The Minefield

In a speech to the National Press Club, Health Minister Mark Butler announced a series of sweeping changes that the federal government will make to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).In the thirteen years since it was legislated, the growth of the NDIS has surpassed all expectations. By 2030, the Productivity Commission projected that the scheme would cover around 550,000 people and cost about $40 billion. This year there are already 760,000 people on the scheme at a cost of $50 billion. On the current trajectory, by the end of the decade there will be 900,00 people on the NDIS and it will cost $70 billion per year — this would represent a greater expenditure than Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme put together.Concerns over the affordability of the NDIS are nothing new, and since returning to government Labor has repeatedly indicated their intention to curb its growth (even if, while in opposition, they resisted the Coalition’s efforts to do the same). But in an economy threatened by high inflation and at a time of increasing cost-of-living pressures — from fuel and food to housing — it is understandable that the federal government would feel a certain urgency to bring the NDIS under control, not least for the sake of the long-term viability of the scheme.And yet, what was telling about Butler’s speech was the way he proceeded to justify the radical changes the government has in store for the NDIS — which include removing around 160,000 people from the scheme by 2030 and reducing the projected annual cost by $15 billion. He swiftly pivoted from its long-term viability to its declining “community support, or social licence”.Citing research conducted by Talbot Mills, Butler claimed that 70 per cent of Australians think the NDIS has “gotten too large and struggles with dodgy providers” and that 60 per cent think the scheme is “broken”. He went on to detail mistakes in design and “structural flaws” that make the NDIS susceptible to fraud. He drew particular attention to criminal behaviour on the part of unaccredited “third-party” service providers and neglect by unqualified support workers.Given the dearth of qualified, registered, sufficiently committed carers, it was perhaps inevitable the NDIS would become “a soft target for shonks and rorters”, as Butler described them. It is, frankly, baffling that there wouldn’t be tighter government regulation over who could qualify to be paid to provide such support in situations that demand attentiveness and care.But some of the criticism that is now being levelled at the design of the NDIS threatens to besmirch its original moral genius: the provision of support to those with a disability in the form of personalised budgets, such that those in need of care would be accorded the dignity of “choice and control” over the form their care would take. Which is to say: it turned people with a disability from those for whom everything must be done, those who are a societal “problem” needing to be solved, and who must rely on the “good graces” of others; to those who are rightfully accorded agency in their own pursuits on an equal basis with other Australians.While this approach effectively created a competitive “disability services market” over which there has been far too little oversight, such a market is also the condition of possibility for the type of agency and equality the NDIS promises.This raises a number of dangers lurking beneath the government’s proposed reforms. In addition to the inherent danger that the expressed intention to reduce the number of people covered by the NDIS will see some people denied the care and support they are entitled to, there are a range of unintended moral consequences that accompany the reputational damage done to the NDIS itself.If we accept that the NDIS is noble if flawed, that it was a worthy aspiration for a nation like ours and represents a tremendous collective achievement which nonetheless needs to be placed on sustainable and just footing — the question becomes: how can the federal government address the “structural flaws” and escalating costs without undermining public faith in the NDIS itself?Guest: Jennifer Smith-Merry is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellow and Professor of Health and Social Policy in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Sydney.You can read Professor Smith Merry’s reflections on the moral risks and consequences that accompany the federal government’s NDIS reforms, on ABC Religion and Ethics.—THE MINEFIELD — Live at the Sydney Writers’ Festival24 May 2026“The Return of Nationalism and the End of Democracy”With each new election, geopolitical deal and technological advancement, it seems like the ideals of democracy are slipping away. In this special live recording of ABC Radio National’s The Minefield, hosts Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens discuss the state of democracy today with Canadian podcaster and political scientist David Moscrop.When: Sunday, 24 May 2026, 4-5pmWhere: Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh, NSW, 2015To get tickets: https://www.swf.org.au/program/festival-2026/abc-the-minefield-live—UPCOMING EPISODE: CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S “DOCTOR FAUSTUS”Expressions like “deal with the devil”, “selling one’s soul” and “Faustian bargain” are woven through our language. And popular culture is filled with variations on the unsavoury theme of attaining wealth, fame and pleasure by permanently corrupting one’s soul.In the third week of May, Waleed and Scott will be turning their attention to the source of these tropes: Christopher Marlowe’s play “Doctor Faustus”. It was first performed in 1592, just a year before Marlowe’s own untimely death.It is neither a long nor an overly complicated play, but it is powerful and ethically rich. We will be discussing the so-called “A-Text” of Marlowe’s play, revised in 1604. We hope you’ll join us in reading the play beforehand.

