Australians are looking out at a world in turmoil and either recoiling in horror or simply disengaging, setting the conditions for a more insular politics that risks descending into outright nativism.
Anthony Albanese returns to Canberra confronting an opposition propagating the line that what happens abroad is some grandiose “distraction”, totally separate from the day-to-day struggles of ordinary hardworking Aussies.
The diplomatic tour of duty that has taken him to Washington, Beijing and the Pacific against the backdrop of the escalating humanitarian disaster in the occupied Palestinian territories, has been well-received by those who know more about geopolitics than me.
But according to a series of revealing questions in this week’s Guardian Essential report the broader public is less impressed, with just 25% rating the performance above average, while 30% have him below the meridian and the other 45% just say “meh”.
This sense of lassitude is part of a broader vein we have isolated when asking people their views on the key global fissures: on both China-US and Israel-Palestine the vast majority of respondents just want Australia to sit things out.
On Israel, there has been a minor shift since we asked the question in the immediate aftermath of the 7 October attacks with significantly more younger people wanting to see active support for Palestine. But overall, three times more see it as a conflict Australia should not engage in at all.
This sentiment is even stronger when it comes to China-US tensions, where two-thirds of us say we want our government to “stay as neutral as possible”, a tacit endorsement of the PM’s active de-escalation of the performative tensions he inherited.
These findings are a stark repudiation of the former Coalition government’s preferred modus of foghorn diplomacy, which had a counter-productive effect.
This neutrality sentiment appears to go deeper than specific hotspots, with a majority of Australians saying it’s in the nation’s interest to actively disengage with world affairs altogether.
This question replicates a formulation that the non-partisan Chicago Council on Global Affairs has been asking Americans since 1974. For context, through the cold war, 9/11 and rise of Trump those saying they support playing an active part in the world has never dipped below 54%.
While American exceptionalism has always projected out, these findings suggest the natural barriers of our land girt by sea are more than just a coastline – for many of us they also represent a protective barrier.
Australia’s isolationist aspiration is understandable but also carries its own consequences: events over “there” do have profound impacts “here”.
The key drivers of the surge in inflation have been the long-term impact of a global pandemic where governments pumped money into their economies to support lockdowns and the war in Ukraine, which has throttled Europe’s gas supplies, leading to a global price cascade.
Escalation of hostility in the Middle East, a real risk as the Gaza conflict plays out, would provide a further trigger for privately owned energy companies to inflate their bottom line.
As we brace for summer bushfires, the imperative for global climate action becomes more urgent with COP talks in Dubai next month risking becoming a proxy for the growing list of international cleavages.
And on technology, global cooperation is urgently needed too, not just in regulating AI before it rolls over our workforces, but in building broader consensus on mitigating the excess of both the US’s surveillance capitalism and China’s state surveillance.
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More immediately, an inward-looking electorate poses a real risk to the government’s ambitions to ramp up skilled migration after the pandemic pause, as well as the projected flow of climate refugees expected from our Pacific neighbours.
A final question in this week’s poll illustrates this dynamic: while more people say immigration has been positive for Australia than not, those numbers have declined in recent years. Significantly, among the majority who want us to stay out of world affairs, more describe immigration is “generally negative”.
Don’t be fooled into dismissing this group as just the old, grumpy Sky After Dark crew. In fact, 27% of younger voters are in the “immigration is generally negative” cohort while those who self-identify as being under financial stress are also less convinced.
While immigration has largely been bipartisan since the demise of the white Australia policy in the 1960s, the Coalition has form in ruthlessly weaponising it for political affect.
Twenty years ago John Howard confected a border panic against the backdrop of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, masking concerns about economic globalisation and increasing levels of business migration by creating a class of “bad” outsiders to focus on.
This time the nativist panic is likely to coalesce around perceived scarcities in jobs and real pressures in housing, with a base political opportunity to convince Australians that outsiders are again to blame for their material challenges.
With asylum seekers the Coalition’s openly nativist campaign had the tacit support of the business establishment because it was providing cover for an escalation in skilled migration.
It remains to be seen how these interests respond to a similar campaign that breaks this consensus at a time where rising migration is a key plank of the agreed economic plan to fill labour gaps to, ironically, help mitigate rising costs and supply chain logjams.
As for the PM, his challenge is not to withdraw into his own political cocoon but, rather, to champion the shared values that have made Australia a cohesive multicultural society, one with the very stability, safety and security that more and more of us want to take refuge in.
Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company
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