PM must begin to address his legacy – what will he leave us?

Recently, I went into the Sydney Opera House, where my partner was briefly working, for the first time in years. I had passed it, of course, travelled by on ferry, on my visits to the city in which I spent most of my youth. On such returns, there are always things you have not noticed – or perhaps forgotten. I had certainly never properly appreciated the shade of carpet in one of its bars, a gentle red that lies perfectly at the intersection of luridness, elegance and nostalgia. And I had not for years trod its inside concrete steps. The feel of those stairs, their exact width and hardness, somehow recalled me to my childhood, the bag of Minties my grandfather shared with me when he and his wife Jo took me to hear the orchestra.

Anthony Albanese is beginning to speak to Australians about the need for change in our foreign policy.Credit: Dionne Gain

Staying in the CBD, I became dependent on the city’s public spaces. I worked in the State Library of NSW, became accustomed to its rhythms; I spotted kookaburras with my son in the Domain. These places I know from my youth, and so there was the shock, too, of just how different much of the city feels even compared with a decade ago.

It feels more exciting, mostly – which also means busy. A friend told me about the squash to get onto the Metro in the morning, the aggressiveness that can come out, the simultaneously intimate and impersonal experience of being pressed against other human beings. And these things made me feel that the denser Australian cities everybody has talked about for years – a little nervously – are upon us.

Of course, we don’t know that this trend towards greater density will continue. It is possible, say, that the work-from-home shift is only getting started; that employers’ recent push for more days in the office is merely a brief reversal, and that the fading of the importance of cities that seemed to begin during the pandemic will continue.

One thing to remember is that nothing pans out quite as expected. A report in The Australian Financial Review last week suggested that work-from-home has not, as many predicted, drastically decreased the need for office space. As Challenger’s chief economist told the paper, even if people only spend three days in the office, “You still need pretty much the same amount of space.”

Cafes, though, are doing awfully. What will governments do about these “third places”, neither work nor home, but necessary? If commercial “third places” are dying, will we get more parks? Some new type of hybrid space? This reminded me of one of those pandemic-era conversations – like so many now forgotten – about infrastructure created through Depression public works programs. Instead of our generation’s version of ocean pools – something visionary and beautiful, both useful and communal – we got HomeBuilder.

Instead of our generation’s version of ocean pools – like this one at Coogee – we got HomeBuilder.Credit: Anna Kucera

In all this I was reminded of that constant push-pull of Australian identity: the desire to mix with the “big world” out there, to compare ourselves with the largest cities, the most powerful countries, and yet to retain whatever is unique about ourselves. Have we achieved either to our satisfaction? Is it possible to do both?

This was the subtext of Anthony Albanese’s trip to China last week, as it is of all prime ministerial engagements with other powers. The ever-growing rivalry between China and America reminds us of our great luck in being stuck at the bottom of the globe. Have Australians ever been more conscious than they are, right now, of the upside of isolation? And yet our public debate about foreign affairs seems driven by the linked ideas that we are more central than we are and have more control than we do. And so our news becomes dominated by questions such as when will Albanese meet Donald Trump and whether we should commit to wars that haven’t happened.

This masthead’s Peter Hartcher put it well, writing that journalists approached the China trip like “little kids walking past a haunted house … waiting for something to go badly wrong”. I would add that this has long been the case with Australian prime ministerial visits. I remember travelling with Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, waiting to see what tiny thing would become blown up into an “international incident” – because there was always one. There had to be to confirm the two contradictory elements of our cultural cringe: our defensive insistence that we were as good as anyone else and our deep belief that we were not.

This makes speaking honestly to Australians about foreign affairs a tricky task. Albanese managed this well in his recent John Curtin Oration, with talk of “choosing our own way”, of “an Australian foreign policy anchored in strategic reality, not bound by tradition”. The prime minister is clearly beginning to speak to Australians about the need for change in our foreign policy.

This fortnight, parliament returns. There will be scary tax hikes bandied about, boasts about the state of the economy, references to the election. All of these are important enough. But most, too, are transient, and a reminder that much of what governments deal with passes quickly.

As Albanese implicitly recognised in his speech, with his tributes to John Curtin’s approach to foreign policy, the things that governments leave behind typically involve shifts to the way a nation sees itself. Sometimes those things are ideas. And sometimes those things are public buildings, communal spaces. And of course ideas are communal spaces, of a type.

There are other ways our nation needs to change – urgent ones. How will the government achieve its target of building 1.2 million homes – it is on track to fail – without shifting the way Australians conceive of their cities? How will it play its role on climate without changing how we live and how we make our money? Those are conversations Labor has barely begun to have with voters. If Albanese wants to leave something permanent behind, he will very soon have to talk to Australians about what in our lives will have to change.

Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

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