Election 2025: in the hopes of kicking the can down the road.
An analysis of the clash between history, culture and geography
Context: On 12 and 13 May, I participated in two events in Beijing in which the recent Australian federal election was the focus. One event was a forum hosted by the Beijing Club, a think tank focused on international relations. Scholars, commentators and journalists were involved. The second event was a forum hosted by the Australian Studies Centre at Beijing Foreign Studies University. I presented the keynote papers at both. Given the different surroundings for each event, the presentations addressed the issue of the Australian election and its implications for Australia, Australia-China relations and potential implications for regional and global dynamics from slightly different angles. What follows is the formal address prepared for the second event, which is a little more scholastic in tone.
Snapshot: In western parliamentary systems, each election is presented by the competing parties as one of the, if not ‘the’, most critical elections ever (or at least of an era). Australia is no different. Yet, in truth, the adage that the more things change the more they stay the same seems more appropriate once the dust of electioneering settles. Critical issues of national development are more often than not deferred. Elections as singular events invariably serve to disappoint. Yet, they punctuate wider historical forces and questions, which ultimately cannot be ignored forever. In this presentation, I explore the 2025 Australian election against a conjuncture of American-inspired instability and uncertainty as an inflection point in the longue duree dynamics of Australia’s unresolved struggles of bridging its historical and cultural predilections on the one hand, with the geo-economic realities of the present. As a case in point, the debate around AUKUS and Australia’s security relations is a symptom of this contradiction. Its resolution may come by way not so much of a definitive denouement but by way of a whimper, as the questions it poses are kicked down the road and in time are consumed by the unfolding of history.
Introduction
“Australians have chosen to face global challenges the Australian way”. These were the words of re-elected Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, to the crowd of cheering supporters on election night. He went on to say that the “people have made a clear choice”.
In some ways, the electoral outcome could not be clearer. Yet, in other ways, things are no clearer today than they were yesterday or indeed, a decade or two ago. There is a temptation to see each election as a defining moment, and in some ways they are; but in many other respects, they speak to a continuity of historical forces and dynamics, suggestive that perhaps we are better off understanding elections through the lens of ‘the more things change, they more they stay the same’.
The 2025 federal election delivered a decisive victory for the Labor Party, which secured a majority government with at least 93 out of 150 seats and a nationwide two-party preferred vote of ~53.5%. Its primary vote increased albeit modestly, which is also likely to see it increase its representation in the Senate to the extent that together with the Greens, it can pass any legislation it wishes. Yet, we also see other patterns sustain - namely the ongoing rise in non-major party allegiances, and the consolidation - for the time being at least - of an urban independent politics by way of the network of so-called Teal candidates.
For psephologists, this result will be parsed through the lens of campaign dynamics, marginal seat swings, and preference flows. Many will view the election as a re-arrangement of the so-called electoral pendulum, and pour over the details of where public opinion polls got things right or wrong. I have done my fair share of such analyses in times past, examining the distribution of the swing - statistically and geographically - exploring the demographic underpinnings of the much-sought-after ‘swinging voter’ in marginal seats that make or break elections.
But for historians, sociologists, political economists and geopolitical analysts, the event demands a wider reading, which steps back from the minutiae of campaigns and polling so that we can make sense of the event without the broader dynamics of how Australia continues to navigate through a shifting geopolitical, economic, and demographic terrain.
In what follows I try to bridge these worlds.
Drawing on Fernand Braudel’s tripartite temporal framework — the event, conjuncture, and longue durée — this essay situates the election outcome within a broader historical moment. It argues that Australia is confronting a layered and intertwined set of contradictions: between its longstanding alliance with a declining U.S. hegemon and its economic interdependence with a rising Asia; between a political economy exhibiting persistent signs of declining complexity and where wealth is built on financialised asset prices, and the growing cost-of-living crisis; and between the cultural persistence of a white settler imaginary and the demographic reality of a rapidly Asianising society. The question is whether Australia can evolve beyond the psychic confines of its “fear of abandonment” by a great transatlantic protector, and begin imagining a future shaped from within the region, rather than from across the ocean. In doing so, I hope to draw some threads together that link the dynamics of the event with the forces shaping the conjuncture, and ultimately pose questions about what it may all mean as far as the longue durée is concerned.
The Event: Electoral Realignment and the End of an Era?