Ever since the eighteenth century, there has been a prevailing belief that mutually beneficial commercial relationships between nations provide a powerful disincentive to international conflict.Montesquieu perhaps put it best in his Spirit of the Laws (XX.1-2):“Commerce cures destructive prejudices, and it is an almost general rule that everywhere there are gentle mores, there is commerce and that everywhere there is commerce there are gentle mores … The natural effect of commerce leads to peace. Two nations that trade with each other become reciprocally dependent; if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling, and all unions are founded on mutual needs.”After the devastation of the First and Second World Wars, the principle that commerce is conducive to peace was the guiding philosophy behind the establishment of some of our vital international institutions. And even if its implementation has been inconsistent and most of the economic benefits have tended to flow upward toward wealthier nations, the belief was that such disparities represent a fault in design not in the animating principle itself. We should remember, for instance, the role interdependence played in thawing Cold War antipathies. As West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt told US President Jimmy Carter in 1980 regarding Germany’s decision to develop a joint energy policy with the Soviet Union, “those engaged in trade with each other do not shoot at one another”.But the practices of interdependence and “oil diplomacy” that emerged from energy crises of 1973 and 1979 paradoxically reinforced the reality of a further source of instability — one that has become especially pronounced in 2022 and again in 2026, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the current conflict in the Middle East. And that is what Michael LaBelle calls the use of energy as a “weapon of war”, in which assertions of state sovereignty intentionally disrupt relationships of energy interdependence in order to inflict economic pain.This leaves nations like Australia — which is both a major energy exporter (of LNG and the critical materials for solar panels, among other things) and extremely reliant on fuel imports for our own energy needs — vulnerable to disruptions in the global supply chain as the result of international conflict. When this sense of vulnerability translates into higher fuel costs or uncertain supply, and when it accentuates an already palpable sense of rising unaffordability, it can be a catalyst for democratic instability and popular resentment.Even as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese acknowledges the reality of Australia’s dependence on other countries for our fuel needs by making diplomatic trips to Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei, he has also stressed the need to reduce that dependence: “The Middle East conflict has reminded us of … the need to make more things [in Australia], of the need to not be at the end of supply chains and to be less vulnerable to global events.”For many, becoming “less vulnerable” means pursuing greater “energy sovereignty”, or even “energy nationalism”. But what would that pursuit entail? Some insist it means a turn to far greater reliance on renewables; for others, the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Act (EPBC) has denied Australia access to its own oil reserves. And then there is the vexed question of the balance between Australia’s LNG exports and its domestic reserves. But on top of all this is the likelihood that greater “energy sovereignty” will likely prove more costly to voters.The tension between these three elements — the benefits of interdependence, the dangers of vulnerability to global supply chains, and the domestic costs of greater self-reliance — presents one of the most vexing problems of our time.Guest: Hamish McKenzie, Deputy Program Director of Grattan Institute’s Energy and Climate Change program.—UPCOMING EPISODE: CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S “DOCTOR FAUSTUS”Expressions like “deal with the devil”, “selling one’s soul” and “Faustian bargain” are woven through our language. And popular culture is filled with variations on the unsavoury theme of attaining wealth, fame and pleasure by permanently corrupting one’s soul.In the third week of May, Waleed and Scott will be turning their attention to the source of these tropes: Christopher Marlowe’s play “Doctor Faustus”. It was first performed in 1592, just a year before Marlowe’s own untimely death.It is neither a long nor an overly complicated play, but it is powerful and ethically rich. We will be discussing the so-called “A-Text” of Marlowe’s play, revised in 1604. We hope you’ll join us in reading the play beforehand.

Within days of the commencement of the war that has enveloped the Middle East — and that continues to severely disrupt global energy supplies — a familiar pattern began to emerge in some of the world’s most prosperous democracies. Much as they did at the outset of the pandemic, people began stockpiling. Then, it was toilet paper and food; this time, it’s fuel. In cities across Australia, long lines formed outside petrol stations and tensions flared as motorists seized their opportunity to fill not just their cars, but jerry cans as well.Since then, the fears that motivated this behaviour have only heightened as the war goes on, petrol prices sharply rise and “not in use” signs appear on petrol pumps. The federal and state governments have already introduced measures designed soften the economic blow of significantly more expensive fuel. And while the prospect of rationing fuel reserves remains some distance away — at this stage, at least — the Prime Minister is nonetheless urging Australians not to use “more fuel than you need”.It is nonetheless telling that the mere possibility of fuel rationing has seemingly sent a chill down the nation’s collective spine. The prospect of government restrictions on petrol is tailormade to the exacerbate the underlying conditions of distrust, division and resentment, and to make the parties who are most adept at harnessing that resentment, that distrust, more attractive still.There is something here that is eerily reminiscent to the popular backlash to US President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech to the nation, with its modest request for voluntary sacrifices in the face of a similar energy crisis:“And I’m asking you for your good and for your nation’s security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense — I tell you it is an act of patriotism.”Carter’s exhortation proved wildly unpopular then, and there is every reason to wonder whether similarly voluntary measures would be politically costly now.This presents us with a dilemma. We’ve long known that liberal democracies are averse to sacrifice, and that the basest yet most effective commentary on federal budgets divides the population into “winners” and “losers”. We know that economic growth is the precondition of political stability. Does this mean that liberal democracy is, fundamentally, a politics for times of prosperity? Is the corollary, then, that, during times of scarcity and sacrifice, the majority of the electorate revert to being populists?For John Rawls, one of the defining features of a society dedicated to “justice as fairness” is the agreement among citizens to bear each other’s burdens, “to share one another’s fate”. The challenge, then, is how to inculcate those just dispositions — we could call them the habits or virtues constitutive of democratic morality — such that, during times of scarcity, we do not turn habitually to fear, envy and self-interest. For when that happens, citizens soon become competitors, and neighbours become threats.There is every reason to believe that intermittent energy crises will be a feature of our common future. If our social commitments are this fragile in times of prevailing prosperity, what will become of them in the face of shared hardship?Guest: Melanie White is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales.

