TL;DR Not good. Taking account of economic failure, nothing Trump has done – rape, war crimes, corruption, insurrection, ICE or trashing the constitution – has cost him a single vote on balance.

In  a flowchart prepared before the 2024 election, I gave US democracy a 30 per cent chance of surviving a Trump election win. This was broken down as 10 per cent that Trump would govern constitutionally, 10 per cent that the Supreme Court would stop him and 10 per cent that he would face effective popular resistance. Obviously, the first of these didn’t happen. And while the Supreme Court has occasionally ruled against Trump, it has more helped him by overturning lower court judgements.

That leaves popular resistance, including both the public as a whole and institutions like the media, law firms, big business and universities. The level of acquiescence, or outright collaboration from the institutions, with the partial exception of universities, has exceeded my most pessimistic expectations. For me, as a lifelong Apple fan, the sight of CEO Tim Cook fawning over Trump while he handed over protection money was particularly galling, but Wall Street and Big Law have been just as bad

As regards the public at large, optimists have taken heart from the fact that Trump’s popularity has dropped sharply from the 49 per cent he won at the 2025 election. But the drop is about what would be expected for a president of either party who ran on a promise of lower prices and failed to deliver. Trump’s decline almost exactly parallels Joe Biden’s, as well as Trump’s own first term

Putting this as sharply as possible, once you take account of economic performance, nothing else Trump has done – rape, war crimes, corruption, insurrection, megalomania, secret police or trashing the constitution – has cost him a single vote on balance. An issue-by-issue analysis for The Economist supports this. Trump is deep underwater on the issue of inflation, but has barely lost any ground on national security and immigration since the election. And his support among Republicans remains rock solid.

The big problem Trump faces in 2026 is that of the mid-term elections to be held in November. Under normal circumstances, the party of a relatively unpopular incumbent would lose. And this would set the stage for the successor to a term-limited incumbent to be defeated in the subsequent presidential election. The incumbent would then retire to write his memoirs, give speaking tours etc.

But it’s obvious that a Democratic presidency with control of Congress would put Trump and his cronies in grave danger. Even if Trump could not be criminally prosecuted, and even with liberal use of the pardon power, he would surely be subject to civil actions of all kinds and state-level prosecutions which (hopefully) would not be bungled. The problems for cronies would be even greater.

For that reason, it’s highly unlikely that Trump will willingly accept a mid-term defeat. Can he prevent it? His first attempt to stop the outcome, taking gerrymandering to extremes, proved counterproductive when California Democrats responded in kind. And it’s unlikely that the usual long-standing forms of voter discouragement will be enough to change the outcome. That leaves two possibilities: forcible suppression using ICE or military forces, and annulment of results.

Trump somewhat botched the first option with his order of troops into US cities, which achieved nothing and undercut any basis for invoking the Insurrection Act. Even the Supreme Court rejected his attempts to establish control over state-level national guards against the wishes of governors. But there are still plenty of possibilities. For example, ICE could be mobilised to arrest Hispanic voters on the suspicion of being illegal immigrants and detaining them long enough to stop votes being cast. Or mail-in ballots could be seized and destroyed on some pretext or other.

Alternatively, Trump could direct Republican officials to “find” the necessary votes to deliver the desired outcome in close contests, as he tried to do in Georgia in 2020. While Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger resisted that time, it’s doubtful that many Republican officials would do so now.

Finally, the current speaker Mike Johnson could seat Republican losers in place of elected Democrats. The only limit here is the willingness of the House of Representatives to countenance such an action. With a slim majority in the existing House, there would be a risk of defection.

Looking at this, it struck me that Trump could make Johnson’s task easier by detaining enough Democrats to ensure the vote went the right way. When I searched on whether this was possible, I received the reassuring answer that members of Congress are protected by privilege and that arresting them would be a felony, “except in cases of treason, felony or breach of the peace”. The last of these exceptions seems broad enough to drive a truck through. And, when I asked what remedy was available, the first answer was “impeachment”, which was grimly amusing. More promising options are actions under habeas corpus, but as recent cases of arbitrary arrest have shown, the government can drag its feet over such actions for a long time.

Successful suppression of the voters’ will in the mid-terms would clearly mark the transition of the US from democracy to dictatorship. A “normal” election or successful resistance to suppression would allow some breathing space, but would still imply an uphill battle for the remainder of Trump’s (current) term.

