for the first time. And some of it is intuitive — the result of a somewhat vague reassessment of the level of need.

The gun shop was visibly strange in those early pandemic days. It looked like it had been stripped. The wall behind the counter that would normally display perhaps 100 different models of handgun had maybe 20 — guns no one really wanted but would eventually be reluctantly purchased by some Johnny-come-lately. But it was the state of the ammo that was most striking. In the major calibers there wasn’t any, a pattern that everyone in the shop knew was repeated all over town, and indeed across the entire country. Ammunition manufacturers couldn’t keep up. When a crate of ammo was occasionally delivered to the shop, it was target ammo, not ideal for self-defence, and it was rationed to one box per family, per week. Welcome to America.

In the gun shop, no one was troubled by novices, or even liberals. Explanations were patient. It’s a surprisingly courteous, agreeable, and highly technical culture: no one knows more than gun enthusiasts about the hazards that come with firearms, and such people take a very dim view of those who treat guns casually.

I suspect the notable courtesy was at least partly the natural result of the level of armament. The staff were surely all armed. So too, I would guess, were the clientele — it is legal in Oregon to have a concealed handgun given the proper, easily obtained permit. In such an environment heightened tensions are quickly noted, and de-escalation is an ever-present priority. It is, in some sense, the opposite of Twitter, where no one is armed and people are routinely terrible to each other.

There was one woman behind the counter, who had the unenviable task of running background checks for every firearm purchased. In most cases that meant she had to disappoint customers and tell them it would be days or weeks before they will be able to collect their weapons. She had been ringing up and disappointing people, non-stop for weeks. As I neared the front of the line I heard her say to the room: “I don’t get it. Do they think they’re going to shoot a virus?”

“It’s not the virus they’re worried about,” I offered. “It’s their neighbours if the food runs out.”

There was a general murmur of agreement, and I was glad to have brought something useful to the party. But looking back, I don’t think my explanation was complete. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t.

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Most of those stocking up on guns and ammo belong to a culture, and like every other culture, it has its beliefs, suppositions and fears. That culture believes that tyranny may descend on us, even here in the freedom-loving United States of America, and that privately held guns are the key to fending it off. I’m not a member of this culture, but I believe they may well be right about this.

In a country where politicians are increasingly prone to withdraw or stand-down the police to curry favour with confused constituents, it is easy to see how things can quickly escalate as they did in Kenosha, Wisconsin the night Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men in self-defence at a riot. To be clear, I do not believe Rittenhouse, then 17-years-old, should have been there with his AR-15. But I also don’t believe the streets of American cities should ever be ceded to violent ideological bullies — a now familiar pattern that set the stage for Rittenhouse’s actions.

To understand why private guns may be decisive in a fight against tyranny, let’s take a moment to revisit what is assuredly the most inscrutable section of the United States Constitution, the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

It’s almost like a deliberate non-sequitur. In fact, after decades of pondering the question, I’m now fairly convinced that that is exactly what the founders gave us: an intentionally vague pronouncement designed to force the question into the future, to ensure it would be repeatedly reevaluated to keep up with changing weaponry and circumstances. Near as I can tell, it’s a place holder for a principle they could not tailor in advance.

They clearly didn’t want to give the legislature or the courts complete latitude. They tied our hands; our representatives are not allowed to disarm the public, even if a majority desires it. And the founders gave us a strong hint about why — something about the need to protect a “free state” from, you know… stuff. But they didn’t tell us how much firepower citizens should be allowed to have. And thank goodness they didn’t, because muzzle-loaded weapons are no better a model of modern weapons than a movable-type printing press is for an algorithmically personalised infinite scroll.

The second amendment contains two conundrums, one novel and one original. The modern trouble is relatively straightforward: What does it mean not to “infringe” on the right to bear arms? In the 18^th century that was far simpler because, although guns have always been a force multiplier for an individual, the factor by which an individual’s force was multiplied was so much lower. Back then, within reason, a person could be trusted to buy the guns they wanted to own.

