Survivors of cyclones and hurricanes talk of a surprising, almost preternatural calm in the eye of the storm.

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Maybe we're there now, with things becoming wilder again this week as prices gallop and mortgage payments chase them to an 18-year high.

Economically speaking, getting to the other side of this tempest will be rough and prolonged. Politically however, the climate - as distinct from the weather - may be improving as exhausted voters assess the moral and institutional damage of the past decade and pause to count the thin achievements of indignant fringe politics around the world.

What they see is a whole lot of nothing.

Amid the institutional debris, the tattered playbook of populist nationalism has been blown open for all to see - a shouty one-page manual for acquiring unprecedented concentrations of power and wealth. To wit, ours. Whether it was clutched by Hungary's brutish authoritarian Viktor Orban to create his famed "illiberal democracy", Brazil's fast-scarpering nepo-baby strongman, Flavio Bolsonaro, or Serbia's Aleksandar Vucic, ordinary citizens are increasingly recognising that they'd been played. For all its gestural empathy, ultra-nationalism has left them worse off. Invariably, it sees public freedoms withdrawn and private oligarchs enriched, protected.

Populist windbags are still around of course, preaching their counterfeit oneness with the left-behind, and some may yet make electoral gains.

Looming state elections in Victoria later this month and in NSW in March 2027 could bring parliamentary progress to One Nation. Whether it proves durable, though, is another question.

In the "garden state", One Nation preferences seem certain to help end an unpopular Labor government and install a Liberal-National executive, probably as a majority operation. This is a marked turnaround for a shambolic show considered........

© Canberra Times