Overall, I’d say that the probability of US democracy surviving past 2028 is a little better than the 10 per cent implied by by my 2024 flowchart, but still well below 50-50.

Best wishes for the New Year

This came out in The Conversation, a while ago, but I didn’t get around to posting it here. I’m posting my original version, which includes a discussion of vapes

Few Australians can have failed to notice the proliferation of tobacconists and “convenience stores” in the last few years. And most of us are aware that these stores aren’t making much from the limited set of offerings on public display. Rather, their profitability comes from under-the-counter sales of untaxed tobacco and illegal vapes.

The growth of illegal tobacco sales has reached the point where the national accounts produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics have been significantly distorted. The ABS has announced that it is taking steps to “measure the consumption of illicit nicotine related products to supplement existing measurement. ”

Before looking at how this decision will affect the national accounts, it’s worth asking how we got here. The short answer is that, over the past decade or so, tobacco excise has been steadily increased to the point where there are big profits to be made from dodging the tax.

But that’s not the whole story. Taxes on spirits have also been raised substantially, yet we haven’t seen a return of the “sly grog” shops that were common in Australia until the 1960s, when 6pm closing of pubs was abolished. And despite heavy taxes on gambling, illegal casinos seem to be a thing of the past.

What explains this difference? The sale of alcohol and gambling services is subject to licensing restrictions, managed by state authorities and enforced by police specifically allocated to these duties. By contrast, until very recently, nicotine products have been treated as normal grocery items. Enforcement has been left to health inspectors with many other duties and very limited powers. A store found to be selling illegal cigarettes might get a warning, or at worst, a 24-hour closure.

The Australian Taxation Office, along with the Australian Border Force, makes serious efforts to prevent illegal importation of tobacco products as well as seizing tobacco crops grown here. But it appears unable or unwilling to do much against retailers who sell cigarettes under the counter.

State police forces have been similarly unwilling to enforce the law in this respect. Their reluctance here contrasts with the reasonably effective licensing enforcement discussed above and with the positively draconian measures taken against suspected users of drugs like ecstasy, which are less dangerous than tobacco.

State governments have gradually tightened up the law, and have begun shutting down tobacconists found to be breaching it. But the imbalance between the incentive to dodge the tax and the risks of being caught remains. Until it is resolved, the federal government would do well to defer further increases in taxation.

Another measure that would help to resolve the problem is the abandonment of the anomalous policy under which vapes (legally available only from pharmacists, many of whom are unwilling to supply them) are more severely restricted than cigarettes and loose tobacco. The aim here was to prevent the arrival of a new form of nicotine, but that horse has well and truly bolted by now.

A question that remains open is whether the growth of illegal tobacco has led to an increase in smoking. Evidence here is mixed. AN AIHW survey in 2022-23 showed a continued decline in smoking with an increase in vaping. However, a more recent Roy Morgan survey suggests an increase of smoking among young people as a result of the vaping ban

Now, back to the ABS. The objective in producing national accounts statistics like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is to measure economic activity, giving a guide as to whether the economy is operating at full capacity. As critics have often pointed out, this measure pays no attention to whether the production being measured is socially desirable, neutral or harmful. Similarly, the ABS has always been aware that not all economic activity is legally recorded.

The solution, in the past, has been to add an adjustment of 1.5% to official measures, to take account of unrecorded activity. There hasn’t been a perceived need for anything more detailed. But with untaxed and unrecorded products now accounting for around half of all tobacco consumption, this ad hoc adjustment is no longer sufficient. The ABS estimates that growth in final household consumption expenditure has been underestimated by more than 0.5 percentage points over the past year, which is a big deal given that the typical annual change is around 5 per cent.

Finally, it’s worth noting that this isn’t the only issue the ABS is looking at in response to an ever-changing economy. As more and more households meet their electricity needs through rooftop solar, the ABS has faced a conceptual issue. This might be thought of as household production, like growing your own vegetables or cooking your own meals, which isn’t counted in GDP. But the ABS has decided it’s between to regard solar rooftops as a home-based small business, whether the electricity is self-consumed or fed back into the grid.

As distinctions between home and work, and between licit and illicit production become increasingly blurred, statisticians will need to make more and more judgements like this.

