For much of the time I’ve travelled for my job, my friend Judy has worked the early shift at Brisbane airport. She personifies what we love about Australia and Australians – irreverent and upfront.
When I saw Judy first thing on Wednesday, en route to regional Queensland, she captured a widely held fear when she said: ‘The world has gone off its rocker.’
Judy was reacting to the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, but reflecting bigger and legitimate fears many people share about the news we see from around the world.
This is characterised by a creeping incidence of divisiveness, political violence and extremism, and the hateful misinformation and disinformation fuelling it.
It’s not completely foreign to us in Australia. We read its language and hear its slogans on social media, and increasingly in the language of some of our politicians.
But the gunshots that rang out in Butler, Pennsylvania gave political violence and extremism a new clarity, and for us as Australians a new urgency as well.
I watched those extraordinary scenes unfold on a cameraman’s iPhone during a live television interview, from outside a basketball stadium before my son’s game.
But even in real time, as shocking and confronting as the footage was, there was also a sense of familiarity.
Political violence is not recent to the United States, as Nick Bryant explores in his new book The Forever War, and as the frothing mob which stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021 made clear to us too.
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords survived an attempted assassination in 2011. Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked in their home in 2022 by a man who attempted to kidnap her.
It’s not new, or isolated, or limited to the US either – 2 UK parliamentarians have been assassinated since 2016.
But political violence is now also the most extreme of the causes and consequences of dislocation wrought by 3 economic shocks in 15 years, major conflicts in eastern Europe and the Middle East, and tensions in Asia.
It’s part of a bigger and longer story of fragmentation, within democracies and between countries, and in the fracturing of a rules‑based international order.
And in turn, this big shift from globalisation to fragmentation is itself just one of what we consider to be the 5 most consequential for Australia, our people and their economy.
The other 4 are big economic shifts too: from hydrocarbons to renewables; from information technology to AI; from younger to older populations; from old industrial bases to new ones.
With all this churn and change, is it any wonder there is so much uncertainty, insecurity and anxiety?
Australia was among the biggest beneficiaries of the relative calm of the 2 decades between the end of the cold war and the beginning of the global financial crisis.
But now after the Great Moderation gave way to the Great Fragmentation, we need to think differently about our choices and chances in a world of greater volatility.
As much as the violence outside and the anxiety within seems to transcend the dollars and cents, it is transforming economies and markets too.
Our Future Fund laid this out in a thoughtful analysis of geopolitics as ‘the bedrock of the new investment order’, dominated by populism, climate change, deglobalisation, technological disruption, instability and risk.
Conflicts we are seeing around the world have immediate and tangible economic consequences.
Global freight costs have tripled since November, oil prices have jumped nearly 10 per cent since this time last year, avoiding the Red Sea adds time and costs to voyages. All of this puts additional pressure on persistent inflation globally and here.
As we maintain a primary focus on this inflation and as we react to the shooting in Pennsylvania, we need to understand the longer‑term consequences of all of this for our economies and our societies.
Australia is fortunate with our history and heritage, the politics we’ve chosen relatively free of political violence, and the more mobile society we’ve built together – but we can’t be complacent.
A new Productivity Commission report gave us heartening news that Australia remains that mobile society, but with warning signs at either end of the distribution of wealth.
Our experience teaches us that economic inclusion and mobility cannot be divorced from social inclusion and mobility.
Our unifying story is that every time we have broadened our social democracy we have made ourselves stronger too. When we expand the reach and meaning of the fair go, we’re all enriched.
When women secured the right to vote, we became a better democracy. When we embraced migrants from every culture and tradition, our whole society and economy benefited.
That’s why Medicare is universal, why superannuation is the right of every working Australian, and why we all contribute to a social safety net for the most vulnerable.
It’s why we took a big political risk this year to ensure every Australian taxpayer gets a tax cut, not just the wealthiest.
Sharing opportunity is about expanding it, not dividing it.
In all of this, there are important lessons.
Australia can be a primary beneficiary of accelerating change in the global economy just like we were a primary beneficiary of the calm which preceded it.
But only if we make ourselves indispensable to the global net zero transformation. Only if we align our economic, social and security interests more tightly. Only if we recognise and respect the economic causes and consequences of social marginalisation and democratic decline.
Only if we choose upwards mobility over downwards envy; pragmatism and progress over extremism and violence; and if we humbly look for answers by listening to each other, not turning on each other.
If there’s a sixth big shift to add to the list above, it’s democratic and cultural.
In a brilliant piece in the New York Times, David Brooks writes of a fusion of enlightenment, reason and faith giving way to the politicisation of truth and identity, dialling‑up our divisions and undermining democracy and social solidarity.
This is the dismay at the core of today’s divisiveness, hatefulness and violence. A sense that our democracy and our political leadership is supposed to help mend fault lines, not widen them, or worst of all let violence turn them into battlelines.
Think back to our feelings of sympathy and horror as events unfolded in Pennsylvania. None of us want to go down that path.
The major anxiety facing most Australians is not geopolitical tensions but the struggle to make ends meet. But political division and violence don’t emerge in an economic vacuum and that’s why leadership matters.
Leadership can help ensure a proper place for real people and communities as our economy evolves in major ways.
Our goal is an economy powered by cleaner and cheaper energy, indispensable to the global net zero transformation, which teaches and trains our people to adapt and adopt technology so we are beneficiaries, not victims of all the change around us
This is one way we become an island of decency and opportunity in a sea of uncertainty and division. And by deliberate choice, not some accident of our geography.
My friend Judy is not alone in her dismay for the world. We take seriously our responsibilities to her and to millions of Australians concerned about the damage done by divisiveness and extremism.
It’s not too late to choose decency and economic opportunity over the politics of marginalisation, demonisation, division and violence.