Great Expectations

Australians are unhappy with their politicians, and Laura Tingle argues in this Quarterly Essay that the reasons lie deep in the national character. Her subject is the country's long-held belief that government should look after its people, a hope she traces back to the colony's beginnings and that has survived every change in the wider world.

Tingle follows how this expectation has played out since the deregulation of the 1980s. Governments have stepped back from many of their old roles, yet citizens still want them to do more. She looks at how successive prime ministers, from Hawke to Gillard, dealt with that gap. Keating tried to shift what people expected, Howard built on a sense of entitlement, and Rudd aimed to rethink the federation.

The essay argues that public anger has become a lasting condition rather than a passing mood, and that the era of entitlement may be ending. It asks what a different kind of politics could look like, and whether a leader who rides that anger into office could ever meet the expectations voters bring with them.