The 2025 election was momentous in some fairly obvious ways. It was the first time since 1984 that a sitting Labor Prime Minister was returned. It is the first time for many generations that a second term government enjoys a larger majority in the House of Representatives than in the first time. It is the first time that an opposition leader has lost their own seat.The election is also noteworthy in some other respects.
The collapse of the Liberal-National Coalition’s primary vote across urban electorates, and the rising influence of multicultural communities, particularly Chinese-Australians, suggest a long-brewing demographic realignment may be emerging though its effects are likely to be highly concentrated geographically. Demographically, the Liberal-National Coalition seems increasingly concentrated amongst so-called ‘baby boomers’ - those born in the years after the second world war, with limited traction amongst Gen-X and Millennials. The Coalition also fared particularly poorly amongst women.
The Labor Party, despite facing economic headwinds and concerns about cost-of-living problems, positioned itself as a “safe pair of hands” amid global uncertainty. In contrast, the Coalition floundered. It flirted with Trumpian populism and cultural wars, a topic to which I will return. Its economic program was oddly centreed on a rejection of Labor’s tax cuts, and the rejection of renewable energy in favour of nuclear power. These were controversial and left open many questions just as communities across Australia were in search of assurances.
Perhaps most telling was the continued political rejection of racial dog whistles. Attempts to blame immigrants and foreign students for housing shortages fell flat in electorates increasingly shaped by diverse, multilingual, and globally connected communities. In this sense, the election event reveals not just a change in political fortunes, but perhaps - to some extent at least - a transformation in who determines them.
Menzies: A Microcosm Event
No single electorate captured the shifting dynamics of race, identity, and political allegiance more clearly than Menzies, a suburban seat in Melbourne's northeast named after Australia’s longest-serving prime minister. Historically a safe Liberal seat, Menzies is now emblematic of a new kind of political battleground — one shaped not just by income or ideology, but by ethnicity, belonging, and cultural respect.
Almost 29% of the Menzies electorate identify as Chinese, with over 16% speaking either Mandarin or Cantonese as their first language at home (9.4% and 7.0% respectively). This makes Menzies the first ranked nationally in terms of Chinese population.
In the final days of the campaign, Liberal deputy leader Jane Hume publicly accused Chinese-Australian booth workers handing out how-to-vote cards for the Labor Party of being potential Chinese spies. The comment, made with no evidence and under the shadow of long-standing China-scare politics, triggered an immediate backlash. On Chinese social media platforms such as WeChat, the news spread rapidly, galvanising anger and alienation among local Chinese-Australian communities.
Labor quickly seized on the moment, framing it as part of a broader pattern of racialised scapegoating by the Coalition. Community leaders condemned the remark as inflammatory and offensive. Many observers believe this single incident had a decisive effect in swaying Chinese-Australian voters — a significant demographic in Menzies — away from the Liberal incumbent.
While the Liberal Party had banked on appealing to anti-China sentiment as a wedge issue, it backfired spectacularly in electorates like Menzies. The result revealed a fundamental misreading of Australia's evolving multicultural landscape: what once may have passed as nationalist dog-whistling now registers as outright xenophobia in electorates where large segments of the population have direct connections to the countries being maligned.
Menzies, in this light, is not just an electoral footnote. It is a signal. The incident crystallised how deeply immigration, diaspora politics, and cultural recognition now matter, not at the margins, but at the centre of Australian urban and political life. It confirmed that electoral success in urban, multicultural Australia increasingly depends not just on economic policy or party loyalty, but on an affective politics that can mobilise senses of respect and inclusion.
The Waning Power of Race Envy and Culture Wars
The 2025 election also laid bare the diminishing returns of race-baiting politics in contemporary Australia, for the time being anyway. Alongside the misfire in Menzies, the Liberal Party attempted to rekindle the embers of resentment surrounding Indigenous recognition. In the final weeks of the campaign, party leaders suggested, often obliquely, sometimes explicitly, that a re-elected Labor government had a “secret plan” to legislate an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, despite the failure of the 2023 referendum.
The aim was clear: to provoke voter backlash and revive anxieties about national identity and the alleged privileging of minorities. It was a calculated appeal to residual “race envy,” a strategy with deep roots in Australian political history, from the dog-whistling of the Howard era to the more recent campaigns against refugees and multiculturalism.
But this time, the tactic fell flat.
