We’ve reached a perverse moment. Things are only going to get worse

October 9, 2026 — 5:00am

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This week it’s immigration. Last week, inflation and interest rates. The week before, the existential threat of AI. These issues are never neatly confined to a single political week, of course. They don’t come and go away. They’re more like the clamour of an unruly classroom: always rumbling away, driving the background noise from which there is no respite, occasionally piercing the din to demand attention like fingernails down the blackboard. But look at them all at once, and you see why we have the political mood we do: fevered, anxious, tumultuous. Desperate, really.

That’s because none of these is a discrete issue. They are instead wickedly integrated, such that they crash into one another, each demanding a solution that has a real risk of making things worse. I don’t mean to say politics was ever neat, or issues hermetically sealed. I mean only to say we’ve approached a critical point where the trade-offs seem intolerable. And that shows up politically in voters’ desire for constant change.

Let’s start with inflation. It’s about the worst economic problem a government can have because the responses we demand either make the problem worse and more enduring, or plunge us into acute misery. We demand cost-of-living relief from government, which is inflationary. Or we demand reduced government spending – though very rarely by specifying the cuts – which will almost certainly deny people cherished services. The biggest growth areas of government spending have been the NDIS, health, aged care and childcare. If........

© The Sydney Morning Herald