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.

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.

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.

Thousands of Australian citizens remain stranded abroad, unable to return due to strict caps on spots in hotel quarantine, which are set by state governments. Frequent domestic border closures — also decided by state governments — have effectively fragmented Australia into eight separate countries. Last month, Australians were treated to the surreal spectacle of the Australian Defence Force patrolling the border between Queensland and New South Wales.

Across the country, citizens have discovered that reserve powers are largely the prerogative of state governments, and are being exercised in ways that routinely exclude other states’ residents, as if they were foreign nationals. For example, Western Australia now requires that people living in New South Wales have at least one shot of the Covid vaccine to enter the state. In one of the most callous examples of exclusionary state politics in practice, last year the Queensland government denied a 14-year-old double-lung transplant patient from NSW access to his specialist doctor, declaring that Queensland hospitals were for Queenslanders.

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Indeed, throughout the pandemic, it seems that states’ rights have trumped citizens’ rights — while at the same time reducing federal government to a feckless bystander.

How quickly things change. Few would have predicted that the Australian federation would suffer from such deep fragmentation before the pandemic. After all, the trend for decades had gone in exactly the opposite direction, towards greater centralisation of power at the federal level. Australia’s federalism was long viewed by political scientists as one of the world’s most “vertically imbalanced”; the Commonwealth has controlled around 80% of tax revenue since World War II, making Australia’s states reliant on federal transfers for half their budgets.

Federal governments used this leverage to introduce greater controls over how the states spend their money, by introducing a host of national schemes that promised funding to the states which agreed to undertake reforms. In some cases, such as in the National Disability Insurance Scheme initiated in 2013, states were relieved of their responsibility for disability care altogether, in favour of private and non-profit service-providers.

But when the pandemic struck in March 2020, state governments moved swiftly into the driver’s seat. Harnessing emergency powers few realised they possessed, they imposed society-wide lockdowns and closed internal borders. Although the constitution accords responsibility over quarantine and international borders to the federal government, lack of federal preparedness saw state governments assume full control over the hotel quarantine system, which was hastily established over one weekend. Since hotel quarantine capacity determines the number of weekly international arrivals into Australia, the states in effect have de facto control over international borders.

Initially, many were thrilled to see state governments taking strong action, especially as Prime Minister Scott Morrison was slow to act in the face of the pandemic. And premiers have been rewarded for this by remarkable levels of popular support, especially when they succeeded in keeping Covid out of their states. The Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, and Western Australian Premier, Mark McGowan, were both easily returned to government in their respective state elections. In McGowan’s case, re-election was secured by a margin rarely observed in free and fair democratic polls.

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Morrison, meanwhile, despite initially enjoying high levels of public approval, has seen his popularity plunge to negative territory, as lockdowns and border closures sparked by the Delta variant have again handed the initiative to the states. Aware of the potential for incoherence and discord within the federation, he established a National Cabinet in March last year as a platform for federal and state leaders to coordinate policy directly. The National Cabinet was initially heralded a success, with the nationally coordinated lockdown of March-May 2020 eliminating community transmission in Australia. However, beneath the veneer of cooperation, there was squabbling and petty tribalism.

There were, for example, no national standards developed, so each state designed its own hotel quarantine system differently. When these systems failed, rather than learn from each other’s mistakes, states preferred to take pot shots at each other about whose Covid response was best.

The repercussions of this petulance soon became clear. In Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, poorly trained and precariously employed security guards caught Covid from returned travellers and then spread it in the community, sparking the state’s second wave last winter, resulting in more than 19,000 cases and 800 deaths, as well as a 112-day lockdown.

Victoria tried to redress these problems by establishing a centralised agency for managing hotel quarantine, but in June a leak from NSW sparked another wave of infections, which spread to other states and even New Zealand, resulting in more lockdowns. The outbreak was caused by an unvaccinated driver without the correct PPE transporting airline crew from the airport to the quarantine hotel. While NSW requires all drivers to be vaccinated and wear a mask, compliance and enforcement was left to the private transport companies. Once again, the failure to learn from best practice in other parts of the country had disastrous consequences.

As the pandemic has worn on, these skirmishes have erupted into open warfare, exacerbating the formidable challenge of developing and implementing an exit strategy from lockdown. Take the federal government’s recently proposed four-phase plan for reopening borders and ending restrictions. Based on Doherty Institute modelling, it anticipates reopening to be safe enough when 80% of the eligible adult population are fully vaccinated. Although initially approved in National Cabinet, some states almost immediately began to pull away.

The was mainly due to the emergence of two Australias. The first, which includes the two most populous states, New South Wales and Victoria, has suffered major outbreaks and long lockdowns. Consequently, they have abandoned “Zero Covid” strategies and accepted that reopening will involve some risk of the virus’ spread and mortalities.

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The second group, however, led by Queensland and WA, has so far managed to avoid major outbreaks thanks to border closures and snap lockdowns. Although indicating basic support for vaccination as a way out of isolation, their premiers have nonetheless repeatedly raised the threshold for reopening beyond the figures suggested in the Doherty model.

Palaszczuk, for example, recently argued that reopening should only occur after children younger than 12 were vaccinated. This is despite the fact that no country in the world has vaccinated under-12s, no vaccines are currently approved for this age group and their risk of serious illness is vanishingly low. Yet McGowan concurred, and wondered aloud why the federal government would want to “infect” WA. Although Palaszczuk backtracked a few days later, it is clear that reopening Australia, internally and internationally, will be fraught and challenged at every step, and finding a unified position among the federal and state governments will be difficult, if not impossible.

Australia’s federation is thus facing one of the biggest challenges in its history. Australia’s hodgepodge of state-based systems and responses, combined with endless acrimony and buck-passing, contrasts poorly with New Zealand’s more coherent “whole-of-government” approach, even though both countries are effectively following the same elimination strategy. If there’s one lesson for Australia in the past eighteen months, it’s surely that a greater consolidation of powers within the federal government is necessary for ensuring a unified, efficient and effective national response.

Ironically, however, it is likely this crisis will likely have the opposite effect, further entrenching the fragmentation of Australia’s federation, guaranteeing the same problems will recur in future crises. For state governments and their residents will not forget where reserve powers are truly located, and that they may be exercised with little regard for national agendas or citizenship rights.

In the absence of constitutional reform or some other change within Australian federalism, the temptation in future crises will always be for states to go it alone. So, what is the point of Australia? With 54% of WA residents in a recent survey declaring themselves “Western Australians” first rather than Australians, perhaps it is time we stop taking the answer for granted.