Not only did the broader electorate appear unmoved by these cultural provocations; in some electorates they actively repelled voters, especially younger Australians, migrants, and urban professionals for whom these tactics appeared outdated, cynical, and deeply out of step with contemporary values. The result revealed a narrowing corridor for explicitly racialised electoral messaging.
To be sure, the deeper legacies of White Australia — as an ideological construct and political reflex — remain embedded in national life. Structural inequalities persist. Public discourse still struggles to centre Indigenous voices without backlash. But in the election at the very least, crude appeals to racial grievance failed to shape mainstream electoral outcomes. In short, the tools of the old culture wars were blunt.
The Conjuncture: Strategic Dependence and Economic Contradictions
Geopolitics: Between Empire and Region
The conjunctural environment in which the election occurred is defined by strategic volatility and a political economy that is increasingly drifting to being less and less complex, and where wealth is dependent on asset value growth. We can trace some of this to well before the global financial crisis of 2008, which laid bare the fragility of financialised political economies; and as far as complexity is concerned, these issues can be traced back to the days when Donald Horne wryly coined the term ‘lucky country’ to describe a country whose wealth was - at the time - grown on a sheep’s back, and latterly on the back of Australia’s abundance on natural resources.
The return of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency in early 2025, and the increasingly transactional and belligerent bent of American foreign policy, marked in particular by the imposition of so-called ‘reciprocal tariffs’ on ‘friend and foe’ alike, has reignited long-standing anxieties about the durability of U.S. security guarantees. Australia, a long-time sub-imperial ally of the U.S., finds itself caught between loyalty to the Atlantic alliance and growing regional scepticism of American militarism.
Key Southeast Asian nations, including Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, have expressed unease about AUKUS and the militarisation of the Indo-Pacific. While Canberra presents AUKUS as a stabilising alliance, its regional neighbours see it as an escalation. Australia risks being seen not as a regional partner but as a proxy power, importing geopolitical rivalry into a region that prefers balance, dialogue, and economic integration.
Meanwhile, Australia’s largest trading partner, China, remains central to its economic fortunes. Efforts to decouple or hedge against Chinese trade dependence are constrained by geography and comparative advantage. In the wake of the pandemic, the then Morrison Government initiated a Productivity Commission investigation into supply chain dependencies, with the view of rationalising its own version of ‘friend shoring’ and decoupling. After 18 months or so, the Commission returned a report that showed that aside from a handful of products, Australia was not inordinately dependent and at risk of exposure to China’s supply chain. Further, the analysis confirmed that Australia’s best interests from a supply chain security perspective was to promote and contribute to a multilateral global trading order rather than pursue high risk ‘friend-shoring’, ‘near-shoring’ or ‘decoupling’ policies.
Australia’s foreign and defence policy is currently at a strategic crossroads, reflecting broader tensions within its society, economy, and political culture. This divergence is most clearly seen in the competing perspectives on how to engage with a rapidly changing Indo-Pacific region and manage relations with the United States and China. Trump’s tariff war contributes to growing uncertainties as all that was once solid ‘melts into air’.
On one hand, there is a growing recognition within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) that the Asia-Pacific is already a multipolar region. This perspective, articulated by Foreign Minister Penny Wong, calls for the establishment of a new “strategic equilibrium” in which the United States continues to play a role, but no longer occupies the position of uncontested regional primacy. This view accepts the realities of China’s growing influence, the increasing importance of regional middle powers such as India and Indonesia, together with a commitment to ASEAN centrality, and the diminishing ability of the United States to unilaterally shape the regional order. It implies a shift toward a more balanced, diplomatically active Australian foreign policy, one that seeks to engage constructively with multiple centres of power through multilateralism and regional integration.
In contrast, significant elements of Australia’s defence and security establishment remain committed to a strategic paradigm centred on American military leadership. This orientation is most visibly embodied in the AUKUS partnership, which represents not merely a defence arrangement but a deeper integration into the United States’ broader strategic architecture aimed at containing China. This position assumes the necessity and possibility of preserving elements of American primacy and reflects a continuing reliance on forward military posture and interoperability with the United States as the cornerstone of regional and, by extension, Australian security.
