Today, I feel embarrassed. Embarrassed by the moral emptiness of those who claim to “lead” us. I say that as an Australian who has watched his own country from afar for two decades. Distance has peeled away the excuses. Without the daily fog of spin and talkback, the pattern is clear: when principle collides with profit, lobby pressure, or alliance politics, Australia’s politicians fold.
I do not criticise individuals; my complaint is with the workings of a governance system that’s passé, one that’s prey to bullying and the politics of fear.
On several occasions last year I sat with young entrepreneurs and investors across Asia. They risk careers, safety and freedom to fight for a liveable planet and a shred of justice. They understand power. They know the odds. They act anyway. Back home, those with real leverage – ministers, CEOs, editors, mandarins – chose the opposite.
2025 was the year new fossil projects advanced while environmental protections were weakened. Social supports were pared back while private fortunes swelled. Authoritarian rhetoric crept further into the mainstream. When Trump’s illegal raid on Caracas – an unprovoked use of force that many international jurists say breaches the UN Charter – tore another hole in the so‑called rules‑based order, Canberra’s “response” was little more than a nervous cough.
And now, at the urging of Zionist lobby groups, the government flirts with a royal commission into “rising antisemitism” – not as a universal reckoning with all forms of racial hatred, but as a narrow, politically framed instrument. The risk is obvious: criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza is chilled, while hostility towards First Nations people and other forms of bigotry remain without equivalent urgency or inquiry. A government that could not find its voice to condemn illegal bombardment suddenly discovers an appetite for moral panic at home. This is cowardice, pure and simple.
You are fully briefed. You attend COP and APEC. You buy reports from global consultancies. You hire sustainability officers, reconciliation advisers, and climate‑risk teams. You know the science. You know where 2.7°–3° Celsius leads. You know what rising seas mean for the Pacific, for northern Australia, for food systems, and for social cohesion. Quite possibly you wake at 3am with that cold dread. Yet when the moment comes to act at the scale of that knowledge, you look away.
Instead, you perform virtue. You give smooth speeches about “values”, “innovation”, and “inclusion”. Your agencies pump out ads with turbines, schoolchildren and smiling elders. You sign ESG commitments and reconciliation plans. Then a belligerent White House tramples international law, bullies allies and demands obedience – and you fall into line. Fossil lobbies knock on your doors – and you oblige. Security briefings mutter “China” – and your spine turns to mush. A loud, well‑connected lobby demands a selective royal commission – and you reach for the paperwork, not the principle. How dare you call this leadership when it is submission dressed up as “discretion”.
You control parliaments, corporations, funds, and media platforms. You have the authority and resources to refuse unlawful pressure, defend ecosystems, protect the vulnerable, rewire the economy, and uphold one standard of human dignity for everyone. Yet you act as if shackled by “market sentiment” and “strategic realities”. You are not shackled. You are comfortable.
This is not a policy quibble. It’s a collapse of character. You see, and you agree not to speak. You know what is right, and you choose the path of least discomfort – for yourselves. You are trading a living continent, a viable society, and the trust of a generation for ratings, donations, and a quiet life. No spreadsheet will ever show you courage. No KPI will ever give you a conscience.
Australia likes to picture itself as decent: straight‑talking, allergic to bullies, and committed to a “fair go”. That story has always been scarred by invasion and dispossession. But there was at least an aspiration. You are tearing even that apart.
The buildings, flags and slogans remain. The substance has been gutted. Industrial economism rules: an extraction machine where land, water, culture and people are inputs; capital flows and alliance settings are sacred; everything else is negotiable. Under that creed, “national interest” means coal cargoes, gas pipelines, defence contracts, poll numbers – and the sensitivities of favoured constituencies. Pacific neighbours, First Nations Country, young Australians, Palestinians, Muslims, and many others on the receiving end of selective outrage – all become collateral.
From Asia, this is brutal to watch. The region I live in is grappling with climate disruption, economic fragility and shifting power. I see communities improvising unity and new stories about what matters. And I see Australia – rich, informed, comparatively safe – clinging to an old script: follow Washington, soothe investors, mine harder, militarise faster, police speech at home, and hope the storms pass. They will not.
The bill is already landing. Islands swallowing saltwater. Farms losing soil. Cities choking on inequality. First Nations communities are forced yet again to fight off “national interest” projects on their own land. Muslim and Jewish Australians alike are dragged into a climate of fear, instead of a politics of equal safety and equal rights. Young Australians staring into a future of fires, floods and permanent precarity – taught in school to value honesty and courage, then shown how cheaply you sell both.
None of this was fated. The raid on Caracas was not inevitable. New gas fields were not inevitable. The shredding of social safety nets was not inevitable. The indulgence of hard‑right fantasies and selective moral panics was not inevitable. These were choices – or capitulations – by people who still tell themselves they are “public servants”.
At the Centre for the Future, through the MiVote experiment, we spent months examining how those choices are made. The conclusion was blatant: the very notion of a “political career” has become obsolete – not because governance is unnecessary, but because the career model now almost guarantees moral failure.
A system built on factional patronage, donor dependence, adversarial theatre and 24‑hour messaging traps even decent people. To survive, you must fundraise constantly, trade favours, obey party machines, and feed a media cycle addicted to outrage and simplicity. You are selected not for wisdom but for loyalty and message discipline. You are rewarded not for long‑term courage, but for short‑term spin. Under those conditions, how likely is it that you will defend international law against a powerful ally, resist a mining lobby in a marginal seat, or insist that any royal commission address all racism, not just the kind that suits your donors and media allies?
In such a system, politics becomes less a vocation of service and more a guild protecting its own continuity. The feedback loops between citizens and power are filtered, delayed, and distorted. We built MiVote to test a different hypothesis: that ordinary people, given transparent information, time to deliberate and real authority over specific decisions, often demonstrate more courage and coherence than career politicians whose imaginations have been colonised by polls and party rooms. That hypothesis still seems worth exploring.
I have spent my life working with leaders across cultures as a futurist, strategist, mentor, social impact investor, philosopher‑activist and commentator. The sticking point is rarely technical. It is moral – and structural. You know this system is lethal in slow motion. You know the career path you have chosen bends you away from truth and towards convenience. You lack the will either to change it or to step aside for those who will.
You still have agency. You could treat international law as binding, not decorative. You could lock core ecological and social protections beyond the reach of three‑year election cycles. You could declare certain profits incompatible with any serious notion of decency. You could defend universal protections against racism and hate – for everyone – instead of instrumentalising one form for partisan advantage. You could stop using young activists as colourful props while undermining their work. You could refuse illegal wars and reckless military entanglements. You could even admit that the era of politics as a lifelong profession is over and begin to build new democratic architectures that distribute power and responsibility more widely.
Will that hurt? Yes. Real courage always does. You may lose contracts, headlines, donors, alliances – and, crucially, your safe seats and ministerial cars. But your present cowardice is costing far more – in homes, species, cultures, trust, and the possibility that public life might still mean something humane.
If you will not pay the price of integrity, at least drop the theatre. Stop chanting “Australian values” while you liquidate them. Stop invoking “mateship” while abandoning neighbours to floods and fire – and communities at home to fear and division. Stop hiding behind “the national interest” when you mean your own careers in a decaying profession.