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On first glance, the original puzzle also seems uncomplicated: The state is going to need a fighting force if it is to remain free. But the longer one stares, the stranger this pronouncement seems. What militia, regulations and state were they even referring to? Is it a reference to the Army? No, the Army already existed and could have been referenced if that was their intent, having arisen first as the Continental Army that fought and won the revolution after it was formed in 1775, later to be re-founded as the United States Army in 1784 — seven years prior to the 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights with its “well-regulated militia” riddle embedded in its second amendment. So if it wasn’t the Army protecting the “free state” they meant to invoke, then it must really have been the people — but against whom? And what is “a well-regulated militia” and where is it going to come from and in what way is it to be regulated other than “well”?

As a young man I regarded the second amendment as the founders’ biggest blunder. As we head into 2022, my position has flipped — I now believe history may well come to regard it as the most far-sighted thing the founders did, not in spite of its vagueness, but because of it. It’s like a mysterious passage from a sacred text that forces living people to interpret it in a modern context. The founders believed the people needed to be able to defend their free state — with deadly force — whether that refers to a geographical state, or a state of being, or both.

It’s not that I don’t see the terrible carnage which comes from ubiquitous guns. I do see it, and I detest it just like every other decent American. I know that a single deranged or careless person can rob us of anyone, at any time. No American is exempt. Not our families, nor our leaders. It is a terrifying realisation. With modern weapons an individual can kill dozens. It has happened many times, and it will happen again.

I find none of this remotely acceptable as a human, or an American. Remember, I said at the beginning that I believe that the liberals are basically right about the staggering cost of ubiquitous guns. Further, I don’t believe the net effect of ubiquitous guns during an average year, or decade, or century is a reduction in harm. It’s a complex picture, but many Western nations have managed crime as well or better than the US without the population being armed. On long timescales, however, I suspect this trend reverses. A nation’s descent into tyranny can kill millions, and it can drag continents, or the world as a whole, into war.

The terrifying carnage that derives from the right to bear arms must, in the end, be compared to the cost of not having that right, not only for the individual, but for the republic and its neighbours at a minimum. If you imagine that tyranny cannot happen in America due to some safeguard built into our system, or by virtue of some immunity residing in the population itself, then perhaps there is nothing left to discuss.

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For my part, I don’t believe it. In fact, I believe I know better, both as a scholar and as someone who was falsely accused of racism and hunted in my own neighbourhood — with the police withdrawn in a foolish attempt to appease the mob. And I suspect that if we put the question to a vote, the fraction of the citizenry who believes tyranny could happen here is rising rapidly, even if we don’t necessarily agree on its most likely source. Of course, the fact that tyranny may happen anywhere is not sufficient counterweight to the unacceptable cost of ubiquitous modern firearms. To imagine that cost is outweighed, one must also believe that an armed population is in a position to fend off tyrants.

This, I admit, is by no means clear. Many will correctly point out that no matter how many semi-automatic weapons are in private hands, it will never be a match for the firepower of the guns — including fully automatic guns — in the publicly funded arsenals that, the argument goes, are in danger of finding themselves at the disposal of tyrants. When you add to that the incredible range of weapons and weapon-systems for which the public has no answer, it’s a slam dunk: in a head-to-head conflict between a treasonous, tyrant-led US military on the one hand, and freedom-loving Americans on the other, the military would trounce any number of militias, no matter how “well-regulated”.

But that isn’t really a persuasive argument, for two reasons. First, who decided this would be a fair fight? How many times will the US military have to find itself stalemated by inferior forces before we incorporate the lesson of asymmetric warfare into our national consciousness?

When our family lived in Olympia, Washington, we frequently saw foxes in our backyard. We learned not to worry about our cats because the foxes seemed to simply ignore them. Here in Portland, we have coyotes instead of foxes and neighbourhood cats are constantly disappearing. Does this imply that a wild fox can’t beat a housecat while a coyote can? As a mammalogist I’m sure that’s not it. A fox would almost always win a fight to the death with a domestic cat. But a house cat is capable of doing enough damage on the way out to dissuade anything but a desperate fox from trying it. An armed populace might not be able to defeat a tyrant’s army, but they could well punish it into retreat.