How my AI report on housework started well, then went off the rails

I’ve long been interested in the topic of housework, as you can see from this Crooked Timber post, which produced a long and unusually productive discussion thread [fn1]. The issue came up again in relation to the prospects for humanoid robots. It’s also at the edge of bunch of debates going on (mostly on Substack) about living standards and birth rates.

I’m also interested (like nearly everyone, one way or another) in “Artificial Intelligence” (scare quotes intentional). My current position is, broadly, that it’s what Google should have become instead of being steadily enshittified in the pursuit of advertising dollars. But I’m alert to other possibilities, including that more investment will deliver something that genuinely justifies the name AI. And I think a lot of the concerns about power and water use, the spread of AI slop and so on are either overstated or (as with deepfakes) are mostly new iterations of concerns that always arise with new IT and communications technology, and can be addressed with existing conceptual and legal tools.

With this background, I thought it would be interesting to try out ChatGPTs Deep Research (DR) on the question of what has happened to housework and why. As I may have mentioned before, I’ve trained DR on a big volume of my own writing. That produces a passable imitation of my style, and means I don’t worry about the ethical issues of plagiarising the writing style of others (of course, standard norms of citation and attribution still apply).

I decided to focus on single-person households, to abstract away from the issues of child-raising (which I want to look at separately) and the allocation of work between partners (about which there is a vast literature to which I can’t add anything new).

Everything went really well to start with. I prompted DR for time use data, then pushed further on with more detailed questions like the impact of air fryers on male cooking habits (I was given one recently and was impressed enough that I promptly bought a second). I asked for a literature search and got references to Judy Wajcman and Michael Bittman, both of whom I knew and a couple of people I didn’t. DR missed Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s classic More Work for Mother.

On the other hand, I wasn’t aware of Wajcman’s recent Pressed for Time and hadn’t thought about the broader issue of life administration, which DR pointed out. I gave it a more economistic take, trying to divide labour-saving innovation (electronic bill paying) from the labour costs of more digital consumption (retrieving passwords for streaming services etc).

I got DR to produce a LaTeX file, and was nearly ready to go to digital press when I noticed that the references were incomplete. At this stage, the whole process spiralled into disaster. Every draft seemed to lose more material, and to be worse written. Finally, I demanded an explanation\

Source: Enkiai. com

DR graciously explained that this is the way it does things. Here’s its response with original formatting (more detailed version here)

---

Why Deep Research Fails

The core issue: The “illusion of continuity” in long-context LLMs

Large-context models appear to preserve every part of the conversation, but in reality:

They do not reliably retain or retrieve long-form outputs they themselves generated.

Even though the conversation window may be large, the model often cannot:

• accurately locate the version you consider the “full text,”
• reliably differentiate between multiple drafts (short, medium, long) created earlier,
• or accurately regenerate from earlier output unless it is verbatim re-supplied by the user.

This is because the internal contextual representation compresses earlier tokens. Information is not stored sequentially; it is represented in a latent space, which cannot always reconstruct past outputs faithfully.

---

Fortunately, my LaTeX program took continuous backups, so I’ve been able to retrieve the last good version, but I’m going to keep it away from DR for now.

I was going to go on with more detail about the actual report, but my op-ed training leads me to feel that a post should have 700 words, and I am at 675 as I type this. 

fn1. I can take a victory lap on my jihad/crusade against ironing, which has disappeared almost entirely, contradicting the expectations of many commenters.

I’ve been seeing more and more alarmism about the idea that, on current demographic trends, the world’s population might shrink to a billion in a century or two. That distant prospect is producing lots of advocacy for policies to increase birth rates right now.

One of the big claims is that a smaller population will reduce the rate of scientific progress I’ve criticised this in the past, pointing out that billions of young people today, particularly girls, don’t get the education they need to have any serious chance of realising their potential. But it seems as if I need to repeat myself, so I will do so, trying a slightly different tack

It’s surprisingly difficult to get an estimate of the number of researchers in the world, but Google scholar gives us a rough idea. Google Scholar indexes research across all academic disciplines, including social sciences and humanities. No exact count is available, but I’ve seen an estimate that 1.5 million people have Google scholar profiles. I’d guess that this would account for at least half of all active researchers, for a total of 3 million.

www.isaaa.org Licensed underBY-NC-ND

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The US is one big grift these days: the Trump Administration, traditional and social media, corporations, crypto, financial markets are all selling some kind of spurious promise. It’s hard to pick the most egregious example. But for me, it’s hard to go past Tesla. Having lost its dominant position in the electric car market, the company ought to be on the edge of delisting. Instead, its current market capitalisation is $US1.33 trillion ($A 2 trillion). Shareholders have just agreed on an incentive deal with Elon Musk, premised on the claim that he can take that number to $8.5 trillion.

