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Australia is yet again approaching an election in which neither party leader, or party, is particularly popular. Whoever wins will be little more than, in the eyes of Australians, the leper with the most fingers. This seems to have been the case in Australia since the 2010 election; neither potential leader nor party inspires much confidence from Australians.

But why? The basic problem is that the issues that Australians are most concerned about — cost of living, housing, immigration — are, to a large extent, beyond the control of our normal elected representatives.

I say “beyond control” cautiously, because these things actually are to some extent within their control, but politicians and governments are too embedded in special interests, nationally and internationally, for significant departures from our current path to be anything less than heroic. And we have not had heroic leadership in this country in decades.

Indeed, Australia tends not to elect heroes; it elects managers. And managers are fine when you’re basically on track as a nation. But once you get off track, all managers can do is smooth the path to nowhere; “managed decline”, as we say nowadays.

Entrenched Problems

To a large extent, our current representatives have stepped into a situation in which Australia is already signed up to the Paris Agreement and the aspiration for Net Zero carbon emissions, which means the simplest solution to our energy prices and much of the cost of living — coal and natural gas mining — is basically forbidden.

For an Australian politician to say what they really should — “To hell with the Net Zero con” — and reinvigorate Australia’s mining industry and direct the resources to Australians would mean fighting massive forces: lavishly-funded renewables lobby groups who have a financial interest in Net Zero and will pour millions into campaigning against any politician or party who opposes climate change apocalypticism. To stand against this international juggernaut would be heroic, even though Australians couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about Net Zero and the climate, if we’re being really honest with ourselves.

On the housing crisis, this is a very wicked problem, and is linked to immigration, which is also a wicked problem; but immigration is also linked to some extent to Australia’s low fertility rates. The problems faced by developed democracies are wicked problems all the way down. The bottom line is that our immigration policy is largely dictated by business interests who want an abundant supply of people to fill jobs, but also so much of an abundance that there is little to no pressure to raise wages in order to compete with a limited potential workforce.

At the same time, we have the problem of the universities, which over the years have stitched up deals with governments to entice foreign students to Australia by dangling a carrot of permanent residency and citizenship. We have too many universities in Australia, and they all compete with one another for students, and with our small population, the only thing to do is to seek massive numbers of international students, who pay full fees up front. Without them, most of our universities would collapse overnight — as they should. This creates massive pressure on housing in metropoles, especially Sydney and Melbourne, pushing rents and house prices up.

Last time I checked, Australia was about 70-90,000 tradies short of what we need to build enough homes for demand. The brave solution to this is to focus over the next ten years on encouraging Aussies to go into trades. The lazy but simple solution is to just bring in another 100,000 immigrants to help do this work. But this, of course, creates the problem of where to house these people as well. Easiest solution? Bring in more to build more.

Immigration is, as many have said, a massive Ponzi scheme. It CAN be broken, but, again, it requires courage to stand up against big business, the universities, much of the media — who will accuse the party of being racist — and immigrant-dense electorates with thousands who have an interest in existing family-reunion schemes.

Perhaps the biggest stumbling block to slashing immigration will be the Australian electorate itself, who will likely want two mutually incompatible things: slashed immigration but also a growing economy and efficient public services (especially hospitals). Try telling Australians that they can have a smaller Australia but that it will be harder for a while to get a doctor’s appointment or staff hospitals and seniors’ homes with enough personnel, or tradesmen to build homes and you may well find Australians will find the medicine more intolerable than the ailment. Just keep kicking the immigration can down the road for the next generation to deal with.

Obviously, the cost-of-living issue is also related to the fertility issue. Australians are just not having enough babies, partly because they’re over-mortgaged because of the price of housing. Simplest solution? Immigration.

No Guts, No Glory

Here’s the kicker. One of the few genuinely disruptive politicians in modern history is Donald Trump. Trump doesn’t give a tinker’s cuss about Net Zero or sensibilities about immigration (and many other things). He also doesn’t care much for the current global order. Trigger warning: Trump is what we could call a heroic type, but Australians, by temperament and by media messaging, do not like Trump or anyone who can be linked with “Trumpism”.

Note: This is one reason Peter Dutton has become skittish about going too hard on immigration and, just recently, trans lunacy. He’s afraid of the media tying him in with Trump. Managers instinctively fear disrupters, because the creative courage possessed by disrupters is the exact antithesis of the rule-following instinct of the manager. The ideas and instincts of managers are tethered directly to a prevailing order of rules and precedents. Cycles of creative destruction leave them fearful and redundant, standing on a stage without even a script to cover up.

I don’t mean heroic in the sense of Superman or Batman. I mean it in the sense that one — Trump, for example — has the guts and lack of “fear of men” to do what he thinks must be done, for better or worse. When was the last time Australia had such a figure? Probably with John Howard (gun control, GST, and his failed Work Choices), but even more so with Gough Whitlam. Remember, you don’t have to like what the heroic type does — you just have to acknowledge that he has the bottle to do things that others’ talk about but never risk doing out of fear of failure, or fear of the electorate, or fear of upsetting the network that pushed them to the top.

There’s much more to be said on this. We also have an ideologically uniform public service that would fight radical change very effectively (note the fate of Brexit in Britain, not to mention Trump’s struggle with the Deep State leading up to the 2024 election and now). These technocrats know much more than the elected MPs and the latter routinely rely on the former for policy guidance and implementation.

The upper levels of the public service are a juggernaut that few MPs can outwit and out-muscle. The easiest thing to do is just to talk big about all the issues, but leave the current bureaucracy to remain on its current path while insisting on a few cosmetic changes so you can say you’ve done something: slashed this, boosted that, inquiring into this, etc.

I haven’t even started on national defence, China, and the relation of that issue to our cost of living.

In a Bind

And so this is the situation Australians are in. We have massive problems facing our nation and our families and we look to politicians to solve them for us. But the problems are such that to combat them would be to combat massive monied interests, global treaties, again linked to monied interests, but also Australians’ likely demand to have their cake and eat it too.

Would the simplest solution just be to “dig, baby, dig”, sell, sell, sell coal to China and India while keeping enough for ourselves to greatly reduce power prices but also transportation costs and therefore the price of goods, all the while slashing immigration? Maybe, but that would be a heroic policy that would be opposed every step of the way by renewables lobbies, the ABC, the universities, and business interests.

We’d also want to be lifting our own birthrate at the same time. And that’s not even to mention the high likelihood that Australians might find any short-term economic disruption intolerable and vote for whatever major party promised to restore the economy quickly (by going back to business as usual).

One of the greatest problems with democratic government, going all the way back to Athens, is factional opportunism in moments of painful crisis. If you are fortunate enough to get one faction that will truthfully tell you what the only medicine is, which is bitter, there will always be another party who will be selling a much sweeter medicine with the same medicinal promises attached, but which is actually just sugar water.

And this, in my humble opinion, is why Aussies can’t find politicians who inspire them nowadays. Everybody is sick of the ailments the nation is facing, but the medicine required is so bitter that all our managerial politicians will do is talk about band-aids when we know we’re bleeding out. Apologies for mixing the therapeutic metaphors.

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Image courtesy of Adobe.