Nations, like ordinary citizens, from time to time need to have their health checked. Who better to consult than Dr Hippocrates and his humours? In the period before Tony Abbott's deposition the choleric element dominated in Australia, full of sound and fury. This has been followed by the preponderance of the sanguine humour, expressing itself in that sunny optimism that makes light of problems.
But more recent events suggest that the humours are again in chronic imbalance. The intransigent and brutal treatment of people, including women and children, due to be returned to Nauru, is not unexpected. It confirms the same readiness to exclude people from the protection of the law and to give untrammelled power to the executive that characterised previous governments.
The choleric humour again predominated in government, although in the populace the automatic shrug of the shoulders may suggest an imbalance of the phlegmatic.
The decision of the CSIRO head to cut its research capacity to monitor climate change and to focus on mitigation, as well as the entrepreneurial language in which the decision was announced, shocked many scientists, who insisted that effective mitigation depended on knowledge.
Government silence on the issue confirmed that after the commitments made last year concern for the environment will now yield to business as usual. Such loss of short term memory and lack of responsibility may indicate the preponderance of the sanguine.
The deal done to eliminate minor parties from the Senate was a predictable response from the larger parties to protect their interests. These interests were already defended by the identification of parties on the ballot paper and in the provisions for public funding. The independent senators had been important in rejecting legislation that did not serve the common good.
Like the bottle of Johnny Walker discovered in the hospital bed of a recovering alcoholic, this narrow focus on immediate self-interest to the neglect of a larger reality suggests the predominance of the melancholic humour.
These examples suggest that the core weakness in the Australian constitution has not been removed with the accession of Malcolm Turnbull. It supports the diagnosis that Australian political life is an ethics free zone.
This does not imply that politicians individually do not consider the ethical dimension of the daily decisions they make in their lives. Nor paradoxically does it suggest that no ethical framework guides political decisions.
In fact they are controlled by the ethical principle that the end always justifies the means, and that the