Having failed with the Cybertruck and robotaxis, Tesla’s value depends almost entirely on the projected success of the Optimus humanoid robot. There’s a strong case that Optimus will be outperformed by rivals like Unitree But the bigger question is: why build a humanoid robot at all?

Read More »

107 years ago*, the guns fell silent on the Western Front, marking a temporary and partial end to the Great War which began in 1914, and has continued, in one form or another, ever since. I once hoped that I would live to see a peaceful world, but that hope has faded away.

• fixed my arithmetic error, noted by several readers – I seem to be getting worse at this. Also, the date is 11/11 in Australia, where I’m writing.

And will they stay loyal?

When I first started following politics, in the dying days of the McMahon LNP government, most people voted consistently for one or other of the two major parties, Labor and Liberal/Country. The only important exception, the DLP, was just about to disappear. At that time, the common view was that consistent party voters were acting out of habit or class/cultural identity, while “swinging” voters made a considered choice, based on policies, candidates and so on. Since both major parties got close to 50 per cent most of the time, appealing to these swinging voters was seen as the crucial task.

Once political scientists started looking however, they found out that swinging voters were typically the least engaged group, paying little attention to politics or policies and making late choices based on frivolous issues or just “vibes”. The lesson drawn by party “hardheads” (a term I routinely deride) was that the best strategy was to off attractive goodies that would tempt these voters. A better response, though, was to convert consistent voters from the other side. Labor managed more or less the opposite of that with the 1956 split, losing supporters to the DLP who mostly ended up voting Liberal when the hope of (re)gaining control of the ALP was abandoned.

That was then. Now with the combined vote of the majors down to 60 per cent in the latest Newspoll, the dissident 40 per cent is very different from the swinging voters of yesteryear. But what about the “rusted-ons”? It looks as though the LNP has just about lost its core base, going either to One Nation and other far-right parties or to centrist independents. But Labor still gets the support of more than 30 per cent of voters nearly all the time (the low point, I think, was 25.5 for the utter trainwreck of NSW Labor in 2011).

What are they thinking about and will they keep thinking the same way? Thinking about why someone might choose to vote Labor consistently, there are a few possibilities.

First, there are voters for whom Labor’s policies have been and remain closer to their own preferences than any other option (LNP, Greens, independents). Given Labor’s shift to the right on most issues, that would include voters who were always on Labor’s right flank. Another group would be voters focused on the relatively few issues, such as union rights, where Labor has sustained a relatively strong position, along with a historical record. But it’s hard to see this group as being very large.

Next there are those for whom voting Labor is a matter of personal/cultural identity, similar to cheering for (to pick an example not exactly at random) South Sydney in the NRL. No one backs the Rabbitohs because they approve of the current coach’s preferred style of play, and very few because they like particular players. It’s just something you are born with, or pick up along the way. To the extent that this is a view formed by growing up a traditionally working class environment where voting Labor is taken for granted, it’s eroding over time.

Third are those who don’t consider any alternative to voting for a major party. In large measure this reflects misunderstandings about the nature of preferential voting, misconceptions shared by a surprising number of political commentators and very much encouraged by Labor. In 2022, for example, Labor ran with the (totally false) claim “voting 1 for Labor is the only way to get rid of Morrison”.

A variation, relevant with a large crossbench, is a belief that minority governments are problematic and unstable. This remains the default position of the commentariat, who have built their careers in a two-party system, and don’t know how to handle anything else. But as minority governments become more common, and function fairly effectively, this belief can’t be sustained indefinitely.

