2018 will go down as the year that reality finally caught up; a national reckoning after a decade of cultural neglect driven by the conviction that the prize was more important than the purpose.
The flashpoints were brutal truth-tellings that toppled leaders and confronted us all with our complicity. But what was more off-putting was the way that one followed the next until they all became part of something bigger and even more significant, the hollowing out of some of our once most cherished institutions.
The first shock seemed initially to be just a sporting scandal – the Australian cricket team’s implosion in South Africa, when a group of young men weighed by institutional expectation resorted to cheap and dirty tricks to gain a short-term advantage. The Test captain, whose job has been described as the “second most important in Australia”, was banished, shedding tears under the glare of cameras as the weight of public opprobrium came crushing down on him.
The men in suits who had set the demands on the team to win at all costs, tried to wash their hands but could not abrogate their responsibility. At year’s end they were gone too, along with many of the game’s long-term fans who had for too long cheered on their boorish representatives.
It was only the prelude. In 2018 our financial institutions were also held to account with a royal commission the government never wanted to call, soon exposing the depth of the sector’s voracious thirst for self-aggrandisement.
The big banks may never had been loved but they had earned our grudging respect with their stability through the global financial crisis, albeit with taxpayer-funded ballast. But it was the former mutual societies like AMP, once member-owned and member-focused, who shocked us more with their petty schemes to trick us and scam us as though they were just a bunch of bankers.
As the hearings unfolded we came to realise that these were not bad apples but emissaries of a system that had rotted from the inside, where money had become its own purpose and everyone from the teller to the CEO was rewarded for extracting more of it from us.
The reckoning did not end there. Religious institutions were forced to confront their neglect and ongoing obligations to those whose lives they ruined as the federal parliament apologised for our collective blindness. Aged care providers were scrutinised for their disregard and sometimes cruelty towards those in their care and will be the subject of their own royal commission.
Big tech companies like Facebook and Google were placed under the spotlight, with calls by some to address the abuse of their market dominance. Politicians and performers, for whom celebrity was no justification for disrespect and worse, were called to account by women.
If 2018 were a show, it would be a morality play where the consequences of business as usual, rather than any individual act or omission, came home to roost.
And if this were the plotline of the year, it is only apt that a leading protagonist would be the government that purports to lead our nation.
The forced removal of the sixth prime minister in eight years was perhaps the most shocking in the sequence. Rudd’s dysfunction was notorious, Gillard’s disconnect with the electorate terminal, Rudd’s second coming only ever transitory, Abbott’s stewardship catastrophic.
In contrast, Malcolm Turnbull’s demise was different because it remains inexplicable to the public; driven as it was by a small cabal of conservative representatives backed by a smaller sect of commentators who wanted to shift the party right. The electoral consequences of these actions are still to be felt; Wentworth was a harbinger, Victoria a caution; as the election approaches the government braces for repudiation.
What is harder to quantify is the extent to which the affair has undermined the entire project of politics. We noted a steep decline of trust in public institutions through Labor’s leadership conniptions earlier in the decade; what we see now is a growing disconnect between our personal selves and our public institutions.
This shines through in the response to a set of questions we ask annually.
Most respondents regarded 2018 as a good year for themselves personally, but they saw it as being a very poor year for the government and politics in general.
While the majority of people now expect the government to change, that’s not the half of it.
People thought it was a reasonable year for the economy, but less so for the institutions that operate through it, the businesses and unions. And while they were happy at work, their financial situation is less secure as wages continue to flat-line. The planet too had a bad year, with another 12 months of wilful neglect of the need to take action on global warming, another reckoning of existential proportions.
As I have argued previously, the gap between personal happiness and the bigger picture is the real paradox at the centre of the Coalition’s implosion. The majority of people are contented, not angry, albeit feeling they are not getting their share of the nation’s wealth. They don’t want a revolution – just a government to keep its side of the bargain and lead with their interests at heart.
Instead they have a new leader who has turned himself into a meme, conjuring up a stunt a day and hoping one of them will stick and become the miracle he knows he needs to defy the tide of history. In doing so, he only digs the hole deeper for everyone.
As opposition leader Bill Shorten noted in his address to the Labor conference on Sunday, his real opponent in 2019 will not be the Coalition or the Greens, but the lack of faith in the political project. How he confronts this will be key to his success in the election and beyond.
Australian cricket’s response to its crisis of trust may be instructive. They have united behind an understated journeyman, who had been on the verge of retirement after too many broken fingers, when he was called up to serve. Not many Australians may know who Tim Paine is, but he is leading Australia in the midst of a riveting Test series where victory has become an aspiration rather than a god-given right and the game feels stronger for the shift.
Meanwhile, in the finance world, people are flooding to the for purpose, not for profit industry fund and community owned banks, as they look for custodians who have more than the self-perpetuation of profit at their core.
And for politics? As the Coalition government unravels, Labor has been calmly going about its business of preparing a different sort of government, one that has learnt from its previous failings.
Like Tim Paine, Bill Shorten is not a show-pony – he still trails Scott Morrison in personal approvals and attributes. But his success lies in developing a series of interlocking policies that, when set out, amount to a program for centrist progressive government. These have been dripping out with little interest, less compelling than the circular firing squad that is the Coalition government.
But drill into the detail and there is a program emerging: early learning, Tafe, rental affordability, a revamped NDIS, recognition of Indigenous Australians, a coherent refugee plan; a model of government working in partnership with those who have a social purpose.
While Morrison plays for the miracle win, Labor invests in its purpose, piece by piece convincing more Australian they are fit to govern, with a program that thinks through the challenges of a running modern society in a global economy and a connected world.
The lesson of 2018 is pretty simple, really: whether you are running a cricket team, a bank or a nation, its not enough to play the ball in front of you. Actions have consequences. Success has context. And causes have effects.
• Peter Lewis is the executive director of Essential and a Guardian Australia columnist
