One of the strangest features of the Australian political system over the last 80 years or so has been the permanent coalition between the Liberal and National (formerly Country) parties. It sometimes puzzles foreigners – I remember an American observer saying that the prevalence of coalition governments here was an indicator or political instability. And it takes different forms in different places. At the national level, until two weeks ago, there was a standing coalition agreement even when in opposition (this dates back to the 1970s, I think). There’s a similar arrangement in NSW and Victoria, but in WA the two parties operate independently. At the other extreme are merged parties – the LNP in Queensland [1] and the CLP in the NT. In SA, Tasmania and the ACT there’s no separate country party.

Until now, the usual convention in reporting polling results has been to aggregate these parties into a single grouping reported as “LNP” or “Coalition”. But the breakup of the federal coalition means it is better to report them separately as four groups: Liberals, Nationals, LNP and CLP. Combined with the resurgence of One Nation this yields the starting possibility that the Liberals (as well as the other three) may soon have polling support below 10 per cent.

This graph from Redbridge (kindly provide by Ben Messenger) illustrates the point. The Liberals alone were polling at nearly 30 per cent a year ago, before the 2025 election disaster, but are now barely in double digits

Regardless of the precise number, these results have dire implications for the project of a moderate centre-right urban Liberal party, split off from the rightwing and far-right majority and aiming to making some kind of common cause with community independents. Such a party would command less than half of the Liberal party’s supporters or maybe 5 per cent of the population (plus whatever it could draw from the Queensland LNP). It would start with seven or eight members in the House of Representatives, along with some Senators who would be unlikely to get a quota in a Senate election.

Of course, just about anything could come out of the current chaos. For example, a merger of One Nation and the Nationals could easily become the main opposition party. But on Hanson’s track record it probably wouldn’t last long. And even if it endured, the chance of such a party actually winning would be small. Hanson’s permanent support base (embittered middle-aged and older low-education regional voters) is not only small, but so different from the actual majority of Australians to whom they refer as “inner-city elites”.

More likely is continued division on the right, with the remaining urban seats being picked off by Labor and the independents. The dreary implication is that Labor will continue to roll up big majorities even as its primary vote falls to 30 per cent or less. And as long as Albanese is leader, those majorities will not produce any significant policy change, let alone the radical transformation this country needs to respond to the challenges of global heating, Trumpism and the information economy.

fn1. I got in trouble 20 years ago or so for a jokey post predicting that there would be no more Liberal PMs because the Libs and Nats had to merge. Happened in Queensland, but not nationally.

Back in March 2023, the Nine Papers ran a series of articles, entitled Red Alert, based on the claim of an “expert panel” that we should be ready to fight a war with China, within three years. With only a few weeks to go before the third anniversary of the series, the prediction is not looking good. Not only has there been no war, but relations between Australia and China are friendlier than they have been for years, going back at least as far as Turnbull’s prime ministership.

Where did Nine go wrong, and what lessons can we learn? The first, and most important error was the assumption that the PRC government could, if it chose, launch an invasion of Taiwan which would succeed in the absence of intervention by the US and its allies.

This claim was widely accepted in the US at the time, at least until analysts absorbed the lessons of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The most commonly proposed date was 2027, the “Davidson window” based on unverified claims that Xi Jinping wanted an invasion, or at least the capacity to undertake one, by then.

But as I argued at the time , the claim disregarded the history of seaborne invasions, which is mostly one of failure. The one success on a comparable scale, the D-Day landings in Normandy, required a preponderance of forces massively greater than that available to the the PRC.

This historical analysis was reinforced by the crushing defeat of Russia’s much-feared (before 2022) Black Sea Fleet. The anticipated assaults on ports like Odesa not take place, and the Fleet played almost no role in the grinding and brutal battle for Mariupol. Worse, beginning with the sinking of the Moskva early in the War, Ukraine, with no naval forces at all, drove Russia’s Navy off the sea entirely, forcing it to seek shelter in faraway Russian ports, but not safe even there.

