Australia is in a Truman Show election campaign. Both major parties are carefully, wilfully myopic. They direct our attention to details of domestic affairs as if Australia can carry on undisturbed. It’s an artificial reality in a contained environment.

The leaders occasionally acknowledge the larger world outside. Like the directors of The Truman Show, they can’t conceal that there is a reality beyond the sound stage of Truman Burbank’s idyllic village, but they prefer to avoid the fact that a historic upheaval is under way.

Illustration by Simon LetchCredit:

One consequence is that many of the programs and promises of the campaign will be unaffordable or irrelevant once the ads stop and the corflutes are packed away.

The election will have come and gone. And failed to brace Australia for the reality beyond.

It’s not that the Labor and Liberal offerings are necessarily bad or stupid. Many are positive, desirable, even admirable. They’re just inadequate. For instance, at the second leaders’ debate 10 days ago, the ABC’s David Speers said to Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton: “A lot of people say, where’s the serious reform?”

He asked each to name “the one big change you’d like to be remembered for?” Albanese’s answer: “We want the universal provision of affordable childcare so that it is as natural to have your child have access to childcare as it is to have access to the public health.”

And Dutton’s: “Energy is the economy.” He outlined his plan for an East Coast gas reserve to increase domestic supply. “It will help bring the cost pressures down across society.” And he cast ahead to his proposed nuclear energy vision.

Universal childcare and cheaper energy are fine ambitions, setting aside the specifics of how each proposes to achieve them. But they’re expensive and the federal budget already is in deficit.

Next week both parties are obliged to publish a reckoning of how they propose to pay for their many costly promises. So we’ll be able to see whether they’re affordable, right? Only in Truman terms. “The election,” says ANU economics professor Warwick McKibbin, “is surreal”.

“We are not realising that there’s a fundamental shift occurring in the global economy. We should be thinking about repositioning Australia for the next few decades, we have to rethink our geopolitical alliances and the economy,” he tells me from Washington, where he’s in demand as one of the world’s foremost economic modellers.

This election is like The Truman Show, untethered from reality.

“It’s really extraordinary watching the........

© The Sydney Morning Herald