You could be forgiven for thinking that there is a general pall of weariness across Western democracies. The continuing aftershocks of the late-century push for liberalisation and — more recently — the global financial crisis has bred generations of dislocated voters who seek answers outside of the limited solutions presented by centrist governance.
This provides ample opportunity for true progressive change, the signs of which were seen first across Europe and Latin America, and now the United States and the United Kingdom.
Jeremy Corbyn led an insurgent socialist movement from within the UK Labour Party that seems more at home with Clement Atlee's postwar program than the liberalism of Blairism.
In the US, Bernie Sanders seeks to rejuvenate the New Deal model of labour-centred consensus, which is almost entirely atrophied in the midst of corporate Third Way political economy.
Where's Australia? Nowhere to be seen, really. As Jason Wilson writes over at The Guardian, Australian politics is 'reactive and defensive', abrogating itself of any responsibility for real structural change in favour of keeping our post-GFC prosperity stable.
We face similar problems — the Australian Council of Social Service's 2015 report on inequality found a trend of growing wealth disparity not unlike that of other Western nations — but it's hard to imagine a radically progressive candidate emerging here.
There are, I think, a few reasons for this.
In both the Corbyn and Sanders campaigns a populist progressive movement found its roots in the dominant centre-left party. Corbyn came from within UK Labour and Sanders, though nominally an independent, is running for president on the Democratic ticket and has caucused with Democrats in the Senate for some time.
There have been progressive figures with platforms outside the status quo in the Australian Labor Party — Melissa Parke and Doug Cameron come to mind — but it is near-impossible to imagine them finding greater success within the hermetic confines of Labor's factional warzone.
And the Greens, the third force in Australian politics, aren't likely to buck the status quo. If anything, their messaging under Richard Di Natale hews closer to consensus governance than it ever has before.
Some of the leftward push globally, especially in the US, hinges on the corrupting influence of money in politics. Sanders rails against the enormous lobbying money enabled by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which effectively unbounded the amount of cash that could be poured into political campaigns.
Donations have at best an ancillary role in