Twenty-eight million people now call Australia home. The face of the nation turns increasingly toward Asia, its economic activity shifting toward the region, its culture less Anglo-Saxon than at any point since the end of the Second World War. Yet switch on the parliament during a sitting evening, and you will witness a combat choreographed for a country of eight million people in a world that no longer exists.
There’s a man in that same chamber — I will leave him nameless, because naming him would miss the point — who is genuinely good at his work. Quick across details, respected in his community, and curious about how a policy will land on the people who must live with it. Several evenings a week the country watches him do none of that. It watches him attack.
His party keep him on a short lead and let him off whenever they need someone hurt. Whether citizens understand the matter better after he has finished has nothing to do with why he is deployed. He lands the strike cleanly, often with a quip the press gallery applauds, and a clean strike is what the cameras have been trained to feed on.
No one is nourished by this. Not the people who sent a more-than-capable representative to the capital and got a weapon in return. Not the policy, neither sharpened nor lit by being defended this way. Not the watching public, who feel, rightly, that something mean and pointless is passing between these players in their name. And here is the part none of the protagonists can see from the inside. Each televised round feeds a contempt and a frustration that is, by slow degrees, eroding the ground from under them.
They read that contempt as weather. Frustration as something that blows in, polls badly for a week, and blows out again. So the staffers manage it. A softer segment, the stroll in borrowed boots with locals through a flooded town. As though the problem were the message, and the right message would erase the problem. It was never the message.
It’s the game of politics: the wholly accurate instinct of people who can see, even when they lack the words for it, that the spectacle being conducted in their name is a contest for authority rather than a defence of policy. That we have called both activities by the same name for so long that any distinction has worn away is a travesty. The skill of winning the struggle is not the gift of tending what is won.
This erosion doesn’t announce itself as collapse. It manifests as departure – frustration seeking escape through whichever vent opens first. There are three, and none leads back to the starting place.
The first is ratchet-up: each cycle of unmet discontent legitimises a more radical vehicle than the last until you reach a movement that doesn’t merely compete within the system but proposes to replace it entirely. This is often the authoritarian path, and it is important to see that today’s manifestation is itself only a station, not the terminus. If politics continues to manufacture disillusionment while claiming to address it, tomorrow’s autocrat will be more competent, more patient, and more thoroughly prepared than today’s.
The second exit is quieter but, in some ways, more corrosive: the turning away. Apathy, disengagement, and the slow withdrawal of a citizenry that has concluded the whole arrangement is a farce and that the ticket price is too high. Falling turnout, collapsing membership, a sense that voting changes nothing. Democracy can survive angry citizens. It can’t survive absent ones. The condition is terminal.
The third is fragmentation: the polity dissolving into a thousand defensive enclaves, local anger withdrawing from the national level and reconstituting around the council, the neighbourhood commons, or the single issue. This is the most ambiguous exit, because it can resemble health subsidiarity – people governing what they can actually touch – or it can become the end of the shared project, a nation of gated communities and parallel societies with no common language for the problems they hold in common.
The Liberal Party’s appointment of Tony Abbott to its federal presidency illustrates the failure of imagination that makes the probability of these exits unavoidable. Here is a party comprehensively rejected by the electorate, reaching not for renewal but for the most combative figure of its recent past — a man whose entire political identity is adversarial, the attack-dog mode elevated to leadership philosophy. They are trying to do a Menzies, but they have forgotten what Menzies actually did.
In 1944, facing collapse, Menzies dissolved a failing conservative vehicle and built something new around a constituency he actually went out and identified — the forgotten people, the middle class that no existing party was speaking to. He read the society as it was, not as it had been, and constructed a model to fit it. Today’s party invokes his name constantly while abandoning his method. They reach for Abbott not despite the fact that he represents the old approach to combat but because of it — because the adversarial instinct runs so deep in the institutional muscle that, in crisis, the organism can’t imagine any other response. It mistakes the disease for the cure because it can no longer tell them apart.
The demographic reality makes this blindness fatal. Menzies built for an Australia of eight million, Anglo, British-facing, and culturally homogeneous. Contemporary Australia, a nation of twenty-eight million, increasingly Asian in its face and its economic gravity, is a different country entirely. To reach for Abbott is to signal that you are still governing for a nation that no longer exists, while the actual nation seethes with problems your vocabulary cannot name.
The Westminster system makes this capture nearly total. In a fused executive-legislature, party discipline is not a custom but a structural necessity: lose a vote, lose government. So the whip’s power over the individual member is absolute, and the member’s incentive runs entirely toward the party rather than toward the policy problem. The US, with its separated powers and weaker discipline, shows a different pathology — affective polarisation so severe that party identity works like tribal character even without Westminster’s mechanisms. This suggests the deeper culprit is not the discipline but the binary itself: the two-party structure that converts every question into a contest, every policy into territory to be captured or defended, every capable representative into a weapon.
