Australian democracy right now may be more vulnerable than many care to admit. One reason is that the branch office mentality of so many politicians often leads them to assimilate and ape American trends. The usual suspects have been flaunting their Trump fandom, but others may come to see his victory and his politics as something to be more closely emulated.
More serious, though, are multiplying signs of a kind of structural rot whose sources are internal.
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The minister for human services, Alan Tudge, has defended the mechanised but indiscriminate collection of Centrelink debts from citizens because of the money it will save. This reveals how, at the highest echelons of our political life, the idea is now embedded that the primary function of such institutions is not service, let alone welfare, but discipline.
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This systematic lowering of expectations may be a greater long-term danger than its immediate fruits. The placeholder currently occupying the Lodge – the latest in a sequence stretching back over a long decade – is a living reminder how difficult it is to draw a bead on a government’s short-term failures when they have no discernible long-term projects in mind.
Everywhere, there is a sense that no one can imagine any higher task for government than managing an eternal present.