Navigational Challenges

How do we thread the needle to effectively navigate the socio-cultural and political transition in which we Australians find ourselves? The politics of division is ramping up, with a focus on the energy transition and climate change and anti-immigration rhetoric in attempts to ‘weaponise’ the reality of the rising cost of living, particularly for low-income families and young adults. We see this playing out right across Europe, the US and Australia. Meanwhile we face:

• Shocks to democratic systems of governance, exemplified by President Trump’s America First, and the lurch to an ethno-nationalist rejection of democracy across much of Europe and the UK, and the collapse of the Western liberal world order
• Climate change impacts on human settlements linked to extreme weather events, changing patterns of agriculture, energy costs in the need to transition away from fossil-fuel based energy systems
• AI technological revolution that threatens the nature of ‘work’ as the social organising principle of modern life, through robotisation and LLMs, and a new wave of technological warfare
• The corruption of the information ecosystem, upon which we depend to discern the nature of truth about the world around us, by profit-driven algorithmic logic to maximise advertising revenue and platform dominance, by leveraging human fear, confusion and anger.
• The Housing Crisis resulting from the financialisation of housing as an asset class, rather than as a means of personal and family shelter as a basic human right.

Collectively, we of the ‘Global North’—ie, the rich countries of the so-called developed world, are not doing well: the centre is not holding, and resentment and rage is building with ‘passionate intensity’ fuelled by our technology-transformed information ecosystem.

A ‘Third Coming’?

We are being called to remember William Yeats’ poem, ‘The Second Coming’, as he contemplated the destructive forces of WWI and the wave of the first Industrial Revolution began its disruptive path.

Today are we facing the ‘Third Coming’ of apocalyptic Christian thinking? Not in the saviour Jesus, but with climate change, the AI Revolution, and the new era of multi-polar technological militarisation threatening ‘life as we have known it’?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

It took WWII to fully turn the ship of Western civilisation around to entrench democratic liberalism as a new civilisational world order that sort to normalise ‘universal human rights’ through a series of global institutions under the umbrella of the United Nations.

In the process, the dominance of the Anglosphere was maintained despite the collapsing power of the British Empire, as the baton of ‘empire’ was passed to the US, riding high on the next wave of technological innovation and transnational capitalism. But we must remember that in echoes of today’s America First agenda, the US was late to the support Western allied forces, and only after they were pulled into the war when Japan bombed their naval bases in Hawaii. A non-white nation daring to take on the mighty ‘white’ West.

Passionate Intensity

History’s Lessons

Hitler and Mussolini were full of passionate intensity, as were the Japanese nationalists, along with Russia’s Stalin. All engaged in vicious annihilation campaigns against the enemy ‘other’—on the basis of their ethnicity, religion or lack of ideological purity.  In the process millions were gassed in the Nazi death camps that shocked European ideas about any claims to ‘civilisational ethics’; millions died in Stalin’s purge of his political enemies, and millions died in the desperate efforts of both Russia and China to force the pace of industrial development and collectivisation of property and labour. The Japanese demonstrated their own passionate intensity in their practice of aerial suicide bombing and fanatical loyalty to their Emperor.

The Americans, full of their own passionate intensity were determined to demonstrate their technological might. They released not one, but two atom bombs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the name of forcing an unconditional surrender from the Japanese Emperor.

Today’s forces of Passionate Intensity

One again we face the rising voices of passionate intensity threatening havoc in the world:

• The assertive voice of Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ and the MAGA movement
• The rising nationalism of China and Hindu nationalism of India
• The genocidal aggression of the Israeli State towards Palestinians
• The shrill voices of ethno-Christian nationalism—including from the Tech Bros of Silicon Valley, intent on destroying the last constraints on them from  liberal humanism in democratic systems of governance in Western democracies,
• Russia’s attempts to rebuild its empire in Europe on the back of a ‘mafia-state’, with secret ties into Trump’s financial interests that both threatens US democracy and the future of Europe.
• The genocidal civil wars raging in Africa among remnants of ISIS factions, the secondary market for the First World armaments industry, ramping up with its next technological revolution.

Lacking All Conviction

When we consider the ’best who lack all conviction’, we can see the failure of the West’s intellectual class and business elites to adequately address growing wealth inequality that is feeding right wing popularism and vengeful rage, as promised dreams of ever rising prosperity evaporate.

The attempt to prosecute liberal humanism as the face of modernity was like an addict, hiding the evidence of their drug and alcohol abuse. The other ‘hidden’ face of humanistic modernity was coloniality: the brutal exploitation of the marginalised ‘other’ through colonisation and epistemic violence, to be followed by transnational capitalism in the search for cheap labour and unregulated exploitation of the Earth’s natural resources that has built the wealth of modern life.

The result was global capitalism, which following the COVID epidemic, has turned the last vestiges of neo-liberal economic promises to toxic dust.

While the world’s universities churned out huge volumes of research papers demonstrating the destruction of the forces of coloniality, even giving voice to the marginalised to talk back to the assumptions of modernity, they have also churned out the business graduates, economists, lawyers, engineers and scientists who have served the intensification of extractive capitalism. And continue to do so.

The populist rage of the West’s ‘intolerables’ is the direct result of the hypocrisy of Western professional elites: talking humanistic values, while pursuing the neo-liberal economic hubris that market forces would grow the pie of economic wealth so that ALL would benefit on its rising tide.

