Australia maintains an active international presence—climate summits, regional security forums, development aid commitments—that projects the image of a middle power pulling above its weight. The work isn’t meaningless. A stable Indo-Pacific genuinely serves Australian interests, and development assistance can prevent problems from metastasizing into crises that eventually arrive on our doorstep anyway.
The complication is that voters see their government speak more fluently about “regional resilience frameworks” than about why they’re stuck at rental inspections every weekend or why their electricity bills have doubled. It’s not that international engagement is wrong—it’s that the domestic basics appear increasingly like an afterthought, the unglamorous homework done grudgingly between the interesting overseas trips.
Housing illustrates the problem neatly. Successive governments have prioritized negative gearing protection and immigration growth while treating planning reform as too politically difficult to attempt seriously. The result is entirely predictable: rents and house prices outpace wages, vacancy rates tighten, and young professionals increasingly resign themselves to permanent rental status or exodus to regional areas. Development aid—a favorite target for budget hawks—represents a rounding error in overall spending. The housing crisis stems from decades of deliberate policy choices that prioritized existing homeowners over future ones.
Energy policy follows a similar pattern. The transition to renewables is inevitable and necessary, but the implementation has been characterized by what one might charitably call optimism about timelines and costs. Baseload capacity retired faster than replacement capacity came online. Wholesale prices spiked. Retail bills followed. The government’s response tends toward announcing new targets rather than addressing the immediate reliability concerns that affect people’s actual lives.
The crossbench criticism—that Canberra prioritizes global posturing over domestic delivery—resonates because it contains observable truth. A more credible approach would involve the unsexy work of actually fixing things: planning reform that enables housing construction, energy policy that balances transition speed with reliability, and treating domestic fundamentals as something more substantial than background scenery for international photo opportunities.
The question isn’t whether Australia should engage internationally. Of course it should. The question is whether policymakers can simultaneously demonstrate basic competence at home. Currently, the evidence suggests they’re struggling to walk and chew gum.