Political instability only ever feels inevitable in retrospect. After the shock, the increments that led to it seem more obvious. The reality is that there are always signs; there are always people who point them out. But we are hard-wired to believe we are going to be fine. I fear that this is the case for Australia now.
It has struck me as a bit odd that we have mostly withstood anti-establishment agitation, as seen in countries like Brazil, the Philippines and the United Kingdom. It is not like our political class have not earned similar scorn.
This summer, the Centrelink automated debt collection program, which generated incorrect claims at considerable scale and has caused needless distress, coincided with the latest scandal in parliamentary entitlements abuse. No one who is paying attention can miss the chasm between government and the governed.
A couple of things are probably insulating us from seismic shocks. For one, the self-nominated standard bearers for outsider politics are not yet competent, at least structurally. Unless Pauline Hanson gets her act together, then One Nation will continue to be defined by useless rogues and time-wasting debates.
This does not necessarily dilute her appeal in certain parts of the population, but the growing list of dubious former candidates does expose poor internal processes and the nature of that appeal. We can be relieved that that is the case so far. The non-electoral far-right, in addition, is splintered and confined to noxious comment threads, their rallies curbed by highly mobilised anti-fascist and anti-racist movements.
Our robust social protections may also be keeping populism from taking hold. It is not as easy to argue here, as has been the case elsewhere, that government thoroughly sucks — that it doesn't do anything for you. Things like Medicare, HECS, Newstart, child care benefits, raised tax-free threshold on income, age pension are increasingly indispensable in a period where accelerationists are using discontent as fuel.
But what if the optimism bias that kept most of us from anticipating the results of the Brexit referendum and the US election are now also in play in Australia? How long will current welfare architecture and the incompetence of nativists keep at bay the destabilising forces that have laid America so low, that so-called bastion of western democracy?
We should be worried more than ever that ministers still tinker with the services and benefits that people depend on, framing scarcity as a spending problem even