There was a time when every serious participant in Australian political life understood something so basic it barely needed stating. The state is more powerful than the individual. That asymmetry is the primary political problem that democratic government exists to manage.
It sounds obvious. It used to be.
Two Traditions, One Foundation
Australian politics was built on two great traditions that approached this problem from opposite directions but shared the same foundational understanding.
The liberal and conservative tradition — the tradition of Menzies, of the “forgotten people,” of civic individualism — sought to manage the asymmetry by limiting the state’s reach. Keep government out of commerce, out of private conscience, out of the daily lives of citizens wherever possible. The individual should be free to conduct business, raise a family, and live according to their own judgment. The state’s job was to enforce basic rules and otherwise stay out of the way. The onus was on the state to justify any expansion of its power.
The labour and social democratic tradition sought to manage the same asymmetry from the other direction — by directing the state’s collective power toward those who could not protect themselves against private concentrations of power. Employers. Landlords. Corporations. Medicare. Free tertiary education. Industrial awards. Public housing. These were not gifts from a generous state. They were the collective answer to a structural problem: how does an individual without capital, without connections, and without institutional power live with dignity in a society where others have all three? Again, the onus was on the state to justify what it did — this time by demonstrating that it was acting in the interests of the many rather than the few.
Both traditions, from opposite directions, understood the same thing. The burden of justification runs from the powerful to the powerless, not the reverse. The state must explain itself to the individual. Not the other way around.
That principle is the foundation of liberal democracy. It is why we have courts, parliaments, a free press, separation of powers, and a Crown whose authority is held in trust rather than owned by any government of the day.
What Has Been Lost
That foundation has been significantly eroded over the past two to three decades. And the erosion has not followed party lines.
The state has not been reduced. It has been redirected.
It no longer primarily constrains private power or distributes collective welfare. It has become, in large measure, a mechanism for transferring public resources to private interests and a security apparatus for protecting those interests from challenge.
The evidence is not subtle.
Robodebt deployed the state’s coercive power against the most vulnerable Australians to recover debts that did not exist. A Royal Commission found it was not just an administrative failure but a deliberate design — the system was structured to place the burden of proof on the individual rather than the state. That inversion — requiring the powerless to prove their innocence to the powerful — is the precise opposite of the foundational principle.
At the same time, the same state maintained negative gearing concessions that inflate housing costs for those who cannot afford to own. Franking credit arrangements that disproportionately benefit the already wealthy. Defence contracts worth hundreds of billions directed toward American military corporations with undisclosed commercial relationships to the political operatives who shape Australian policy. The poor are subjected to punitive compliance regimes. The wealthy are subjected to generous concessions.
This is not small government. It is not big government. It is captured government — a state whose machinery has been redirected toward the interests of those with the means to influence its decisions, while the language of both traditions is retained as decoration.
The Liberal Party that Menzies built was supposed to be the party of civic individualism, of the forgotten people, of limiting the state’s reach over private life. What it became — particularly after the Howard government’s engagement of polling and political intelligence operations that prioritised fear-based messaging over civic values — was a machine for manufacturing cultural anxiety and directing state power toward the constituencies those anxieties activated. Border security. National identity. The suggestion, never stated directly but always understood, that some communities belonged and others did not.
The Labor Party that built Medicare and free tertiary education was supposed to be the party that used the state’s collective power to protect the vulnerable from private concentrations of power. What it became — visible in the rush to legislate the Combatting Antisemitism Act in January 2026, in the Robodebt-echoing architecture of algorithmic enforcement without accountability — was a party willing to direct the state’s coercive power against individuals and communities when political circumstances made that useful.
Both traditions have been hollowed out. The foundational understanding they shared — that the onus is on the state to justify its power to the individual — has been quietly forgotten.
The Hunger That Remains
Here is the thing about foundational principles: people feel their absence even when they cannot name it.
