Comment

We live in a world of superseded ideas of philosophy and science – still adhering to Newtonian physics, Cartesian duality and Kantian ethics. They have served us well, but the laws of nature no longer support them.

Early on Wednesday morning Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, had what Albanese says was a very frank phone call. He says he demanded ‘full accountability and transparency’ over the death of Zomi Frankcom, an Australian aid worker in Gaza.

As I write this, I do not have a stable home address because my current solution to the problem is leading a nomadic lifestyle to stay a step ahead of Chinese Communist Party goons. I don’t know what their plans are if and when they catch up with me again.

The loss of faith in politicians and the political system has been the most conspicuous aspect of the hollowing out of democracy in this country. The time to fix it is now – with possibly less than a year before the next federal election – by attempting to restore trust with a program of genuine political reform.

This is what happens when you take the law out of law. It is politics that has fixed its teeth but not its spine. It smiles and hunches, a kind of moral pariah, aware of its own evil but also relishing in it.

The recent Tasmanian election reinforces the postwar trend of a sustained drift away from the major parties. Voters are increasingly preferring to trust independents and minor parties, mostly because of their authenticity and closer association with their communities and their views on key issues.

The Albanese government goes into the long break before parliament resumes for the May budget with its reputation tarnished after an attempted ambush that misfired. No doubt they had in mind payback for the opposition, which made hay accusing the government of being unprepared and incompetent in its response to the High Court’s striking down of indefinite detention late last year.

Our world is teetering on the brink of catastrophe, with close to 13,000 nuclear weapons in the arsenals of nine countries. The risk of their use – whether by accident or design – is as high as ever. We are facing the most precarious geopolitical crisis since the height of the Cold War. The threat of nuclear annihilation is – once again – a very real possibility.

Secular modernity reveals that hell is not God’s absence, it is the absence of God’s absence; we have traded Augustine’s God-shaped hole for Nietzsche’s abyss.

On Monday, 10,000 metres above continental Australia, Anthony Albanese made dead sure his government would not be distracted by another divisive culture war. There was no way he was going to allow the Coalition to suck the oxygen out of his government’s economic agenda in the run-up to the federal election.