Critics of this approach, such as Hugh White, argue that such a strategy is ultimately unsustainable. White contends that China cannot be materially contained, and that the regional balance of power will, over time, continue to shift in China’s favour. He calls for a realist reassessment of Australia’s strategic priorities, one that accepts the limitations of American power and seeks to avoid unnecessary entanglement in great power competition. Similarly, Sam Roggeveen, while sharing the mainstream assessment that China constitutes the principal long-term challenge for Australian defence planners, critiques the AUKUS submarine program as strategically flawed and operationally impractical. Instead, he proposes a more defensively oriented posture that leverages Australia’s geographic remoteness. His call for a formal defence partnership with Indonesia reflects an aspiration for regional burden-sharing, though such a development appears unlikely given the historical and geopolitical constraints shaping Australia–Indonesia relations, and the reality of Indonesia’s own approach to non-aligned foreign policy.
Others go further and argue that America is increasingly an unreliable ally, and there are many good reasons . Several scholars, such as Brendan O’Connor, Lloyd Cox, and Danny Cooper, have argued that the United States faces enduring domestic political dysfunction, strategic overreach, and a shifting global focus, all of which render it an unreliable long-term security partner. Iain D. Henry has similarly contended that the United States' own political proclivities and internal contradictions introduce significant uncertainty into the alliance. Bevan Ramsden, writing from a critical security perspective, has also warned of waning American reliability, suggesting that Australia's continued dependence on the alliance risks strategic complacency and diminished sovereignty. From this vantage point, over-reliance on Washington introduces long-term vulnerabilities and reinforces Australia’s subordinate position in a rapidly evolving regional order. Mitigating such risks requires a more self-reliant and diplomatically nuanced approach to defence and foreign policy—one that recognises the structural shift toward multipolarity and the growing salience of regional partnerships.
Nevertheless, elements within the policy and defence elite continue to operate under the assumption that recent disruptions in U.S. politics, particularly those associated with the Trump presidency, are temporary aberrations. This school of thought anticipates a return to the “America of old” and advocates a continuation of long-standing strategic alignment with Washington in the hope that the established order will reassert itself. For these actors, the appropriate course is to deepen Australia’s military preparedness and continue to align with the United States in anticipation of a future in which liberal internationalism regains traction.
These competing visions within the Australian strategic community are not merely technical disagreements over military procurement or alliance management. They reflect deeper societal cleavages concerning national identity, geopolitical orientation, and the legacy of Australia’s historical dependence on Anglosphere powers. At stake is whether Australia will move toward a more autonomous regional role grounded in multipolar diplomacy and strategic self-reliance, or whether it will double down on its traditional role as a subordinate partner within a U.S.-led security order—despite increasing doubts about the sustainability of American primacy in the Indo-Pacific.
Political Economy: The Shadow of Financialisation
The 2025 election also took place within a deeply financialised economy shaped by the long tail of the Global Financial Crisis. Since 2008, successive Australian governments have presided over a growth model reliant on natural resources and agricultural exports, elevated property prices, sustained inward migration, and the financialisation of household wealth. Low interest rates and tax incentives like negative gearing have entrenched a political economy in which housing is both the engine of growth and the core of intergenerational inequality.
In parallel with these strategic dilemmas, Australia’s political economy is exhibiting signs of structural vulnerability. According to the Harvard Growth Lab’s Economic Complexity Index (ECI), Australia has experienced a relative decline in productive sophistication, reflecting a narrowing of its export base and a deepening reliance on primary commodities. This trend is marked by the dominance of resource and agricultural exports, such as iron ore, coal, and beef, which, while lucrative, are subject to price volatility and offer limited scope for long-term value-added industrial development. Simultaneously, Australia’s economic growth model has become increasingly dependent on asset inflation, particularly in real estate and financial markets. This dynamic reflects the broader process of financialisation, wherein capital accumulation is driven more by rising asset values than by investment in productive capacity. The result is a bifurcated economy: one tethered to the global demand for raw materials, and another oriented around domestic asset appreciation, especially in housing. Together, these dynamics risk entrenching a low-complexity, high-rent economic structure that undermines innovation, exacerbates inequality, and limits strategic autonomy in both economic and geopolitical terms.
The limitations and contradictions of this model are now impossible to ignore. Young Australians face a housing market increasingly out of reach, while governments remain structurally dependent on rising asset prices to preserve household balance sheets and political capital. Migration is blamed for housing shortages, yet it is essential to economic growth and fiscal sustainability.