All of this evidence was available at the time Red Alert was published. The authors could also have looked at China’s failure to undertake any serious preparation for a seaborne landing. China has only a dozen or so modern amphibious assault ships with a combined capacity of perhaps 10 000 troops. And, despite a massive buildup of naval forces generally, the PLA Navy is only adding one or two such ships every year. The supposed backup, dual use civilian ferries, is also proceeding slowly. A recent exercise involving twelve such ships falls far short of what is required for a serious threat

Meanwhile Taiwan is learning the lessons of the Ukraine war. Despite the resistance of the defence establishment (and particularly the navy), Taiwan is shifting expenditure towards the acquisition of missile and drone defences that would make any invasion attempt a catastrophic risk. Taiwan is shifting from reliance on imported US anti-ship missiles, such as the Harpoon to the domestically produced Hsiung Feng III with a range of 400km (considerably more the the width of the Taiwan strait).

As a result of these developments, most analysts (though not the Nine papers) have given up on the Davidson window and started talking about alternatives to invasion, such as a blockade or the more nebulous “quarantine” [1]. These won’t work but have kept the idea of imminent conflict going.

The big unforeseen development since 2023 was the re-election of Donald Trump and his shift in focus to plans to dominate the Americas (the “Donroe doctrine”). It is now pretty clear that Trump would be unwilling to commit US forces to defend Taiwan. China’s military and naval buildup, while not very useful for an invasion of Taiwan, has made such a commitment very risky.

For Australia, the withdrawal of a US commitment to defend Taiwan makes the prospect of war with China even more remote. The operating assumption, and the basis for AUKUS, has been the idea that Australian forces would serve under US command. In the absence of US participation, all we could offer Taiwan in the (remote) event of a war with China is the kind of assistance we’ve given Ukraine – thoughts, prayers and some surplus military equipment.

The UK has drawn the same lesson, scaling back the Indo-Pacific operations (the so-called “tilt the Asia Pacific) which provided the strategic rationale for its role in AUKUS, and abandoning it last permanent base ”east of Suez”. . At this point the only UK interest in AUKUS is to get as much Australian money as possible to support its submarine industry.

I will be surprised and impressed if Nine revisits this failed forecast, and even more so if the result is a change in the coverage of our relations with China and the US.

fn1. What I’ve called the Clayton’s version – the blockade you have when you’re not having a blockade.

Ever since it became evident that Trump was likely to be re-elected, I’ve been among the most pessimistic of commentators on the likely course of US politics (most recently here for example). I’ve also been nowhere near pessimistic enough. I assumed that Trump would follow the course of dictators like Putin and Orban, gradually eroding freedom and making his own power permanent. Instead, he’s gone most of the way inside a year.

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This is one of the most depressing Australia Days I can remember. We are still recovering from the horror of the Bondi massacre and the disgraceful jostling for political advantage that followed it. Meanwhile, the news is that opposition is hardening on changing the date to one less offensive to First Nations people. The actual shifts aren’t that great in statistical terms, but there’s no doubt that this shift, along with the rise of One Nation reflects something real.

In part what we are seeing is the global collapse of the “centre-right” and the ideology I’ve called “hard neoliberalism”, a combination of privatisation, pro-rich tax cuts and attacks on workers rights. For decades, hard neoliberals relied on the votes of the 20-30 per cent of the population who are consistently racist, but delivered little more than gestures. Now, with the failure of neoliberalism evident to all, the boot is on the foot. The racist right now dictates terms to the remaining neoliberals. We see this most obviously with Trump, but it’s happening in much of Europe as well. Germany is one of the few places where the mainstream right has (so far) held the line against doing deals with parties like AfD.

In Australia, the former coalition made their deal with the devil when they decided to preference One Nation ahead of Labor. Now they are paying the price. The Nationals will either be wiped out by One Nation or forced to merge with them. Either way, and assuming Labor wins again, the opposition in the next parliament will be dominated by overt racists.

Coming to Australia Day specifically, it’s unsurprising that the right is hardening its position. The bigger problem, as usual, is the failure of leadership from Labor and, more specifically Anthony Albanese. Having bungled the Voice referendum, he has walked away from any serious efforts at reconciliation with First Nations and from any attempt to redefine Australia’s position in the radically changed world brought about by Trump.

I can’t see any good outcomes here, at least in the short term. Until Albanese and Marles are gone, we will have no leadership from this government. That’s not going to happen soon, even if Albanese’s popularity continues to decline. And while Chalmers seems more aware of what is going on, there’s no guarantee he would be radically different. Plibersek could once have been an alternative but she has been fatally compromised by her stint as minister for environmental destruction. The same is true of Wong, leaving aside the problem that she is a senator.

