Australians feeling political despair need only remember one thing … it could always be worse

By rights, we should now be swept up in the to and fro of the first week of the 2025 federal election campaign. That was the plan until Tropical Cyclone Alfred intervened, so rather than voting on April 12, we’ll be doing it on a Saturday in May. Disappointed we’ll have to wait a bit longer? No, I didn’t think so.

The news that the election would effectively be delayed has been met with a collective shrug. There’s a conventional view that an election campaign is the most exciting and engaging period in Australian public life, an extended moment when most of us think hard about our country’s political future before deciding who to entrust with the solemn responsibility of guiding our great nation.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

Convention be damned: excitement and eager anticipation are in short supply this time. What appears to be going on is that increasing numbers of Australians are concluding that whoever wins, nothing much will change. The polls indicate that neither of the two main party leaders are popular. Across the community, enthusiasm is low.

On the face of it, we can explain that level of indifference by being dismissive about our current crop of politicians. It’s true, if you’re looking for inspirational leadership, you’re unlikely to think immediately of Anthony Albanese or Peter Dutton. And to see the futile performative dance in response to Donald Trump’s decision not to exempt our steel and aluminium exports from his punitive tariffs is to be forced into a choice between holding your head in your hands or letting your toes curl inside your shoes.

Government ministers proclaim they haven’t given up on an exemption, while opposition frontbenchers accuse Albanese of not having done enough and insist he should have flown to Washington, DC. To do what? Beg? Forget it! Trump has no ideology. He has no plan. None of it makes any sense. He’s angry, cruel and vengeful; a steroidal version of the absolutely worst 12-year-old bully boy you ever went to school with inside the flatulent body of a man who has more power than anyone else on the planet. He’ll do what he wants.

So yes, Australia’s political class might not be what it used to be, and politics has changed over the past generation or two. But our society has at the same time gone through possibly bigger changes. That’s something we tend not to reflect on too much and yet, it feeds into our politics.

The fifth anniversary of the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic this week was a reminder of the individual and collective trauma experienced by so many of us in the very recent past. Desperate to get away from the restrictions and the sense of loss, we pushed our way back to “normal”. But “normal” for many of us hasn’t been so great. All that necessary spending to keep the economy going in 2020-21 fuelled inflation, leading to a steady rise in interest rates – cue the cost-of-living “crisis”. These days, with a premium placed on speed, we go directly from “difficulties” to “crisis” without stopping at “challenges” or “problems”.

Before the pandemic, the digital revolution that began in the mid-1990s had already transformed the way most of us live our lives and relate to each other. Policymakers are right to concentrate on the effect of mobile phones and social media on adolescents and children. But adults have had their lives transformed by digital communications just as much.

Having in our pockets a super-powered computer that gives access to untold amounts of information, the opportunity to be a publisher and photographer, plus the capability to contact others via voice, video or text is a transformative gain. But it also bears a cost. Click on the wrong link and your details and very identity can be stolen. Digital scams cost Australians $2.7 billion a year. And wasn’t there some deep-seated personal value in being able to be out of contact? That’s gone for good.

When the federal parliament passed the anti-doxxing laws last year, I was put in mind of how much trust had been lost during the digital age. It’s now illegal to maliciously reveal someone’s personal information such as their phone number or home address. One generation ago, every household contained a thick publication that included the name, address and phone number of pretty much every other person in their metropolis or area code. It was called a phone book, an utterly benign thing then but now easily weaponised.

A prominent feature of the modern media diet relates to the prevalence of crime – even more than when I was a young, ink-stained police reporter several decades ago. Certainly, frightening and disgraceful crimes such as carjackings and home invasions – extremely rare not so long ago – are far more widespread than they once were. But is this another crisis? The official crime statistics suggest it might not be.

We are now a more anxious society, still traumatised by the pandemic, worried about falling behind, conditioned by digital technology to expect instant results, and indignant and increasingly disillusioned when the political system can’t produce them. Our politicians mostly operate in the short term in a public square that elevates mostly empty point-scoring above reasoned debate. As a result, we’re heading into a federal election in which we’re underwhelmed by the alternatives.

But let’s draw satisfaction and comfort from the fact that we have a society that is immeasurably better than America’s. For all our anxieties and problems, we haven’t done what a plurality of American voters did four months ago: consciously hand the keys to a fantasist leader of a failed insurrection who’s determined to create an oppressive state where only his friends and champions have total freedom. That’s something to think about and quietly celebrate at this election, whenever we get around to holding it.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.

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