Meanwhile, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) remains heavily exposed to U.S. capital, particularly in its top-tier companies. Any downturn in U.S. investor confidence — especially under a Trump administration more focused on domestic industrial policy and less committed to global markets — risks capital flight. Australia is thus caught in a delicate balancing act: it cannot afford to lose U.S. investment, but neither can it afford to antagonise its Asian markets.
Moreover, it is critical to acknowledge that Australia’s recent headline economic growth has been almost entirely underpinned by population growth. Absent this demographic expansion, primarily through immigration, the country would have experienced a per capita recession over the past two or more years. This trend highlights a stagnation in underlying productivity growth, which has effectively plateaued. The implications are serious: without a rejuvenation of national productivity, Australia risks long-term economic malaise and a diminished capacity to sustain rising living standards. Revitalising productivity necessitates significant investment in innovation and the adoption of advanced technologies.
Crucially, this cannot be achieved in isolation. Given China's scale, technological progress, and centrality to regional supply chains, deeper economic and technological engagement with China—rather than disengagement—is imperative. A strategy of selective decoupling or strategic distancing risks cutting Australia off from one of the world’s most dynamic sources of innovation and capital formation, thereby undermining the very conditions necessary for domestic productivity renewal.
Paradoxically, while population growth has served as the principal driver of aggregate economic expansion in recent years, Australian political discourse is increasingly marked by calls to curtail immigration. The prevailing rationale centres on the perceived impact of immigration on housing affordability, with migrants often scapegoated for structural supply constraints and speculative dynamics in the property market. Yet, beneath the surface of these economic arguments lies a deeper current of demographic anxiety, often racialised in its expression. Debates over immigration policy, particularly when framed in relation to urban congestion or cultural cohesion, frequently give voice, whether explicitly or implicitly, to longstanding undercurrents of anti-Asian sentiment. Such sentiments, while sometimes cloaked in economic rationalism, are entwined with a broader cultural politics that resists the demographic transformations associated with Australia’s integration into the Indo-Pacific region. This dynamic complicates efforts to forge a coherent national development strategy, as it undermines both the labour inputs and regional partnerships, particularly with China, that are essential to reinvigorating productivity and sustaining long-term prosperity.
The Longue Durée: Becoming an Asian Nation
Over the longue durée, Australia is undergoing a profound demographic transformation. The cultural mythology of the settler-colonial state - white, Anglo, and isolated - is steadily being offset by a complex, multicultural, and Asian-facing society. By mid-century, it is conceivable that Australia will be a country where most citizens are migrants or the children of migrants. Asian-origin communities - including Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, and Filipino Australians - will comprise a substantial share of the urban electorate.
This transformation is not just statistical; it is, though this may be a little bit of a stretch, ‘civilisational’. It entails new languages, new values, and new political imaginaries. It calls into question the very basis of Australia’s traditional national narrative, which has always been torn between proximity to Asia and cultural distance from it. And it is, of course, for these fundamental reasons why such a transformation is also the source of Australia’s contemporary, and persistent, anxiety.
David Walker’s notion of Australia as an “anxious nation” - defined by its fear of being overwhelmed by Asia - continues to resonate, especially in debates over immigration and security. So too does Alan Gyngell’s concept of the “fear of abandonment,” which has historically underpinned Australia's strategic dependence on distant allies. But both anxieties are increasingly challenged by difficult to avoid realities. The fear of Asia is out of place in a society that is becoming Asian, yet it is precisely this that drives and reinforces these fears.
In this context, immigration is both a flashpoint and a vector of change. Right-wing populists have framed it as a threat to housing, wages, and the “Australian way of life” — a phrase laden with racial and cultural undertones. Yet immigration is also the main source of demographic vitality and economic growth. The real challenge is not whether Australia should welcome migrants, but how it redefines itself in light of their presence.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Australia experienced a significant, albeit ultimately transient, strategic and cultural opening toward Asia. This period was marked by an explicit effort to reorient Australia’s economic and geopolitical identity in response to the rapid rise of Asia, particularly Northeast and Southeast Asia. The 1989 Garnaut Report, Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy, was pivotal in this regard. It argued that Australia’s future prosperity was increasingly tied to the dynamism of East Asian economies and that national policy needed to reflect this emerging reality. Subsequent Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade reports throughout the early 1990s reinforced this trajectory, highlighting the growing economic significance of southern China and the broader Asia-Pacific.