The Teal independents did not win Kooyong and Wentworth and Goldstein and North Sydney because of climate policy. They won because the voters in those seats — educated, civic-minded, historically Liberal — recognised that what the Liberal Party had become no longer resembled what it was supposed to be. These were not ideological conversions. They were acts of civic recognition. The Teals are elected by networks of people who know each other, who organise locally, who back a specific person rather than a party machine. That is structurally different from how major party candidates are elected. And it is exactly the kind of civic individualism the Liberal Party was supposed to embody and had ceased to.
The hunger that the Teal movement is serving is the hunger for a politics that still understands the state/individual relationship. That still asks: what is the government doing to us, for us, and can it justify it?
One Nation is serving the same hunger in a different and less honest way. Pauline Hanson sits at a kitchen table and speaks in plain language and claims to represent people who feel ignored by the machines. That performance of attentiveness — of actually listening to individuals rather than processing them through polling and focus groups — is politically powerful precisely because the major parties have made the performance of listening so rare that even a performance of it feels like the real thing.
But it is only a performance. One Nation has never demonstrated any capacity to govern in the interests of the individuals it claims to represent. Its policy positions, where they exist, tend to serve concentrated interests. The listening is the product. It is not a means to anything. And the fear-based messaging that drives its electoral appeal is the same methodology that hollowed out the Liberal Party — just without the restraint of governing responsibility.
Both phenomena — Teals and One Nation — are symptoms of the same underlying condition. The foundational understanding has been lost in the major parties. The appetite for it has not.
The Paranoid Cycle
There is a further consequence of the loss that Hannah Arendt identified and that is directly visible in contemporary Australian politics.
When the state loses sight of its foundational purpose — justifying its power to the individual — it does not simply become indifferent. It becomes fearful. And fear-driven state expansion is self-perpetuating in a way that rational state action is not.
Once the machinery of government is directed toward managing fear rather than serving individuals, it generates its own justification. Every act of surveillance finds something to surveil. Every compliance regime finds non-compliance. Every enforcement mechanism finds violations. The machinery cannot stop — because stopping would suggest the fear was not warranted, and acknowledging that the fear was not warranted would threaten the legitimacy of the machinery.
Arendt saw this most clearly in the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century. The concentration camps did not make the Nazi state feel safer. They made it feel more imperilled — and so more camps were required. The categories of those who needed to be contained expanded without limit, because the fear that drove the system was never really about the people being detained. It was about the insecurity of those doing the detaining.
Australia is not Nazi Germany. But the logic of fear-driven state expansion is not unique to totalitarian systems. It is available to any government that has lost sight of the foundational principle.
The Robodebt system was not designed to recover legitimate debts. It was designed to perform the management of welfare fraud anxiety — and in performing that management it created the debts it claimed to be recovering. The anti-hate speech architecture being built in the name of antisemitism is not calibrated to the actual threat. It is calibrated to the performance of managing fear — and the machinery it creates will find violations regardless of whether the violations reflect the threat the machinery was ostensibly built to address.
What the Crown Is For
The Crown of Australia is not a ceremonial relic.
It is the body politic. It embodies the accumulated values, traditions, and constitutional understandings that generations of Australians have built and defended — the understanding that the state serves the individual, that power must justify itself, that no government of the day owns the institutions it temporarily administers.
The reserve powers of the Governor-General, the independence of the courts, the Letters Patent of Royal Commissions, the separation of powers — these are not administrative arrangements. They are the institutional expression of the foundational principle. They are what makes it possible for any generation to reassert that principle when the ordinary machinery of government has drifted from it.
The Crown is the continuity that binds each generation of Australians to those who came before and those who will come after. It cannot be hollowed out by the gradual erosion of civic understanding of what it represents. The machinery of government is not the property of those who happen to control it at any given moment. It is held in trust.
When both major parties have forgotten what that trust requires — when the state has been redirected from serving individuals toward serving the interests that have the means to shape its decisions — the institutions of the Crown are not a last resort. They are the present mechanism by which the foundational principle can be reasserted.
That is not a conservative argument. It is not a progressive argument. It is the argument that both traditions were built on before they forgot where they came from.
The forgotten foundation is still there. It just needs to be remembered.