As I’ve argued in previous posts, Labor’s positioning on the centre-right makes it the natural party of government as long as the main opposition comes from a fragmented right and centre right. In the short medium term (say the next 5-10 years), this is a “hardhead” strategy. But it has already alienated most people who actually care about positive policy outcomes, and is making Labor identity more and more difficult to sustain. Sooner or later, Labor’s base will contract to a point where it can no longer sustain the idea of a binary choice. At that point, the party will have little left to offer to anyone.

As I said last time, Anthony Albanese has succeeded in making Labor the natural party of government in Australia, relegating the rightwing opposition to the role of “B team” and marginalizing the Greens and progressive independents. The cost has been the abandonment of Labor’s historic role as the “party of initiative”, pushing against the conservative “party of resistance”. Indeed, the reverse is now closer to the truth

The characterisation of Labor as the party of initiative goes back to WK Hancock’s 1930 classic Australia (though he used the phrase “party of movement”) and was broadly accurate both as a description of his own time (when the Labor party was only 40 years old) and for nearly a century afterwards. Hancock wrote at a bleak time for Labor. Having achieved many of its early goals, such as union recognition, workers compensation and the expansion of public enterprise, Labor had split bitterly over conscription in the Great War of 1914-18 and was in the process of splitting again over policy responses to the Great Depression.

But these setbacks proved temporary. The Curtin-Chifley and Whitlam governments were responsible for most of the policy innovations of the post-1945 era. Curtin and Chifley secured legislative independence by adopting the Statute of Westminster in 1942 introduced uniform federal income tax upheld by the High Court’s First Uniform Tax case in July 1942,expanded social security and launched a mass immigration program under Calwell that reshaped the population, Labor founded key institutions including the ANU, national airlines and research bodies), and capped the program with the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme in 1949.

Most importantly, Labor committed the Commonwealth to full employment in the 1945 White Paper on Full Employment. The central role of the national government in ensuring full employment legitimised a wide range of interventions in the economy.

Even in opposition from 1949 to 1972 , Labor continued to set the policy agenda. With limited exceptions, the Menzies and his successors preserved\ the foundations laid by Curtin and Chifley, and responded, grudgingly, to pressure from Labor and its intellectual allies

The high point of Labor as the party of initiative came after Whitlam’s election victory 1972. In his first few weeks in office, Whitlam did more than we have seen in the lifetime of the current government: including ending conscription, withdrawing Australian troops from Vietnam, and abolishing tertiary education fees. His government established Medibank (the precursor to Medicare), introduced the Racial Discrimination Act that finally ended the White Australia policy, created legal aid, established land rights for Indigenous Australians, introduced no-fault divorce, legislated equal pay for women, and dramatically expanded federal funding for schools and universities. The Fraser conservative government managed to wind back some of these measures (Medicare was almost eliminated, for example) but not many.

The Hawke-Keating government, gaining office as the neo-liberal counter-revolution become dominant, reversed the work of previous Labor governments in some areas, such as privatisation and deregulation Butit carried on the progressive agend in other areas, including the establishment of Medicare on a permanent footing, the extension of superannuation to the entire workforce, and reconciliation with indigenous Australian. Whatever the direction of movement, there was no doubt that Labor continued to see itself as the party of initiative. Nearly thirty years after its defeat, the Hawke-Keating era is still seen by many as the classic period of reforming government.

Even during the chaotic Rudd-Gillard years (2007-2013), Labor achieved transformative reforms Rudd’s achievements were both symbolic (the National Apology to the Stolen Generations) and practical (the GFC stimulus and the National Broadband Network). Gillard’s government introduced the National Disability Insurance Scheme, perhaps Labor’s greatest social reform since Medicare. legislated carbon pricing, implemented the Gonski education funding reforms, established Australia’s first paid parental leave scheme, introduced plain packaging for cigarettes, and launched the royal commission into institutional child abuse.

In opposition after the disastrous defeat of 2013, Labor continued to drive the policy debate. Bill Shorten’s campaigns in 2016 and 2019 offered substantive progressive platforms. His proposals to reform negative gearing and franking credits directly addressed housing affordability and tax fairness, threatening entrenched interests. He campaigned on ambitious climate targets and a genuine transition to renewable energy. His tax reform agenda sought to make Australia’s system more progressive and equitable.

