Leadership lagging as crunchtime cometh

July 29, 2008

The share market loses $25 billion because the price of iron ore slumps from stratospheric to extortionate. The government is under siege over carbon, the very issue it was elected to tackle. Fear is everywhere. More people I know have declared themselves suffering from chronic depression in the last twelve months than in the other 38 years of my life. Alan Jones has prostate cancer. John Howard gets burgled.

Is it me or are things weird at the moment?

Here’s how I see it. Australia is going through a nasty adolescence, moving from its childhood rooted in late twentieth century optimism to the starker reality of the Crunch Time twenty first century, from the long boom to the long bust, from the lucky country to a lonely raft adrift on the seas of globalisation with nothing to cling to but its reserves of carbon.

The last decades of the twentieth century suited Australia. The country was literally lifted up and brought closer to the rest of the world by the crash in the price of air travel and telecommunications. The peace and prosperity of the post-Soviet era, and the explosion of economic activity from Asia and China all played to the country’s strengths.

Now we are looking at a scarier picture. Our oceans of coal, gas and oil have turned into poisonous threats to our competitiveness. The price of carbon energy is literally dragging us further away from our loved ones and business contacts overseas by the day. The turmoil overseas, both economic and political is terrifying and beyond our comprehension.

Exatraordinary times need extraordinary leadership. You just wonder whether a government that gets bogged down for over a month on discussions over 5 cents a litre on fuel is capable of delivering it, or, more to the point, whether a governance system that forces leadership to focus on such issues is capable of enabling such leadership. Cut through Mr Rudd, cut through.

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