The second reason an armed population might succeed against the military-gone-rogue is that it is exceedingly unlikely the entire military would accept immoral orders. Either they would divide over the question, and the armed populace would end up fighting alongside the hopefully large portion of the military who remained loyal to the Constitution and their fellow citizens. Or those who would naturally resist immoral orders would have been purged from the uniformed ranks under some pretext that discovers and discharges those with independent minds, returning these non-compliant souls home to their well-armed families and neighbourhoods. Either way, private gun ownership might well prove decisive in a periodic contest between “patriots and tyrants”.

I expect this argument will prove unpopular. Are we really that near the brink of tyranny in America? I don’t know. I think it’s plausible enough that it would be irresponsible not to discuss what might happen.

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I also think it is worth taking a brief look at Australia to discern whether it has any lessons for us. Australia is, after all, a nation with many similarities to the US: it had its own permissive gun ownership laws and culture until the 1996 massacre in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in which 35 people were killed. The alterations in Australia’s gun laws and the gun buyback programme that followed are frequently held up as a possible model for American gun reform. And they make a strong case that massacres and other gun violence can indeed be greatly reduced by such a programme. But at what price?

I have to tell you, I’m finding it very difficult to make full sense of events in Australia at the moment. I see things that look a lot like tyranny reported from there. I have friends — people I know personally and trust — fleeing Australia due to what looks to them and sounds to me like tyranny. And I have interviewed Australians who describe absolutely tyrannical encounters they are having with governmental authorities.

But I also see respected people assuring me the picture we are getting is distorted. Whatever the truth, as the ideals of the liberal West spread like wildfire during the 20^th century, I fear we Americans were lulled into a false sense of complacency as freedom caught on in region after region and appeared to become permanent. I don’t know if we will ever fully discern our founder’s intent with respect to the second amendment. But I strongly suspect their understanding of freedom, freshly won, was much more realistic than ours.

This is what gun ownership comes down to, whether you’re a liberal or a conservative. If there is a way to protect liberty from spasms of tyranny that does not condemn us to the spectacular cost of regular gun violence, I’d love to know it. But if the dynamism of the West, the productivity, the ingenuity, and the quest for fairness can only be protected from tyrants at the point of a gun, then so be it.

And yet, at least in Australia, there is nothing overtly remarkable about the interminable restrictions the Victorian capital has had to endure. Like every other state, its political leaders have been committed to a Zero Covid strategy — driven by a woefully unprepared health system — that necessitates lockdowns in response to uncontrolled outbreaks. Even New South Wales, the one state that tried “living with Covid’ at the start, folded in the face of a major outbreak in July and is currently in its third month of lockdown.

Nevertheless, other states’ shutdowns have not nearly been as lengthy. And spending almost half of the pandemic under restrictions has certainly left its mark on Melbourne.

There are the “stay at home orders” which mean that anyone not deemed an “authorised worker” must work from home. For approximately 65% of the workforce this has meant working longer hours as office life seeps into the home. Meanwhile, throughout most of the lockdown, schools have also been closed. The impact has been stark: children in Victoria are already falling behind their peers in the country.

But at least they can play outside again; the Government re-opened playgrounds following a three-week closure in August. For adults, however, there are only five reasons to leave home: shopping for essentials, authorised work, exercise, caregiving and medical appointments. Yet even these luxuries are restricted. For example, only one person from a household can go shopping, once a day. And unless you’re exercising, you must wear a mask outside, even though a number of health experts believe there is no medical basis for this.

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Even with a mask on, where can you go? I have walked the same route every day to my local café, where the staff greet me with varying degrees of despair or weary optimism that we might open up “one day”. Fortunately, Melbourne prides itself on its cafes, so there is likely to be one within 5km of your house, which, until two weeks ago, was the limit for how far you can travel. As a result, I’ve walked through every single green space within 5km of my home, sometimes with a friend, since the Government has allowed exercise with one other person.

That radius has now expanded to 15km — though residents still can’t stray too far. A curfew, which runs from 9pm-5am, is still in place, turning life into a “reverse Groundhog Day”, where each identical day becomes less comforting and amusing.