Labor drew the lesson that bold reform loses elections. But this conclusion reflected a fundamental misreading of Shorten’s defeats. His policies were economically sound and addressed real problems. The narrow loss stemmed from Shorten’s personal unpopularity, poor campaign execution, and Queensland’s particular hostility to change, exacerbated by the disastrous intervention of Bob Brown’s Stop Adani convoy (has there even been a “convoy” protest that’s been other than counterproductive?). The fact that all the polls herded together with a prediction of a narrow win increased the shock of arising from a narrow less. The tragedy is that Labor abandoned policy ambition altogether rather than ditching a few unpopular policies and trying again..

The personal role of Anthony Albanese was crucial here and remains central to our understanding of the issues. Even before the 2019 election, Albanese was positioning himself as the rightwing alternative to Shorten. His factional history as the leader of the NSW “Hard Left” in the 1990s gave him the cover he needed here.His [dominance over Labor’s factions](https://theconversation.com/albaneses-small-target-strategy-may-give-labor-a-remarkable-victory-or-yet-more-heartbreak-166752) reflects this calculation: the Left has been neutered by their own leader’s rightward stance, while the Right has been co-opted by a leader who governs like them while retaining Left credentials. A different leader, like Jim Chalmers, might do a bit more, but that remains to be seen.

Labor’s record in office since 2022 speaks for itself, or rather, its silence speaks volumes. With a handful of exceptions, the Albanese government has done little more than implement, with tweaks the appallingly bad policies inherited from nine years of LNP government, several of which were yet to be implemented when Labor took office. Labor’s defence policy is centred on Morrison’s AUKUS agreement, its tax policy a slightly modified version of Morrison’s three-stage program, its climate policy a modification of Abbott’s Safeguard Mechanism, its higher education policy the consolidation of Tehan’s appalling “Job Ready Graduates” system.

The thin record of Labor’s own policies is also instructive. Before the 2022 election, the promises that most excited its supporters were the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF), the National Anti-Corruption Commission and the Voice to Parliament, a revived and reformed ATSIC which would be entrenched in the Constitution. HAFF was, and remains, a jury-rigged mess, yet to construct a single house. The NACC has been notable only for its own scandals.

The Voice referendum, always facing long odds, was doomed by Albanese’s refusal to explain how it would work (the infamous “details”). The reason, I believe, was that Albanese was unwilling to admit that it would fill much the same role as ATSIC, and would face the same rightwing attacks, as indeed it did.

On the original “three-term” theory put forward by Albanese’s advocates, the caution of the first term in office was supposed to cement Labor’s hold on office, laying the ground for transformative change in the second and third terms. The 2025 election did more than cement Labor’s position, it buried the opposition under thick layers of concrete. But the glacial pace of reform seen in the first time has now frozen into solid immobility. Even broadly popular proposals like a ban on gambling ads have been forgotten.

And even where action can’t be avoided, Labor is still deferring to the LNP. Rather than reach an agreement with the Greens, correctly recognised as Labor’s true enemy, the preferred approach for legisation is to reach a “bipartisan” agreement with the LNP. From an initially centrist position, the result is a centre-right legislative program.

Nothing lasts forever. As Wayne Swan recently conceded, Labor’s win in 2025 was “wide but shallow”. Not only was the primary vote low, but enthusiasm among its supporters has dwindled to nothing. Swan’s closing reference to the need for Labor to mobilise “Activists, organisers and agitators who are active and more engaged with their local communities” is an implicit concession that activists and organisers no longer see the Labor party as a vehicle for positive change. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/albanese-s-election-win-wide-but-shallow-labor-president-s-frank-admission-20250921-p5mwqh.html

Returning to Hancock’s characterisation of Australian politics, Labor is now, above all, the party of resistance, fighting off both the populist right and its former activist base, now to be found with the Greens and community independents. The parties of resistance have held office most of the time since Australian federation, but their adherents can point to little in their history of which they can be particularly proud.

A couple of notes on this piece

1. Back in the paleolithic era of blogging (circa 2003), I used to call Tim Dunlop my “blogtwin” since he and I regularly posted similar ideas. That’s continued into the Substack era, as you can see in this excellent piece

Labor as the party of resistance2. I’ve experimented with  Genspark AI in preparing this piece. I first set up an agent trained on my own work to write in an approximation of my own style. Then I told it to write a draft – this part of the package appears to be a front end to OpenAI’s Deep Research. The “John Quiggin agent” did an OK job, better than most of the political commentariat, but I didn’t use much of what it produced. OTOH, I got some useful lists of policy actions and some links I hadn’t seen.

