We’re pining for the ’90s. Yes, even its politics. Please explain

April 10, 2026 — 3:30pm

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

Save this article for later

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime.

Nineties nostalgia is very much in vogue. Inspired by the FX hit series Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette – a dramatisation of events leading up to the couple’s fatal plane crash in 1999 – Instagram and TikTok is awash with users pining for a world without Instagram and TikTok. The music. The fashions. Those halcyon days uninterrupted by doomscrolling, online influencers, AI slop, the manosphere or even email. No wonder the social media trend “Mum, what were you like in the 1990s?” has become a thing.

My sense has long been that warning lights were flashing by the time Sex and the City first aired in 1998, alerting us to our impending civilisational decline. Already by then, what Vanity Fair dubbed “the Tabloid Decade” had served up Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tapes, Tonya Harding, Anna Nicole Smith, Elizabeth Taylor’s marriage to her seventh husband, Larry Fortensky, the first accusations against Michael Jackson, John Wayne Bobbitt and his penis-severing wife, Lorena, and the OJ Simpson trial; not to mention the divorce of Donald and Ivana Trump and his affair with Marla Maples.

Yet the very fact that it was Trump’s marital difficulties that made front page news, rather than his deranged threats to bomb adversaries back to the Stone Age, only heightens the sense of wistfulness. This was the decade, after all, when so many were seduced by the magical thinking that history had not only ended but culminated in the triumph of liberal democracy.

Here in Australia, ’90s nostalgia goes beyond asking parents how it was possible to survive without mobile phones, the internet, WhatsApp groups or reels spruiking Korean skincare products. It has a political dimension. The energy shock has been cast as the crisis we had to have, a play obviously on then treasurer Paul Keating’s famed “the recession we had to have” dictum from November 1990 that became a spur for reform.

One Nation’s success in the recent South Australia state election, where it received more than 20 per cent of the primary vote, has drawn parallels with its breakthrough in the 1998 Queensland state election, when it last crossed that threshold in a state poll. When Sussan Ley was deposed as Liberal leader after just 276 days, we again reached back to the 1990s, and Alexander Downer’s troubled tenure of 252 days, for an ever shorter spell in charge.

Howard slams Albanese’s leadership, calls changes to gun laws a diversion

In the aftermath of the Bondi terrorist attack, when partisan fury erupted so quickly, many understandably wondered why the country could not revive the spirit of bipartisanship that followed the gun massacre in Port Arthur. John Howard, who signalled the start of political hostilities by assailing the government’s push for tighter gun laws as an “attempted diversion”, refused to grant Anthony Albanese the kind of grace period of which he was a beneficiary in 1996.

How both main parties must pine for the duopoly of the early ’90s, when Pauline Hanson was still running a fish-and-chip shop in Ipswich, when the Greens could still not muster a seat in the House of Representatives (their breakthrough came at the Cunningham byelection in 2002) and when the most prosperous suburbs in Melbourne and Sydney were blue-ribbon Liberal rather than teal.

What’s striking about the resurgence of One Nation is how the sources of discontent are much the same as they were in the ’90s, and how the themes of her notorious maiden speech to parliament still provide her libretto. Anti-multiculturalism, anti-globalisation, anti-establishment and anti-political correctness – or anti-woke, as it would be called today – remain Hansonism’s core themes.

“In real dollar terms, our standard of living has dropped over the past 10 years,” is a line from that incendiary Hanson speech in September 1996 that could be repurposed today. So, too: “I am fed up with being told, ‘This is our land.’ Well, where the hell do I go? I was born here, and so were my parents and children,” at a time when the hard and far right is targeting Welcome to Country ceremonies. Hanson has even embraced her “Please explain” query – that perplexed response to Tracey Curro’s question on 60 Minutes about xenophobia – which made her the figure of disparagement. Now, it’s the title of One Nation’s popular YouTube channel.

As in the ’90s, there are divisions within the Coalition about how to respond to her rise. New Nationals leader Matt Canavan has demonstrated more of a profile of courage than new Liberal leader Angus Taylor, just as Alexander Downer and Peter Costello were bolder in their condemnation of Hanson than John Howard, much to the then prime minister’s annoyance.

On the centre-left, too, there are back-to-the-future vibes. Anthony Albanese sees himself as a consensual leader in the mould of Bob Hawke. Jim Chalmers clearly believes Paul Keating – the subject of his doctoral thesis – personifies the true spirit of the reform era. Chalmers favours an overhaul of the tax system, which he believes is long overdue. After all, the last time a government delivered a major and durable reform came with the enactment of the A New Tax System (Goods and Services Tax) Act, which was passed during John Howard’s second term in June 1999.

The ’90s still cast a long shadow over federal politics. Culture-war skirmishes over reconciliation, republicanism and Australia’s place in the world are still delineated by the battle lines marked out during the 1990s struggle between Keatingism and Howardism over national identity. The origins of today’s small-target campaigns, and the timidity we now see, are found in John Hewson’s defeat in the unlosable election of 1993. “Fightback!”, the then Liberal leader’s 650-page policy manifesto, offered Paul Keating so many lines of attack.

Five Minutes with Fitz

I asked the treasurer if we were up the creek. Here’s what he told me

Peter FitzSimonsColumnist and author

“Australian politics, what were you like in the ’90s?” On both sides, it was bolder, braver, more ambitious, more bipartisan, more constructive and less captive to the hurtling news cycles and theatrical requirements of our online age. There was much to be said for analogue Australia.

Nick Bryant is the author of The Rise and Fall of Australia: How a Great Nation Lost Its Way and host of the History Never Ended Substack.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

© Brisbane Times