Is this the last of the Seinfeld elections?

Like all other Anglosphere nations, Australia urgently requires root-and-branch reform. Unfortunately, neither of the major parties is offering it this election cycle

This is not quite a Seinfeld election – about nothing – but there is an obvious lack of policies to respond to the major challenges facing Australia in the short and long term, from global insecurity and an uncertain economy to the pressing need to reduce debt and lift productivity, improve health and education, and balance energy needs with decarbonising the economy.
Troy Bramston, The Australian, 12/4/25

Australia is in a Truman Show election campaign. Both major parties are carefully, wilfully myopic. They direct our attention to details of domestic affairs as if Australia can carry on undisturbed… The leaders occasionally acknowledge the larger world outside. Like the directors of The Truman Show, they can’t conceal that there is a reality beyond the sound stage of Truman Burbank’s idyllic village, but they prefer to avoid the fact that a historic upheaval is under way.
Peter Hartcher, Sydney Morning Herald, 26/4/25

[AI] will remove the need for regular people in our economy. Powerful actors—like states and companies—will no longer have an incentive to care about regular people. We call this the intelligence curse.

If we do nothing, the intelligence curse will work like this:

· Powerful AI will push automation through existing organizations, starting from the bottom and moving to the top.

· AI will obsolete even outlier human talent. Social mobility will stop, ending the social dynamism and progress that it drives.

· Non-human factors of production, like capital, resources, and control over AI, will become overwhelmingly more important than humans.

· This will usher in incentives for powerful actors around the world that break the modern social contract.

· This could result in the gradual—or sudden—disempowerment of the vast majority of humanity.

But this prophecy is not yet fulfilled; we reject the view that this path is inevitable.
L Rudolf L, No Set Gauge, 24/4/25

[Recent technological progress is] forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a “bottleneck” — a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs and peoples with extinction… Everything that we take for granted is entering into the bottleneck. And for anything that you care about — from your nation to your worldview to your favorite art form to your family — the key challenge of the 21st century is making sure that it’s still there on the other side.
Ross Douthat, New York Times, 19/4/25

The term ‘Seinfeld election’ was coined by NPR correspondent Mara Liasson during the low-calorie 1998 US mid-term elections. Readers of a certain age will recall this as the Clinton Era.

More mature readers might also recognise the late 1990s as the neoliberal era's relatively peaceful and prosperous midpoint, pre-9/11 and pre-GFC. (The neoliberal era kicked off in late 1979/early 1980 and stretched to either 2016 or 2024, depending on how much historical weight you put on Brexit and Trump 1.0.)

Centre-left and centre-right parties throughout the Anglosphere served up much the same uniparty fare throughout this period. The centre-left party would typically foreground social liberalism while going along with economic liberalism. In contrast, the centre-right party would typically foreground economic liberalism while going along with social liberalism.

But even the above account fails to fully convey how fungible the centre-left and centre-right parties had become. Not infrequently, centre-left parties would implement free-market fundamentalist policies while centre-right parties would implement socially liberal ones.

In Australia, it was the Australian Labor Party (ALP) that floated the dollar, deregulated the banks, lifted foreign exchange controls, slashed tariffs, privatised Qantas, the Commonwealth Bank and Telstra (then Telecom), deregulated the labour market, tamed the unions, lowered taxes on corporations and higher-income earners, and introduced compulsory super (to reduce dependence on the age pension).

It was the (centre-right) Liberal PM Malcolm Turnbull that got gay marriage across the line in 2017. After both his immediate Labor predecessors voiced considerable opposition to legalising it in the years prior. (Both subsequently recanted.)

Great Southern Land
A critical mass of American and British voters – especially those recalcitrant white working-class and lower-middle class types – are enraged by the fruits of four decades-plus of economic and social hyperliberalism.

Plenty of Australians are also fuming, but few have turned openly mutinous. That’s largely due to our China-fuelled prosperity and the soft version of neoliberalism we enjoy.

Australia’s academic (at least in economics departments), business, media and political elites gulped down the neoliberal Kool-Aid. However, they took a somewhat more Scandinavian approach to restructuring their economy than their American and British counterparts.

As a result, life remains tolerable, even pleasant, for many Australians. We have access to a world-leading socialised healthcare system and affordable university education. (Granted, most Aussie grads now end up as resentful surplus elite types stuck withering on the vine in pink-collar or lower-level white-collar jobs. But at least they don’t end up with quite the student debt burden of their American counterparts.) There’s even a National Disability Scheme that, while widely rorted, has also proved a boon for many families, not least mine.

While the same winner-take-most dynamics have played out in Australia’s economy as elsewhere, Australia still has a high minimum wage and a reasonable amount of income redistribution. Australians working in the retail and hospitality sectors – big employers in a service-sector-based economy – don’t need to claim welfare to afford to eat, unlike their American counterparts.