Labor looks like becoming the “natural party of government”, but in doing so, it is abandoning its traditional role as the party of initiative. In this post, I’ll discuss the first of these points

Labor as the natural party of government

Prediction in politics is always tricky, but it seems fair to say that Anthony Albanese is well on the way to realising his stated goal of making Labor the “natural party of government” in Australia. Assuming a continuation of the current party system, that leaves the LNP as a party of protest, the B-team which is elected only when Labor has been in too long, or stumbles really badly.

Indeed, this has arguably been the case for some time at the state level. The LNP has been out of office almost continuously since 2000 in Queensland, South Australia,Victoria, and the ACT. It took the truly spectacular corruption and incompetence of NSW Labor to give the LNP three terms there. In WA, they managed two terms on the back of Alan Carpenter’s bizarre decision to readmit allies of the notorious Brian Burke to the ministry.

Federally, however, the Liberals have been competitive until recently. Although it never seemed likely that they could win a majority at the 2025 election, a minority LNP government seemed possible until quite near election day. The disastrous outcome reflected two main factors. First, having campaigned against Albanese’s Voice referendum on the content-free but almost invariably successful slogan “If you don’t know, vote NO’, the LNP convinced themselves they had tapped the support of a silent majority of anti-woke Australians. Then, the horrific advent of the Trump regime made support for Trumpist policies untenable, a fact that was only realised too late.

But the result has only reinforced the shift that was already underway from rightwing neoliberalism to Trumpism. Neoliberalism in the Liberal Party was represented almost entirely by representatives of and candidates for metropolitan seats, nearly all of which have been lost to Labor and independent candidates. The result is a party whose members typical voters increasingly resemble those of One Nation – aggrieved low education voters from peri-urban and regional Australia. Having gained control of the party, it seems unlikely that they will hand it back to the urban upper-middle class that previously dominated it. That leaves the Liberals and Nationals fighting with One Nation and other rightwing parties for perhaps 40 per cent of the electorate.

Labor hasn’t gained the support of the remaining 60 per cent, but it doesn’t need to. The distance between the Greens (and, to a lesser extent, progressive independents) on one side and LNP/ONP on the other is such that Labor will usually get second preferences from both. So Labor will win unless its candidate finishes third in the first preference count or else so far behind that that the inevitable leakage of preferences is enough to produce a majority for the initial leader (or of course, where a non-Labor candidate wins a first-round majority, but that’s rare these days.

In the context of a single-member electorate, the usual outcome is the best reflection of the preferences of voters. If a Labor candidate beats, the LNP on preferences, that’s because a majority of voters preferred Labor to the LNP. And since the LNP candidate’s preferences would also have flowed to Labor, a different majority would have preferred Labor to Greens in a two-candidate race. In the jargon of voting theory, Labor is the Condorcet winner.

The difficulties arise when this outcome is repeated over many electorates. The effect of a single-member system is to magnify majorities, producing parliaments that are quite unrepresentative of the voters.

As we have seen, Labor can win a comfortable House of Representatives majority with 35 per cent first preference support, and could probably form a government even with a vote as low as 30 per cent, and the support of a few independents.

Fortunately for Australian democracy, the Senate is elected on a proportional representation basis, meaning that Labor can’t just push legislation through regardless of the merits. A shift to PR in the House of Representatives would be highly desirable, but it won’t happened until Labor loses its majority and (given that independents depend on localised support) probably not even then.

From Pearls and Irritations

The culmination of Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK was a press conference at which both American and British leaders waved pieces of paper, containing an agreement that US firms would invest billions of dollars in Britain.

The symbolism was appropriate, since a central element of the proposed investment bonanza was the construction of large numbers of nuclear reactors, of a kind which can appropriately be described as “paper reactors”.

The term was coined by US Admiral Hyman Rickover, who directed the original development of nuclear powered submarines.

Hyman described their characteristics as follows:

1. It is simple.

2. It is small.

3. It is cheap.

4. It is light.

5. It can be built very quickly.

6. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”)

7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components.

8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

But these characteristics were needed by Starmer and Trump, whose goal was precisely to have a piece of paper to wave at their meeting.