A key institutional expression of this orientation was the 1993 Asian Languages and Australia’s Economic Future report, commonly referred to as the “Rudd Report”, commissioned by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). The report called for a comprehensive national strategy to promote Asian language acquisition and cultural literacy in Australian schools, framing such measures as essential to Australia’s long-term economic competitiveness and regional integration.
This strategic posture was strongly championed by Prime Minister Paul Keating, who articulated a vision of Australia not only as economically engaged with Asia, but as culturally and diplomatically embedded within it. For Keating, this reorientation also necessitated a reckoning with Australia’s colonial legacy. His efforts to pursue reconciliation with Indigenous Australians were not only acts of domestic justice but also steps toward forging a new, post-settler identity that could underpin a more confident, regionally grounded nation-state.
However, this moment of strategic and cultural repositioning was short-lived. The election of the Howard government in 1996 marked a decisive pivot away from the Keating agenda. The Howard era witnessed the rise of a racialised politics of grievance, most notably with the emergence of Pauline Hanson and the One Nation Party, which mobilised anxieties around Asian immigration and multiculturalism. While economic integration with Asia continued apace, driven largely by resource exports and comparative advantage, the deeper cultural and strategic orientation toward the region receded. Australia’s engagement became increasingly transactional, shorn of the aspirational affinity and sense of regional belonging that had characterised the earlier period.
This shift was vividly encapsulated in a comment reportedly made by Prime Minister Tony Abbott to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in which he described Australia’s approach to China as being shaped by “fear and greed.” The phrase starkly captured the dual impulses that have come to define much of Australia’s contemporary posture toward its largest trading partner: the fear of strategic vulnerability and the lure of economic gain. As scholars such as David Walker and Allan Gyngell have observed, this ambivalence has generated a persistent anxiety in Australia’s international relations and a recurring fear of abandonment by great and powerful friends.
Set against this backdrop, the 2025 federal election is perhaps a moment in which the window to Asia re-opens, ever so slightly. The limitations of a strategic framework governed primarily by “fear and greed” are becoming increasingly apparent, particularly in light of regional geopolitical realignments and the decline of American unipolarity. This moment invites reflection on the ambitions of the Keating era, its confidence, its regional outlook, and its willingness to confront foundational cultural questions. Whether Australia can rediscover those energies and articulate a renewed, regionally integrated identity remains an open and urgent question.
The 2025 election is perhaps a window into a possible future, one where electoral majorities are built not on fear and nostalgia, but on pragmatism, inclusion, and regional engagement. Yet this future is not guaranteed. Powerful forces within Australia's media, political, and security establishment still cling to the certainties of empire: the Anglosphere, the U.S. alliance, and the colonial imaginary of cultural supremacy.
But these certainties are cracking. Trump’s return exposes the fragility of the U.S. commitment to liberal internationalism, the very foundations of subimperial certitude and comfort. Regional scepticism of American strategy reveals the limits of strategic dependence. And Australia's own demographic transformation is rendering its settler-colonial myths increasingly fragile.
The Contest Over the “Australian Way”
On election night, amid scenes of jubilation and relief, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stood before his supporters and declared that “Australians have chosen to face global challenges the Australian way.” It was an attempt at rhetorical closure - a line meant to signal unity, national coherence, and confidence in an uncertain world. “The people,” he continued, “have made a clear choice.”
But these words, while triumphant, beg a deeper question: what exactly is the Australian way?
Is it a social democratic pragmatism that seeks to reconcile open markets with inclusive institutions? A multicultural compact forged in the suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney? A sub-imperial loyalty to the United States? Or is it still, at some subterranean level, a project of white settler modernity, ambivalent about change, fearful of decline, and reflexively hostile to those imagined as “outsiders”?
The contest over this national imaginary is far from resolved. Indeed, it may only just be beginning.
In the days before the election, former Prime Minister John Howard - in conversation with his former deputy John Anderson - expressed clear unease about multiculturalism, lamenting what he perceived as the erosion of a core Australian identity. For Howard, as for many on the conservative side of politics, that identity remains tethered to an older, whiter, more exclusive understanding of who belongs and who gets to define the nation.
But the 2025 election suggests that this worldview is becoming less politically potent (for the time being anyway) - not because it has vanished, but because it no longer commands the cultural authority it once did. Demographics, economics, and geopolitics are reconfiguring the terrain. Australia is becoming more Asian, more urban, and more exposed to a polycentric world in which the old Anglo-American order no longer reigns uncontested.