Things are not much better in the city’s economy. Melbourne’s famed vibrant 24-hour city life has been gutted, as workers stay at home and bars and restaurants are closed. The arts and entertainment sectors — an afterthought when it comes to government support — have also been crippled. To top it off, economists estimate that around $1 billion is lost from the economy for each week of lockdown, and one in three small businesses are seriously considering closing. While city life sprang back into life after last year’s lockdown was lifted, there are serious doubts if it can do so again.

In the broader community, too, the institutions that keep society together — the sports teams, community groups and voluntary organisations — are all closed. Mental health experts say people in Melbourne are now up to seven times more anxious, depressed and stressed than before the pandemic, and the number of people experiencing loneliness has increased by 54%. Compared to 2019, calls to mental health and suicide prevention lines in Australia have increased by 40%, with three of Lifeline’s busiest days in its 58-year history coming in August 2021, as lockdown returned to Victoria.

Admittedly, Melbourne’s lockdown is not unique, with many other parts of the world going through similar restrictions at various points in the past year. What is different, though, is not only its length, but also the fact that it keeps happening again, and every time in a different context. In reality, Melbourne’s lockdown is defined by three very different periods, the culmination of which has made dealing with these restrictions increasingly difficult.

The city’s first lockdown, from 30 March to 12 May 2020, was, if not exciting, at least novel and unprecedented. While certainly coupled with fear of the unknown, it was also a shared experience with the rest of the country and other parts of the world. This made it easier to bear, especially once Australia’s federal government eventually doubled the unemployment benefit and provided a generous wage subsidy scheme. Indeed, studies have shown that Australian’s overall mental health actually improved during this period, as society adjusted relatively well to the new reality.

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But this all changed during Victoria’s second lockdown, from 8 July to 27 October 2020. This 111-day ordeal, sparked by failures in the state’s hotel quarantine system for returning citizens, was particularly draining, especially when harsher measures, such as the curfew, were introduced. It was also doubly difficult watching the rest of the country getting on with their lives, oblivious to what life was like in the “lockdown state”, but quick to sneer at the management of the outbreak.

Yet the combination of external disparagement and parochial defensiveness meant that the second lockdown was wildly popular, with 72% of Victorians supporting it, while Premier Dan Andrews sparked a fanatical following on social media, prompted in part by a newfound obsession with his sartorial choices.

Moreover, once the lockdown ended, Melbourne enjoyed a glorious summer, where bars, restaurants and city life returned to “normal”. A short, five-day lockdown in February was a brief reminder the pandemic was not over, but the city quickly reverted to its usual rhythms.

However, the fourth (14 days), fifth (12 days) and sixth (ongoing) lockdowns, which began on 27 May, in effect constituting a single lockdown, are a different story. From the start they have been accompanied by a sense of disbelief that we are doing this again, after all the “hard work” of last year.

And so there has been anger: with the state government for imposing vaccine mandates; with mass protests flooding the (empty) city streets and getting into violent confrontations with the police; with states like NSW for allowing the current outbreak to spread into Victoria; with Covid-free Queensland and Western Australia posturing about the virtues of lockdowns while not experiencing them; with the federal government for refusing the provide the same economic support as last year; and with it again for its disastrous vaccine “stroll out”, which has left the population completely unprepared for the Delta variant (only 21% of Victorians were fully vaccinated when the latest lockdown began on 5 August).

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It is unsurprising, then, that there is none of the enthusiastic support for the Premier’s handling of the pandemic of last year, with polls indicating that voters are turning on the Government. In its place is either outward hostility, as with the protests, or indifference, as people gradually stop following the lockdown orders. Indeed, compliance is visibly down, with the Premier reduced to pleading with people to stay the course. But after more than 250 days of lockdown, the community has few reserves left to draw on.

To its credit, the Government seems to have realised this, abandoning its cherished goal of Covid elimination, and instead aiming to open up when 80% of adults are double-jabbed, no matter the case numbers. And, importantly, it has promised that there’s no going back this time, that once we open, we will stay open, perhaps recognising a seventh lockdown would simply crumble in the face of non-compliance.

Whether this determination can hold if cases explode, or if there’s a new outbreak, remains uncertain. But it does point to the grim truth that lockdowns — an already blunt tool in the pandemic management toolbox — get blunter the more you use them, and produce more and more damage in the process. As Melbourne has finally realised, lockdowns can’t last forever.