No worries? How a fractured Australia lost its laid-back spirit

The discovery of a caravan filled with explosives and a list of Jewish targets. A neo-Nazi rally in Adelaide. A row over whether Foreign Minister Penny Wong should represent Australia at the commemorations marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Grace Tame, a former Australian of the Year, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “F--- MURDOCH”. As we marked the national holiday, a date in the calendar that exposes division as much as comity, we have been reminded once more of the splintering of Australia.

Illustration by Simon LetchCredit:

Over the course of January, we have gone through something of a perfect storm of polarisation. The now ritualistic arguments over Australia Day coincided with the commencement of a political year made all the more combative by the impending federal election. The swearing-in of Donald Trump, and the rightward cultural shift it represents, has raised political hackles even further. The ceasefire in Gaza has not brought an end to the spate of antisemitic attacks, which have escalated alarmingly during the 15-month war.

What makes this moment all the more worrisome is the apparent threat from foreign players intent on inflaming internal divisions. The Australian Federal Police suspect overseas actors might have paid local criminals to carry out some of the antisemitic attacks.

When I first came to live here almost 20 years ago, after reporting on American disunion and a posting in South Asia covering a spate of civil wars in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal, it was the distance from global conflicts, and its sense of social cohesion, that was part of Australia’s allure. I even used to joke that, if ever we did find ourselves in the midst of a global meltdown, refuge could be found in the serene Sydney suburb of Woollahra, because nothing bad could possibly happen there. How naive. In recent months, Woollahra, my imagined safe haven, has become the prime target of repeated antisemitic attacks.

Last November, the Scanlon-Monash Index of Social Cohesion, based on attitudes towards multiculturalism, immigration and community connection, was at its equal lowest level since the first survey in 2007. Though steady over the past 12 months, it was still roughly six points lower than its average in the 2010s.

Advertising agencies have a habit of capturing the zeitgeist, and once again, the annual lamb campaign from Meat and Livestock Australia zeroed in on the country’s fragmentation. Last year, it parodied modern-day polarisation in “The Generation Gap”, an advertisement portraying Boomers, Millennials and Gen Z as warring tribes. This year, its ad presented “The Comments Section” in human form. The film, based on “100 per cent real Australian comments”, depicted a cacophonous fight over everything from climate change to brewing the perfect cuppa. In essence, our algorithmic default.

Even the Australian Open, the supposed “happy slam”, was shrouded in controversy over the boorishness of booing fans. At a time when everything is politicised, major sporting contests have become cultural battlefields. In Australia these days, there are few combat-free zones.

Throughout this century, the country has been venturing further down the path of polarisation. A string of recent convulsions has accelerated that trend. The COVID pandemic may have nurtured neighbourly solidarity but it also stoked separatism between the states, territories and the federal government. Within cities, discrepancies in the policing of lockdowns in affluent and poorer postcodes exposed economic and ethnic fissures. As lines on a map became uncrossable internal borders, the pandemic led to the temporary dismemberment of the federation. With the connective tissue yet to fully heal, “long COVID” still afflicts the body politic.

The Voice referendum in October 2023 – what was intended as an act of national reconciliation – also ended up having a fracturing effect. There’s no need to relitigate that debate, and to dwell on Peter Dutton’s hard no or Anthony Albanese’s unbending decision to press ahead regardless. What is worth noting in the present context is how the referendum revealed both Albanese and Dutton’s weaknesses as national leaders. The prime minister was neither compelling nor commanding. The opposition leader appeared to thrive on conflict and did not exhibit much compassion for his First Nations compatriots.

What I failed to appreciate after the defeat of the Voice to parliament was how another event that October, Hamas’ attack on Israel the weekend before, would have such a rupturing effect here; or how the rise of antisemitism would become a matter of such fissile partisan contestation. For Dutton to claim Wong was not an “appropriate” representative at this week’s Auschwitz commemoration shows how vicious the politics of antisemitism have become. Even on Holocaust Memorial Day, there was no partisan armistice.

In guarding against polarisation, Australia has some valuable democratic safeguards. Compulsory and preferential voting mean elections do not become exercises in mobilising the base but rather a contest for mainstream voters. Foreign interference laws passed in 2018 criminalised meddling from spies and saboteurs acting on behalf of potential adversaries, such as China.

Yet the laws were not framed with the foreign influence of an ally in mind, and in particular a disruptor such as Elon Musk. The world’s richest man has already sought to destabilise the centre-left governments of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. So it would come as little surprise, having already called the Albanese government “fascist” for passing laws combating misinformation, if Musk attempted to influence the outcome of the Australian federal election by trying to divide us further. The fact he is now a member of the Trump administration seems only to have emboldened him, as his decision to appear this week, via video link, at a rally of Germany’s far-right AfD party would attest.

Here, Albanese faces a conundrum. If he ends up sparring with Musk, will that be seen as a proxy battle with Trump? And even if he thinks it, Albanese can hardly publicly label Dutton a Trump impersonator. Here, the AUKUS deal has not only curtailed Australian sovereignty in national defence but imposed constraints on an Australian prime minister in conducting domestic politics. With Trump in the White House, AUKUS feels like a sword of Damocles.

I am not suggesting Australia suffers the chronic polarisation of America. There is not the same red state/blue state divide. Religion does not infuse politics in the same way. The judiciary is not politicised. There is not the same revolutionary tradition, which in America helps explain why Trump can get away with pardoning the January 6 rioters and insurrectionists. Australians are not so prone to fanaticism and demagoguery.

There are, nonetheless, troubling parallels. In the United States, political polarisation went into overdrive when even middle-income earners sensed their kids would not be better off than they were, and realised the American dream was out of reach. Something similar has happened here with an Australian dream built on property ownership. At the beginning of the 1980s, more than 55 per cent of Australians aged between 25 and 29 owned a home. Now it is just over 35 per cent.

Or consider this troubling poll finding. A 2022 Pew survey found 72 per cent of Australians believed children born today would be financially worse off than their parents – among the most pessimistic of advanced nations and on par with the US. Political polarisation tracks closely with income polarisation, a long-term trend super-charged by the cost-of-living crisis.

When citizens lose economic hope, they become more open to the politics of grievance, cultural conflict and scapegoating. A key finding of the Scanlon social cohesion survey was that 49 per cent of people said the number of immigrants to Australia was too high, a significant leap from the 33 per cent recorded in 2023.

For all the safeguards built into the Australian democratic model, there is also a glaring structural defect: three-year terms. With such concertinaed electoral cycles, politics becomes a permanent campaign, and thus over-aggressive and relentlessly oppositional.

The splintering of Australia extends to federal politics, with the rise of independents and the Greens. But the end of the two-party duopoly has not made national life any less schismatic. Perhaps a hung parliament would bring about a more consensual Canberra, but a government in coalition with minor parties and players is not the same thing as a government of national unity. Far from it. Australia would continue to be bedevilled by the problem of over-politicisation, and the polarisation it feeds off and fuels.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC correspondent, is the author of The Rise and Fall of Australia: How a Great Nation Lost Its Way and The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict With Itself.