The waste is harder to see than the theatre, which is why we tolerate it. But the ledger is brutal. Consider the money first. An entire shadow ministry, salaries and offices and travel allowances, dedicated not to improving what the government proposes but to defeating it. An opposition whose structural job is to oppose, regardless of merit, so that a good idea from the wrong bench must be resisted, twisted, or buried. This is not oversight. It is combat infrastructure, maintained at public expense, and it costs millions to run.
Then the time. Hours of chamber drama each sitting day, questions crafted not to elicit information or clarify assumptions but to trap, and answers rehearsed not to explain but to deflect, the whole elaborate pantomime consuming the calendar while the actual issues — the housing that remains unbuilt, the climate that shifts, the care that fails to arrive — persist unattended. The chamber is not where the thinking happens. It’s where positions decided elsewhere are flamboyantly defended for an audience that has learned, correctly, to look away.
Worse still is the talent. Your best people — quick across details, genuinely curious, the ones you would want bent low over the problems that press on a life — spend their careers learning to attack. That particular skill accumulates. Others atrophy. After a decade of this, a parliament that should be a repository of institutional memory and legislative craft is instead a locker room of practised combatants, their gifts for inquiry and construction rusted through disuse. When the crisis comes — and it is coming — we will find we have bred a class of politicians excellent at winning arguments yet incapable of running a complex society.
We’re not witnessing a temporary rough patch in an otherwise sound arrangement. We are watching the endgame of a machine that converts the labour of stewardship into the spectacle of contest and bills the public for the conversion in the only currency that matters: their belief that any of it was for them. The ground is shifting. Not anywhere the players think to look — they are watching the polls and the next leadership spill. It goes under the floor where they have always safely stood until the day someone steps there and finds it responds like quicksand and will no longer hold.
To change this requires not better manners but a different architecture — one that removes the adversarial binary without removing dissent, that replaces debate-as-performance with inquiry-as-work, that acknowledges politics and governance as different activities requiring different gifts. The reform must begin with the vocabulary, because the words encode the practice. Retire the combat lexicon and replace it deliberately.
The word ‘opposition’ is performative, not descriptive. It doesn’t label a function; it commands a posture. The opposing benches, the two-sword-lengths’ separation, the whip’s discipline that makes every vote a trial of strength — these did not produce the name; the name carved them from the stone. To sit in opposition is to be structurally required to negate, not to hold to account with the care of a craftsman, but to oppose as gravity opposes ascent.
A different grammar would yield a different architecture of attention. If the second bench were the review, charged with stress-testing rather than sabotage; if the minister across were not a shadow (that spectral thing defined only by what it haunts) but a correspondent, crafting alternative responses to the same problem; if the central rite were not debate — courtroom technique designed to produce a victor — but inquiry, the systemic search for futures people can actually inhabit — then the question would cease to be Do you want this? And become, can you live with this? The vocabulary is the infrastructure. Change the names and the feet stop walking toward combat by default.
This linguistic shift enables a procedural one. Systemic inquiry starts with the shared problem, not the pre-cooked position. It asks how many viable policy options we can generate that enough people can accept, rather than how we defeat the other side. It treats legislation as shared authorship — facilitation rather than point-scoring, iterative co-drafting, evidence sessions, and expert and citizen input as “facts in context”. The deliverable of a parliamentary session stops being “we defeated them” and becomes “we have three workable options and have narrowed it to one.”
The objection meets us here, as it must. Without an institutional opposition, who guards against abuse of power? The answer is that scrutiny is essential and must be strengthened — but scrutiny doesn’t require a permanent adversary. Independent audit, rotating inspection panels, citizen oversight, strengthened senate committees, and transparency-by-default: these are mechanisms that probe, stress-test, and hold to account without requiring a dedicated sabotage function. The goal is scrutiny without sabotage, dissent without destruction, pluralism without paralysis.
The reforms are interdependent. Change the language without changing the practice, and you have new words for the old combat. Change the practice without changing the press incentives, and collaborative inquiry gets mined for sensation and then destroyed. Change the press without changing the binary, and the cameras will simply find new combatants. But remove the three mechanisms altogether — the binary, the performance, the conflict appetite — and something else becomes possible: a representative government that delivers the informed, consensual self-determination it was always supposed to provide.
This is not perfect, but better. It’s not the replacement of democracy but its repair from within, a dismantling of the scaffolding that has been hiding the structural foundations. The man in the parliament — quick across details, respected, curious — could then deploy his talent toward the work of governing, rather than the drama of winning. The same person, the same skill, and the opposite effect on the public trust. And the country that watches him might see, finally, something they could live with.