The only consolation, looking at the world scene, is that things could be a lot worse. This is still a great country, even if our political class does not reflect the fact.

The Australian government’s legislation seeking to ban access to social media for people under 16 has received plenty of attention in International media, mostly leading with the government’s that 4.7 million accounts were banned or deactivated when the legislation came into effect. Rather less attention has been paid to discussion of the outcome within Australia, where the consensus is that there has been very little effect for most. With most kids still active, the minority who have been caught by the ban have suffered feelings of ostracism and exclusion When discussing the issue on my own social media (which had few if any teenage readers to begin with) I’ve only had one parent report their kids being thrown off.

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As part of my critique of pro-natalism, I’m looking at the philosophical foundations of the idea. Most of the explicit discussion takes place within the framework of consequentialism (the idea that the best actions or policies are those with the best consequences) and particularly of utilitarianism, broadly defined to say that the best consequences are those which maximise some aggregate function of individual happiness or wellbeing. Other philosophical traditions either avoid the issue explicitly (for example Rawls’ theory of justice) or offer little that can illuminate debate over population numbers (virtue ethics, contractarian theories).

Looking at the utilitarian analysis immediately creates a puzzle. All the early utilitarians, from Jeremy Bentham to John Stuart Mill supported population limitation. They accepted Malthus’ claim that, in the absence of limitation, population growth would inevitably reduce the great majority of people to subsistence. But unlike Malthus, who used this argument to say that attempts to make the poor better off were futile (he rejected birth control as “vice”) the early utilitarians accepted the desirability of limiting family size.

Most notable among this group was Francis Place. Taking significant legal risks in the repressive climate of the time, Place sought to spread information about contraceptive methods in pamphlets such as Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population(1822). 

Importantly, and in contrast to many 20th century Malthusians, Place rejected coercive measures, placing his trust in families to make prudent decisions given access to information and the methods of family planning. Except for his failure (unsurprising at the time) to consider possible conflict within households, Place’s position stands up very well 200 years later.

The classical utilitarians argued for public policies which promoted the welfare of the community to which they applied, on the basis of “each to count for one, and none for more than one”. This contrasted sharply with alternative guides like “national greatness” or “God’s laws”. And, while no philosophical debate is ever resolved, this way of thinking about policy choices (particularly economic policy choices) has remained dominant, or at least influential, down to the present day.

By contrast, contemporary utilitarian philosophy yields bizarre spectacles like “longtermism” which implies that our primary goal should be to produce as many descendants as possible provided that the result is an increase in aggregate utility.

This is far from the only problem with contemporary utilitarian philosophy. It’s commonly presented as a theory of individual ethics, saying that our actions ought to be those which promote the maximal happiness of everyone affected, giving ourselves the same weight as everyone else. Apart from being impossibly demanding, this prescription seems perfectly designed to produce absurd counterexamples (trolley problems, organ kidnapping etc)

The task of tracing where and when a tradition of thought has gone off the rails is usually complex and ambiguous. But in this case, the answer is amazingly clear. in 1874, one year after the death of JS Mill (the last of the classic utilitarians), Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick published The Methods of Ethics, which became the standard interpretation of utilitarianism, at least in the philosophical literature

In the space of a few pages, Sidgwick introduced all three of the errors I have criticised above,

First, (Book IV 1.1) he states, “By Utilitarianism is here meant the ethical theory, that the conduct which, under any given circumstances, is objectively right, is that which will produce the greatest amount of happiness on the whole; that is, taking into account all whose happiness is affected by the conduct. ”

Second 1.2 “on Utilitarian principles, population ought to be encouraged to increase, is not that at which average happiness is the greatest possible,—as appears to be often assumed by political economists of the school of Malthus—but that at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living into the amount of average happiness reaches its maximum.”

Sidgwick asserts these points, but doesn’t really argue for them . Rather, his style of presentation is tight and rigorous, at least by the standards of 19th century philosophy and his tone is authoritative. The result is that even among philosophical critics, most notably GE Moore, his version of utilitarianism became established as the norm.

