We confront a crisis of national confidence and the sense that our political order and institutions are not equal to today’s internal and external challenges.
Australia is at a “Machiavellian moment”. This is not a reference to broken promises on tax. It’s a much bigger deal.
A Machiavellian moment speaks to a crisis of national confidence and the sense that our political order and institutions are not equal to today’s internal and external challenges. Coined by the historian J.G.A. Pocock, the term derives from Niccolo Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy and the Florentine’s diagnosis of a political community’s vulnerability to decay and decline.
Republics (read democracies) are fragile, Machiavelli argued. Stability and liberty are always at the mercy of change and chance. Renewal demands active citizenship and institutional adaptation.
Signs of an Australian Machiavellian moment are everywhere amid political fragmentation, economic stress and global upheaval. Polling finds almost two-thirds of the electorate believe Australia is headed in the wrong direction. One Nation has nudged out Labor as Australia’s most popular political party. The Coalition’s primary vote languishes at 20 per cent.
Weak growth, dismal productivity and declining real per capita incomes stalk our politics. Contrary to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s promise, many people feel held back, left behind, or both.
Study after study has found declining public trust in mainstream politics and the ability of our elite institutions to solve long-term challenges. Housing and energy bottlenecks, migration pressures, defence project misfires, care economy waiting lists, university governance failures – take your pick.
Geopolitical assumptions are under assault. Questions surround core pillars of our national security and prosperity. What’s left of the rules-based international order? Can we trust the Americans in times of crisis, or the Chinese at all? Does Australia see itself as a reliable supplier of gas and coal to our region?
Our Machiavellian moment finds parallels elsewhere. This can be a source of illumination.
In March, British historian John Bew penned a 7500-word essay in The New Statesman on what he calls the fourth great disruption of the modern British state. Bew has doubled as a foreign policy adviser to four British prime ministers (Boris Johnson to Keir Starmer) and we met when I was chief of staff to Scott Morrison.
He threads a compelling narrative through the first three great disruptions: the American revolution through to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the mid-1880s to the end of the Great War, and the crisis of the 1930s through to the post-1945 settlement. In each episode, war abroad and conflict at home forced deep structural changes to the British state.
The clash of foreign and domestic turbulence yields parallels in the evolution of the Australian state. The Federation settlement and two world wars transformed modern Australia, with the postwar Keynesian consensus and the neoliberal turn in the 1980s coming in their wake.
Whiggish progress is not assured. World War I begat World War II, after all. Bew sets a high bar for disruption, scoring the Thatcher revolution as a partial reassertion of an older model of British political economy, not a Machiavellian moment.
Nothing short of sustained political leadership on a multi-year project of cross-cutting reform is required.
Which brings us to today’s great disruption. The present moment, Bew writes, is marked by “structural and ideological changes, at home and abroad, that are incomparable in their scale to anything we have seen in almost 80 years”. We know Xi Jinping agrees.
From his time in No.10, Bew surveys “a vast renegotiation of everything: the basis of the social contract; the underpinnings of political economy; the legal and constitutional basis of national and international life; the division of responsibilities within our alliances; the inputs and outputs expected from the national security state; the areas of geographic focus of our diplomatic efforts; the terms of international trade; the level of tariffs; export and import controls; the foundations of our energy policy; and our ability to generate or access the benefits of the technological revolution that is the essential precondition of our future security and prosperity.”
From Pitt to today, certain lessons of statecraft emerge.
First, problems need to be confronted as a coherent whole. Nothing short of sustained political leadership on a multi-year project of cross-cutting reform is required. Eisenhower’s dictum that “plans” may be useless, but planning is essential is cited approvingly. Bew is a passionate advocate of “the discipline of writing things down”.
Second, nations can easily drift into irrelevance in times of global upheaval. Strategic alignments, hard power projection and sources of economic leverage demand active policy choices. Clinging to international rules and a liberal conscience will not guarantee a place at the table or the protection of Enlightenment values.
Third, progress will not be linear. Wrong turns and setbacks are inevitable. Leaders need to condition the public for them.
Finally, previously unthinkable measures should be contemplated, including constitutional change. Today’s social contract is unlikely to survive the smashing of the post-Cold War status quo.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Australia, like Britain, has arrived at a reckoning. If nothing else, history helps put our tax kerfuffle into perspective.