The result has been evident for years, yet continues to be denied. The working class and much of the middle class have been betrayed. Most have been left marooned in the brackish backwash of financial precarity, falling health, housing insecurity, communal violence and frustrated rage. Ambitions for their children now ash in their mouths.

A rage now turned on the immigrants fleeing war, drought, political repression and floods in search of the ‘promised land’ of prosperity in the West, the ‘American Dream’ pumped out through the global media industry, where even the poorest African and Arab has some sort of smartphone, tethering them to the West’s propaganda about its material wealth.

The Future of Democracy in Australia

In response to these threats to Western civilisational liberal democracies, the 2025 Boyer Lectures chose as its theme, Australia: A Radical Experiment in Democracy with not one keynote speaker, but a selection of five speakers tasked with discussing the strengths and challenges of Australia’s form of democracy: our compulsory and preferential voting system, and our independent Electoral Commission which manages all elections, which have tended to skew voting towards the centre of politics, rather than stoke division. And which in the 2025 national election resulted in an historic majority for the ALP, and an historic defeat for the Liberal Party, as a potential party of government into the future.

Australia is not immune to the international forces tearing at the fabric of the liberal democratic world order:

• the rise of populist ethno-nationalism across the US and Western Europe, as well as India and China
• the reckoning with the underbelly of liberal humanism and the economic wealth of the ‘Global North’ that rested on colonial exploitation and ethno-marginalisation of Indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems
• the collapse of trust in a rapidly changing information ecosystem under algorithmic platform capitalism.

01 | Professor Justin Wolfers: Australia is freaking amazing

The Keynote Boyer Lecturer for 2025 is Justin Wolfers, Professor of Economics and Public Policy from the University of Michigan and visiting Professor at the University of NSW talks about the unique strengths of Australia’s democratic institutional arrangements.

02 | Hon John Anderson AC: Our civilisational moment

In the second Boyer Lecture for 2025, the Hon John Anderson, AC, farmer, grazier and former deputy prime minister of Australia, takes a sweeping look over our history, eulogising the Menzies legacy of social cohesion (but under the White Australia Policy) and concluding that the liberal world order that has so far defined us, is ending.

03 | Larissa Behrendt: Justice, ideas, inclusion

Larissa Behrendt, AO a Euahleyai/Gamillaroi woman and Distinguished Professor of Law and Inaugural Chair in Indigenous Research at the University of Technology, is passionate about the Australian courts’ record of upholding democracy, reminds us of the unfinished business of reconciliation with First Nations peoples, and suggests we look to Indigenous systems of governance being developed in Victoria and South Australia as part of new Treaty negotiations.

04 | Amelia Lester: AI on Australia’s terms

In the fourth Boyer Lecture for 2025, Amelia Lester, deputy editor at Foreign Policy Magazine in Washington, explores why it is so difficult to have meaningful discussions about the possible repercussions of Artificial Intelligence in all our lives, as we face the challenges of surveillance platform capitalism, the socially disruptive robotisation of the workforce, and the end of trust in our information ecosystem

05 | James Curran: Trump’s gift

In our fifth and final Boyer Lecture for 2025, James Curran, professor of modern history at the University of Sydney, analyses our partnership with the world’s most powerful democracy, the USA, addressing options for how we can deal with the end of the American century as the US pivots to an aggressive America First agenda, and Australia repositions itself in a multi-polar world of increasing militarisation and instability.

The Summer of Discontent

As Australia’s politicians depart national and state parliaments to take their summer break, and the rest of us try to wind back our anxieties and states of exhaustion at the increasingly fractious nature of community politics, we wonder what 2026 will bring us?

Will the centre hold? Will we be able to thread the needle of our various discontents, and escape the political maelstrom engulfing the US, UK, Europe, the Middle East and other parts of the Americas?

Many of us are breathing a sigh of relief that the Australian Government managed to finally pass its EPBC Act in a deal with the Greens. As economist Ken Henry says:

Through the new EPBC Act 2025, the lungs of the Earth, a lifeboat against climate change, a filter against sediment destroying the Great Barrier Reef and a haven for wildlife will be provided real protection, while incentives will be provided to support a modern forestry industry based on plantations. 

Writing into law an acknowledgment that environmental protection and biodiversity conservation necessarily underpin everything else, and that they must therefore have primacy, is a profound achievement. An unprecedented bequest to future generations.

Let’s hope the new EPBC Standards live up to this claim.

Meanwhile the Coalition is increasingly pivoting to desperate right wing populism in competition with the appeal of One Nation to anxious older voters, who were brought up in the heady days of the White Australia Policy. This was not repealed till 1973 when Australia was forced to begin facing the reality of its multicultural future, and the demands of reconciliation with the ‘white’ colonial impact on Indigenous Australians.

As President Trump ramps up his anti-immigration campaign by reaching out to like-minds in Australia, the UK and Europe, and the idea of ‘Australian values’ is once again politicised to create cultural division, we can only take comfort from the fact that unlike the UK and Europe, in Australia younger voters are turning away from this cultural warfare, and as the last election results demonstrate, the suburbs of our large cities with their multicultural communities well understand the politics of dog whistling.

The Weather Bureau tells us we face a hot summer of increasing catastrophic fire risk, which ensures that the challenge of climate change will once again become front and centre of mind across large parts of Australia.

As we face the consumer and emotional pressures of Christmas, may we all settle down into a life of simplicity and support for peaceful community wellbeing, put our social media-fed echo chambers aside, and look after one another.