Will Australia continue to cling to nostalgia, to the idea that safety lies in doubling down on old alliances, stoking racial anxieties, and resisting cultural change? Or will it find itself on a less well trodden path; one in which it dares to imagine an Australia that is regionally embedded, socially inclusive, and capable of acting with strategic independence.
The election of 2025 does not resolve this tension. But perhaps it clarifies its stakes.
An important vector of these evolving dynamics is the contested debate surrounding AUKUS. Within Australia's Chinese diaspora, the nation’s commitment to AUKUS has been particularly controversial, widely perceived as signalling a willingness to align with the United States in a posture of strategic hostility toward China. In the security and national defence establishment, AUKUS has given rise to both strategic and operational concerns. Strategically, critics question whether it is truly in Australia's national interest to subordinate its defence policy to U.S. military imperatives, particularly as the regional order undergoes realignment. There are doubts as to whether nuclear-powered submarines represent the optimal strategic asset for defending Australia's maritime approaches, especially given the profound technological, temporal, and operational uncertainties surrounding their eventual deployment. Regionally, AUKUS risks damaging Australia's diplomatic standing by conveying an image of inflexibility and great-power alignment in a region increasingly defined by multipolarity and strategic hedging.
Operationally, scepticism persists about whether the promised submarines will ever be delivered within the proposed timeline, or indeed at all, given the enormous technological hurdles, workforce constraints, and production bottlenecks. The projected cost of $368 billion has prompted questions about opportunity costs, particularly in light of pressing domestic economic challenges and alternative defence priorities. Despite these concerns, the political elite remains firmly committed to AUKUS, with bipartisan consensus reflecting the high reputational costs associated with reversing course. Yet the return of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, and the broader unpredictability of U.S. domestic politics, has reanimated doubts about the long-term strategic coherence of the agreement.
In any case, the resolution of the AUKUS dilemma is unlikely to take the form of a definitive policy reversal. That’s a bridge too far for politicians and institutions whose reputations are staked to the arrangement. Rather, there is a possibility that the initiative may slowly recede in practical significance as changing geopolitical realities, including a possible U.S. retrenchment from Asia and an accelerating shift in the regional balance of power toward China, render it less tenable. Simultaneously, operational limitations and escalating costs may further erode the feasibility of the project. In this scenario, political leaders may seek to quietly defer difficult decisions, effectively "kicking the can down the road," in the hope that a future strategic landscape will absolve them of the need to confront the contradictions of the present.
If there is to be an “Australian way” that is fit for the 21st century, it will have to be invented. Simply saying so won’t make it so. It will have to emerge not from rhetorical gestures, but from a sustained reckoning with the questions this election has brought into focus: who are we, where are we headed, and who gets to decide?
The 2025 election did not resolve the contradictions that define the nation’s geopolitical, economic, and cultural identity, but it clarified them. Demographics continue to reshape the political map, making it increasingly difficult to win elections without the support of multicultural communities. Economic pressures are exposing the fragilities of a financialised growth model. And the global context is demanding a rethink of Australia's role in a post-American, multipolar world.
The question now is whether Australian elites - political, business, cultural - can embrace the implications of this moment. Can they move beyond the comforts of inherited alliances and cultural myths? Can they craft a new story of nationhood that is rooted in the realities of its violent white settler past and the emergent realities of the Asian century?
The path ahead is not preordained. It will require political courage, imaginative leadership, and a willingness to let go of old certainties. But it also offers the promise of renewal: a more confident, inclusive, and regionally connected Australia, no longer defined by fear and anxiety, but by possibility.
Meanwhile, on some of the thorny issues such as AUKUS, it’s more likely than not that the political elite will seek to simply “kick the issues down the road”, hoping that the strategic and operational quagmire won’t demand a denouement in the near term but that the problems will simply fade away as realities beyond Australia’s control overtake historic commitments.
A superb analysis, expressing with glaring clarity the choices we face. I will add one more impediment to our progressing beyond the current constipated quandary... the Australian constitution is an entirely colonial construct which explicitly sunordinates our political structures within the context of the British imperium. I, for one, doubt that it is fit for 21st century purpose.
Your analysis of Australia's domestic and international politics and its resource-, financialisation-, and immigration-dependent economy is spot on. Easily the best commentary on the election I've heard so far.
But why can't I restack this post???