When a high-powered group of Americans joined a swag of influential Australians for a three-day conclave in Adelaide this week, it was a bit like a wedding and a funeral.

The Aussies broadly were content with the state of our democracy, even celebrating it; the Americans were mourning the passing of theirs.

Illustration by Simon LetchCredit:

“There’s an enormous amount of trepidation about the impact of [US President Donald] Trump on our institutions and guardrails,” a former chair of the US Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, tells me as Trump’s takeover of policing in a second major city took effect. First LA, now Washington.

“What’s unspoken,” adds Steele, one of the delegates to the annual Australian American Leadership Dialogue, “is the impact on our identity as Americans. Not just as a global presence, but that swagger we had about this being the land of the free and home of the brave and a place where you could achieve your dream. Now it’s ‘only if you check the boxes we want you to check’. Listening to you guys [Australians], I was thinking to myself, ‘Why can’t we have normal politics, why do we have this crazy stuff?’”

One of the Australian delegates, Malcolm Turnbull, was particularly struck by the gloom among the Americans – to the point where, at one dinner session, he turned to humour to lighten the funereal mood. It didn’t work.

The dialogue’s sessions are off the record to invite frankness, but, speaking outside the forum, Turnbull tells me: “The Australians were much more optimistic about their democracy than the Americans were about their own. And the South Australians, in particular, had reason to be in good cheer.”

SA Premier Peter Malinauskas: “We were first in the world to institute the secret ballot”, in 1856. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Indeed, the premier, Labor’s Peter Malinauskas, astonished some of the Americans and educated some of the Aussies, too, when he laid out South Australia’s litany of democratic innovations – some historical, some very current.

“This is the home of liberal democracy,” he was audacious enough to claim. Of course, the philosophical and intellectual foundations were laid long before the state existed, but South Australia can legitimately boast, as Malinauskas does, that: “This is where the universal franchise started, in 1894 – we were the first jurisdiction in the world to allow women........

© WA Today