Australia’s Gini coefficient is 0.324, placing Australia in the middle of the OECD pack. (The UK has a Gini coefficient of 0.331, and the US clocks in at 0.375.)

All those blessings now counted, it’s also true neoliberalism has wreaked much the same havoc down under as it has elsewhere.

Non-Australian readers may find the following issues oddly familiar:

Out-of-control property markets
Despite having an entire continent to themselves, the 27 million residents of Australia face some of the highest housing costs in the world. The median full-time wage in Australia is around A$72,500. The median price of a Sydney house is A$1.4 million, though you can snap up a median unit for a mere $850,000.

It’s not just that working-class and middle-class first-home buyers have been priced out of Sydney’s property market – that’s old news. It’s that even upper-middle-class ones are now struggling. The Sydney Morning Herald, which has increasingly morphed into a real-estate porn mag, recently fretted that:

A worker paid $150,000 a year could afford to buy a house in just 2.3 per cent of suburbs in Sydney and only 24.3 per cent of suburbs in Melbourne, CoreLogic figures show. They could afford 27.6 per cent of Brisbane suburbs and 31.7 per cent in Perth… Even a couple paid extremely high incomes of $300,000 each would not be able to break into a handful of Melbourne and Perth neighbourhoods – and would be priced out of at least 60 suburbs in Sydney.

Journalists at the Sydney Morning Herald rarely see any connection between Australia’s turbocharged migration intakes and its white-hot property market. But non-professional-managerial-class Aussies have proven more observant. Which brings me to another stone in the Antipodean shoe…

A surfeit of vibrant diversity
A third of Australian citizens are foreign-born. Half of them, including me, have at least one overseas-born parent.

While many foreigners continue to imagine Australia as a nation full of Crocodile Dundees, it has spent recent decades welcoming large numbers of people from Vietnam, China, India, the Philippines, Malaysia and Nepal. Inflows from the Middle East and North Africa have been smaller, but the proportion of the Australian population that’s Muslim doubled between 2006-2021, rising from 1.7 per cent to 3.2 per cent. It remains to be seen how many Muslim Australians will vote for recently formed sectarian parties and Muslim Independent candidates this election, after having previously loyally supported the ALP.

Even as a sceptic of mass migration and multiculturalism, I have to admit Australia had remarkable success in absorbing large waves of migrants in the post-war era. Those who argue that Australia is proof that multiculturalism can work, especially when an orderly, points-based system is strictly enforced, aren’t entirely wrong.

But they are not entirely right either.

Comparatively low and slow migration during the Keynesian post-war decades – back when the Australian dream (i.e. a stable, reasonably paid job, home-ownership, marriage, kids, and a financially secure, if not overly long, retirement) was still achievable for both native-borns and new arrivals – is one kettle of mixed seafood. Throwing open the floodgates and then expecting New Australians and their longer-established compatriots to thrive in a Deliveroo economy is quite another.

Rather awkwardly for the overwhelmingly university-educated and Anglo-European champions of vibrant diversity, the cracks in Australia’s multicultural edifice have long been evident to anybody courageous enough to notice them.

Australia had its own grooming gang scandal back in 2000. More recently, relations between Jewish and Muslim Australians have been a tad fractious. Australians’ faith in their afore-praised health system was shaken when a couple of Muslim nurses were filmed discussing delivering, shall we say, substandard care to Jewish patients.

Following the October 7 attack, many Australians of Middle Eastern descent gathered in front of the Sydney Opera House. Initially, it was reported that they chanted, “Gas the Jews” or possibly “Fuck the Jews”. Fortunately, the relevant authorities investigated and discovered the pro-Palestinian protestors were merely politely asking, “Where’s the Jews?”.

One can only assume the Hamas enthusiasts were disappointed they couldn’t sit down and conduct a respectful, good-faith debate over a two-state solution with “the Jews”. This discussion would have undoubtedly ended with both sides agreeing intractable ethnic conflicts shouldn’t be imported into Australia's cosmopolitan wonderland before vowing to live together in perfect harmony from that day forth.

Albo, the current PM, said he was going to cut migration levels if he was elected in mid-2022. You’ll no doubt find this near impossible to believe, dear reader, but migration levels didn’t fall in line with pre-election promises. Indeed, over a million migrants arrived in Australia from mid-2022 to mid-2024.

As has long been customary in Anglosphere and Western European politics, the Opposition Leader is now promising to absolutely, positively implement the migration cuts his predecessors have baulked at if he’s voted in. But given both sides of politics have been in thrall to their mass-migration-loving core constituencies – diversity-adoring progressives on the Left and the cheap-labour-loving business lobby on the Right – for decades now, nobody actually expects either a Labor or Liberal PM to do more than tinker at the edges.

