The world is going to the dogs. While every generation claims it, right now it feels like we are at our lowest ebb since Oppenheimer blew time on the second world war.
There has been no shortage of horror since: the imposition of the Soviet iron curtain, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam war, the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, the incessant march of corporate imperialism.
But after a global pandemic that killed millions, it is fragmenting anew as creeping fascism, described by some as “illiberal democracy”, and emerges as a new operating system purporting to restore order.
There is nothing perfect about this storm: Vladimir Putin wiping out his opponents, Benjamin Netanyahu doing the same on a grander scale, China’s geopolitical flex, Donald Trump’s march towards the White House.
This growing sense of crisis is borne out in findings from this week’s Guardian Essential report, where two-thirds of respondents see the world as more divided than united.
This perilous state of global affairs is another card in the deck the Albanese government has been dealt as it battles to create the foundations of stability and security essential for long-term government.
Australia’s national security has been tied to the United States since 1942 but most leaders have stamped their own mark: Gough Whitlam’s recognition of China, Bob Hawke’s embrace of globalisation, Paul Keating’s “security in Asia”, John Howard’s “deputy sheriff” shtick, Kevin Rudd’s performative Mandarin, Tony Abbott’s return to empire, Scott Morrison’s Red Menace.
While the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, has worked assiduously to repair relations with Pacific neighbours and ease the overt tensions with China, the Albanese doctrine is largely defined by choices made in opposition.
Like the stage-three tax cuts, Labor took the calculated decision not to fight the last election on national security, waving through the Morrison government’s audacious embrace of the Aukus nuclear submarine contract before the ink was even dry.
Like the stage-three tax cuts, it made political sense at the time but it robbed Albanese of the opportunity to set out his vision for Australia’s place in the world, apart from the low bar of being less divisive than his predecessor.
While it looks like Labor will get away with reconfiguring its tax policy to meet changing economic circumstance, renegotiating a multibillion-dollar, multi-decade defence deal is another matter altogether.
This creates a real quandary for the government at a time when, as a separate question shows, most Australians support either a more independent foreign policy or one of strategic isolation.
While the PM used his personal authority to tamp down internal dissent to the Aukus deal at last year’s national conference, just one in five Labor voters are aligned with the government position.
This disconnect also feeds into specific questions about the direction of Australia’s foreign policy where the trans-Pacific consensus faithfully articulated by the Murdoch and Nine papers seems worlds away from the actual national mood.
On China, voters have consistently called for a nuanced position where Australia does not pit itself as an adversary with our major trading partner.
Meanwhile, the government’s reflexive response to the 7 October Hamas attacks appears at odds with public sentiment, a majority of Australians wanting to see an Israeli ceasefire or complete withdrawal from Gaza.
While achieving world peace is way outside the Albanese government’s pay grade, the spectre of ongoing global instability does have political consequences at home.
A majority of respondents recognise that what happens over there has an impact on both our local economy and our capacity to address the climate change that is delivering us more extreme weather each season.
More fundamentally, global instability risks raising the salience of the types of issues where conservatives traditionally thrive, as a final question in this week’s poll illustrates.
These findings can be read two ways. While the Coalition, as would be expected, has a stronger brand on national security, these numbers suggest that this is only an advantage at the margins.
In contrast, Labor’s objectively superior record on managing its regional relationships seems to have slipped under the radar and is delivering very little recognition or voter dividend. When it comes to global affairs more voters see no difference between the major parties.
These seeming anomalies may serve as both a vindication and a condemnation of Labor’s original call not to contest the Aukus deal.
But the bigger truth is that the major parties are on a unity ticket for a geopolitical strategy that does not have widespread public support and faces another black swan threat in the first week of November.
The risk for Labor is that if global conditions continue to deteriorate, it ends up the defender of a status quo ripe for the picking by a home-grown populist who doesn’t need to convince anyone that the world is going to the dogs.
Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Mort Laitner
Donald Low
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