Superficially, it might seem that modern social welfare theory has taken Sidgwick’s approach and given it a mathematical formalism. The standard workhorse of this model, the social welfare function, is an aggregate of individual welfare measures, with properties that ensure that the higher the value of the function the better the outcome. But this function is invariably applied in ways that reject Sidgwick’s errors. First, it is used to evaluate public policy, typically in the context of models that do not assume individuals act as disinterest utilitarian ethicists. Second, it is applied to specific fixed populations. Where comparisons are made between populations, they are almost invariably presented in average rather than aggregate terms.

There are plenty of arguments to be made against the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill. But the starting point for such arguments ought to be a complete rejection of Sidgwick’s errors.

My contribution to the East Asia Forum special feature on 2025 in review

The events of 2025 have broken the world order that had prevailed throughout this century.

The United States has abandoned any pretence of upholding rules-based trade. Its longstanding refusal to allow the filling of vacancies on the WTO’s Appellate Body has left dispute settlement inoperative, with more than 50 members relying instead on the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA) as a substitute.

US trade agreements with Australia and many other countries have been broken with the imposition of across-the-board tariffs. As a result, other economies, such as Canada and the European Union, are now seeking to rebuild trade patterns to work around the United States.

At the same time, China’s willingness to exploit its dominant position in critical minerals, renewable energy and other industries has driven efforts to diversify production, notably with respect to solar photovoltaics.

The world is recognising that reliance on either China or the United States is a dangerous mistake. Australian policy thinking has yet to adjust, still starting from the premise that the world is dominated by the two great powers, and that Australia’s task is to find an appropriate balance between them.

In reality, neither the United States nor China is as dominant as they appear in these discussions. Though they are easily the largest individual countries, between them they only account for approximately 20 per cent of the world’s population and 30 per cent of global economic output.

The United States and China command massive military forces. But so far, this has done them little good. Attempts by the United States to solve problems with military power — most recently by confronting Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea — have proved ineffective. China has wisely refrained from anything more than ‘grey zone’ sabre-rattling, and confident predictions of an assault on Taiwan as early as 2026 have largely been forgotten.

China and the United States account for just over a third of Australia’s trade in goods and services. Measures of soft power are even more striking. The United States and China ranked fourth and fifth among Australian travel destinationsin 2024–25, behind Indonesia, New Zealand and Japan. This data, captured in June 2025, only partially accounts for the decline in travel to the United States following the re-election of Donald Trump.

The United States continues to dominate popular culture in Australia but is declining elsewhere in the region with the rise of rivals like K-Pop music and Bollywood films. China has long punched below its weight in soft power and, despite the short-lived fad for Labubu, this seems unlikely to change.

None of this would matter much if, as in the days of the Cold War, the United States and China offered competing economic and social models that others aspired to emulate. Broadly speaking, the United States has accepted the Chinese Communist Party view of the world — one in which markets are to be exploited and democracy is a weakness. Both countries are now in the process of becoming personal dictatorships, with success in business depending as much on cultivating the right political connections as on market competition. To put it simply, the United States and China now offer variant forms of crony capitalism.

This is unlikely to change any time soon. On all indications, and in the absence of any major crisis, Chinese President Xi Jinping is effectively president for life. When he passes on, succession is unlikely to be orderly or predictable. As for the United States, Trump has already indicated his intention to run for a third term and his determination to ensure that any future election will produce a Republican Party victory. He may or may not succeed, but in any case, the United States is highly unlikely to return to pre-Trump normality.

Responding to these developments, the rest of the world is gradually moving to disengage from both the United States and China. For ASEAN, this disengagement involves ASEAN countries no longer acting as entrepots, facilitating the transhipment of goods from China on their way to the United States. Trump’s tariffs have rendered this model unviable, without offering a satisfactory alternative. The only way forward for ASEAN is through the expansion of trade within the region and with other non-aligned partners.

Unlike its ASEAN neighbours, Australia’s Anthony Albanese government has so far sought to ignore the realities of the world in which Australia now lives. Its central focus is the Australia–United Kingdom–United States (AUKUS) agreement, signed in 2021 at a moment of high tension with China, and now an untouchable icon of domestic politics. AUKUS locks Australia into a world view dominated by the US–China rivalry, with a side order of British Empire nostalgia.

But sooner or later, Australia must break with great power rivalry and seek a future based on cooperation with other small and medium-sized countries, which collectively matter more for Australia’s future and for the good of the new global order