With some notable exceptions, relations between Australia’s various ethnic groups are cordial. But they are usually also cool. As many left-leaning sociologists, notably Robert Putnam, have observed, there are no free lunches. You can have an orderly, low-crime, high-social-capital, relatively egalitarian monocultural society (e.g., Japan, Hungary) or a multicultural one (e.g. Brazil, the US). There’s no vibrantly diverse but also comfortingly cohesive option on the table. Unsurprisingly, Australian society has become more atomised as it has grown less monocultural.

Geopolitical challenges
Given its small population and large, resource-rich dimensions, Australia has long felt threatened by its poorer, more populous northern neighbours. (The Yellow Peril, as it was referred to in less enlightened eras.) Hence, Australia’s unabashed obsequiousness towards Great Britain and, from the Fall of Singapore onwards, the US. But great powers are cold monsters, even to the most vassaly of their vassal states. So, it’s far from inconceivable that Trump or Vance will decide it’s America’s interests to abandon her long-term ally in return for China staying out of its sphere of influence.

General enshittification
As noted, life in Oz remains relatively pleasant for a goodly proportion of the citizenry. But there is a widespread sense, at least among those relegated to the arse end of the Pareto distribution, that it’s not nearly as good as it used to be. Or should be. It also hasn’t gone unnoticed that those in the top quintile of the income distribution have been going from strength to strength while their compatriots have been treading water.

Given house prices increased by somewhere around 500 per cent from 1990-2023, the generational and class aspects of Australia’s political divisions intermingle. Most Boomers and many Gen Xers won the property-market lottery. Generations Y and Z most assuredly lost it. Not coincidentally, the former group will overwhelmingly vote for the centre-right Liberal Party or soft-right Doctor’s Wife Teals on Saturday, the latter for the centre-left ALP or harder-left, youth-and-renters-oriented Greens.

Unsurprisingly, as opportunities for secure employment, home ownership and upward social mobility have withered, faith in Australia’s institutions has cratered. The latest Edelman Trust Barometer puts Australians in the middle of the pack for institutional disillusionment. But like their counterparts in the US and UK, Aussies are more likely than not to agree with statements such as “the wealthy take more than their fair share”, “business and government serve the select few”, and “future generations will be worse off”.

Whether for economic, demographic or spiritual reasons, Australians, especially younger Australians, aren’t happy. Almost half of Australians report having experienced a mental disorder. Around one in 10 Australian women and one in 20 Australian men use SSRIs. A recent survey by one of the nation’s most respected universities found that 50.3 per cent of Australians believe life will be worse in 50 years, while only 16.3 per cent think it will improve. While Australia’s TFR isn’t as dire as many in its APAC neighbourhood, it still has a one in front of it.

The automated dog that didn’t bark
You may or may not be interested in the Australian election, dear reader. Personally, I’ve never been less emotionally invested in a poll. Neither side of politics has opted to acknowledge Australia’s challenges and put forward a serious plan for addressing them.

But the Australian election campaign, which will run from 28/3/25–3/5/25, may prove historically fascinating in one respect. As far as I (and a selection of free and premium-customer-level AIs) can determine, neither the Labour PM nor his Liberal challenger has so much as mentioned AI on the hustings, let alone proposed any plan to deal with the tsunami of labour market disruption it’s already starting to unleash.

As an old-timey newspaper journo might once have observed, this is burying the lede.

Over the course of the Australian federal election campaign:

*AI technology has continued to evolve in exciting and disturbing ways. Perhaps the most visible manifestation of this was the recent ‘Ghiblification’ craze that swept the interwebs as a result of Open AI launching a new image-generation feature

*China illustrated its (well-advanced) plans to “unleash the creativity of the digital economy” and develop world-leading “embodied AI” with a humans vs humanoid robots marathon in Beijing

*High-profile legacy media commentators – and not just, ahem, wild-eyed Substackers heroically labouring in obscurity – have started publishing articles arguing humans, or at least human employees, are facing an extinction-level event. (The Douthat article quoted above is cheerily headlined, ‘An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive.’)

*The AI Futures Project released its AI 2027 “best guess” scenario. As I detailed a couple of weeks back, the tech-industry heavy hitters behind AI 2027 argue an intelligence explosion will imminently and profoundly rearrange societies.

Decision time cometh
Australians, or at least their elected representatives, have chosen to kick the can down the road. The luxury of being able to (temporarily) turn a blind eye to the nation’s most serious and pressing challenges may well be the last bit of good fortune the Lucky Country’s political class enjoys for quite some time.

Very soon, Australians and their counterparts in other democracies must make an enormously consequential decision.

They will need to choose between continuing with the neoliberal dispensation and allowing a handful of well-placed wealth creators to capture almost all the gains of AI-facilitated productivity leaps, or insisting on a more equitable, dare I say “populist”, distribution of the spoils of blindingly fast technological progress.

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