The actual experience of nuclear power in the US and UK has been an extreme illustration of the difficulties Rickover described with “practical” reactors. These are plants distinguished by the following characteristics:

1. It is being built now.

2. It is behind schedule

3. It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem.

4. It is very expensive.

5. It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems.

6. It is large.

7. It is heavy.

8. It is complicated.

The most recent examples of nuclear plants in the US and UK are the Vogtle plant in the US (completed in 2024, seven years behind schedule and way over budget) and the Hinkley C in the UK (still under construction, years after consumers were promised that that they would be using its power to roast their Christmas turkeys in 2017). Before that, the VC Summer project in North Carolina was abandoned, writing off billions of dollars in wasted investment.

The disastrous cost overruns and delays of the Hinkley C project have meant that practical reactor designs have lost their appeal. Future plans for large-scale nuclear in the UK are confined to the proposed Sizewell B project, two 1600 MW reactors that will require massive subsidies if anyone can be found to invest in them at all. In the US, despite bipartisan support for nuclear, no serious proposals for large-scale nuclear plants are currently active. Even suggestions to resume work on the half-finished VC Summer plant have gone nowhere.

Hope has therefore turned to Small Modular Reactors. Despite a proliferation of announcements and proposals, this term is poorly understood.

The first point to observe is that SMRs don’t actually exist. Strictly speaking, the description applies to designs like that of NuScale, a company that proposes to build small reactors with an output less than 100 MW (the modules) in a factory, and ship them to a site where they can be installed in whatever number desired. The hope is that the savings from factory construction and flexibility will offset the loss of size economies inherent in a smaller boiler (all power reactors, like thermal power stations, are essentially heat sources to boil water). Nuscale’s plans to build six such reactors in the US state of Utah were abandoned due to cost overruns, but the company is still pursuing deals in Europe.

Most of the designs being sold as SMRs are not like this at all. Rather, they are cut-down versions of existing reactor designs, typically reduced from 1000MW to 300 MW. They are modular only in the sense that all modern reactors (including traditional large reactors) seek to produce components off-site. It is these components, rather than the reactors, that are modular. For clarity, I’ll call these smallish semi-modular reactors (SSMRs). Because of the loss of size economies, SMRs are inevitably more expensive per MW of power than the large designs on which they are based.

Over the last couple of years, the UK Department of Energy has run a competition to select a design for funding. The short-list consisted of four SSMR designs, three from US firms, and one from Rolls-Royce offering a 470MW output. A couple of months before Trump’s visit, Rolls-Royce was announced as the winner. This leaves the US bidders out in the cold.

So, where will the big US investments in SMRs for the UK come from? There have been a “raft” of announcements promising that US firms will build SMRs on a variety of sites without any requirement for subsidy. The most ambitious is from Amazon-owned X-energy, which is suggesting up to a dozen “pebble bed” reactors. The “pebbles” are mixtures of graphite (which moderates the nuclear reaction) and TRISO particles (uranium-235 coated in silicon carbon), and the reactor is cooled by a gas such as nitrogen.

Pebble-bed reactor designs have a long and discouraging history dating back to the 1940s. The first demonstration reactor was built in Germany in the 1960s and ran for 21 years, but German engineering skills weren’t enough to produce a commercially viable design. South Africa started a project in 1994 and persevered until 2010, when the idea was abandoned..Some of the employees went on to join the fledgling X-energy, founded in 2009. As of 2025, the company is seeking regulatory approval for a couple of demonstrator projects in the US.

Meanwhile, China completed a 10MW prototype in 2003 and a 250MW demonstration reactor, called HTR-PM in 2021. Although HTR-PM100 is connected to the grid, it has been an operational failure with availability rates below 25%. A 600MW version has been announced, but construction has apparently not started.

When this development process started in the early 20th century, China’s solar power industry was non-existent. China now has more than 1000 Gigawatts of solar power installed. New installations are running at about 300 GW a year, with an equal volume being produced for export. In this context, the HTR-PM is a mere curiosity.

This contrast deepens the irony of the pieces of paper waved by Trump and Starmer. Like the supposed special relationship between the US and UK, the paper reactors that have supposedly been agreed on are a relic of the past. In the unlikely event that they are built, they will remain a sideshow in an electricity system dominated by wind, solar and battery storage.