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Better in what sense? The political discourse is absolutely better, and I would say our political institutions are much more stable and effective at the general business of government: running elections, writing and enforcing laws, handling the myriad edge cases and emergent problems that crop up constantly in complex systems.
Australians are more culturally authoritarian than Americans in one sense, but there is less perceived distance between citizenry and government. Where in the US the government is seen as oppositional to the citizenry in many respects (independent of party affiliation, e.g. with cops) and must be constrained via various 'checks and balances', an armed citizenry and so on, authoritarian stances taken by Australian government are parsed domestically as Australian society exerting its will over itself. This difference in perspective is why you had many people in the US (including some on this forum) convinced that the Australian government would never end Covid restrictions or freely give up Covid-era powers, and that our politicians who implemented lockdowns would pay a steep political price for it.
I really can't comprehend to this day why potentially the most covid-hysterical state gave up the powers. I think your politicians are stupid.
Yeah, I think failure to model differences in culture and the political incentives at play led to a lot of bad external predictions. In reality the lockdowns were stop-start in response to new infections being detected. It wasn't surprising domestically to see covid powers dialled back because it had essentially already happened a few times by that point (and the publicly accepted rationale was buying time for vaccines)
I don't think it's culture, I think it's timidness. The whole developed world could turn into 1984 literally tomorrow with zero problems, if only the upper class wished so. I should be playing coy at this point, saying how this is not something to be mentioned openly, but who the fuck among them reads this forgotten corner of the internet, 2rafa is the closest here.
I disagree entirely, I think American politicians are far more timid than Australian ones. Our political culture is utterly ruthless.
Yes, but part of that is the tools they have available. Trumps cabinet had the option of being obsequious or resigning, and without any real mechanism for removing him that didn't involve cosigning with the dems, they spent their energies on ever more creative legal theories on his criminal immunity as if he's Louis XVI. Australian politics proves if you give a politician a knife, they'll happily stick it someone's back, and while they can obviously get a bit stab-happy it's a genuine boon to have the privileges of leadership be conditional on the continual, sustained confidence of the led.
American journos are certainly more timid and status/access-conscious than Australians, which is why Jonathan Swan's interview stood out so much, and I'd definitely put that down to cultural over structural factors, so I'm sure there's a bit of both at play.
Reminds me of a presser I went to with Madeleine Albright and Julia Gillard in Sydney ages back. Questions addressed to Madeleine Albright, per her aide, should be prefaced only with 'Madam Secretary'. Questions directed to the prime minister, of course, were addressed to 'Julia'. It's hardly as simple as one country being more deferent to authority than the other.
For those that haven't seen it, here is a recent sitting Australian PM getting booted off a citizen's front lawn.
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yeah, Australia also lacks the paranoid style, but that's always been idiosyncratically american in the anglosphere, going back to Hofstadter's 1964 essay and probably beyond
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