It’s like déjà vu all over again. After launching a devastating but limited series of strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and against the nation’s top military leaders and nuclear scientists in June last year, the United States and Israel recommenced hostilities against Iran at the end of February.The objectives of this ‘war’ are similar — to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities and remove the senior leadership of the Islamic Republic regime — but its implementation is more thoroughgoing, more open-ended, more uncontainable, and more problematic in terms of its basis in international law.There is near consensus among international law experts that the US-Israeli attacks on Iran come in violation Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. And yet neither the United States nor Israel seem interested in justifying their actions in terms of their legality (unlike their “middle power” allies, who are intent on using the language of “collective self-defence”). In its place are assertions of power, of unassailable might, of moral legitimacy, of “good and evil”, of an “intolerable threat” posed by Iran.The casual way that international law has been cast off in the conflict that is spreading across the Middle East raises pressing and pertinent questions about the moral considerations that undergird international law itself.Guest: Tamer Morris is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney, where he focusses on international law, United Nations peacekeeping and international humanitarian law. You can read his penetrating article on the illegality and (il)legitimacy of the Iran war on ABC Religion and Ethics.

Over the course of this Ramadan series, we are exploring the contours of a cardiocentric conception of the moral life. The notion of the primacy of the heart goes back three millennia: it finds expression in the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, and in the philosophy of Aristotle; it pervades the pages of the sacred texts and subsequent traditions of Judaism and Islam — and even now, its remnants persist in our everyday speech, as if to remind us of an older wisdom.In this broader conception, the heart is a kind of physio-spiritual organ which, at once, coordinates the body’s movements by providing its orientation within and opens the person to moral realities without. A central feature of “the heart”, then, is its capacity for moral responsiveness. The heart is not all there is to the moral life — there is moral reasoning, and there are moral obligations — but it may not be a stretch to say that “the heart” is the moral life’s indispensable element. In a hadith, Muhammad is reported to have said: “There is a piece of flesh in the body if it becomes good the whole body becomes good but if it gets spoilt the whole body gets spoilt and that is the heart.”Last week, we touched briefly on the fear that is often expressed in Islam of the heart being “sealed off”, rendered impervious to divine wisdom or moral appeal. Within the Jewish tradition, this fear is expressed in terms of the heart being “hardened” (literally “toughened” or “strengthened”). In both traditions, this condition is most particularly associated with the figure of the Pharaoh of Egypt (see, for instance, Exodus 7:13, 22; 8:16; 9:24; Qurʾān 10:88). He is not, and cannot be, responsive to the divine appeal — and for that reason, he is damned.Because the worst thing that can happen to a heart is for it become hardened, Pharaoh acts as a cautionary figure (see Deuteronomy 15:7). Through his repeated refusals, his heart toughens to the point that it grows impervious — at which point, his heart is given over to what is called in the rabbinic tradition “the evil impulse”. As Rav Assi puts it in the Talmud (Sukka 52a): “At first the evil impulse is as thin as a spider’s gossamer, but in the end it is as thick as a cart-rope.”It is unsurprising, then, that in the we often find prayers in the Jewish tradition (which characterises prayers themselves as “work of the heart”) asking to be kept from having a “hard heart” and to be granted “an understanding heart” — literally, a listening or responsive heart).In a time like ours, when the temptation to refuse or fail to see others as fully human — as making some claim on our sympathy, our compassion, as requiring from us some hesitation — is everywhere apparent, what would it mean to cultivate an “understanding/responsive heart”? What can we do to avoid a “hardened heart”?Guest: Avril Alba is Professor of Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation at the University of Sydney.

Judging by the way we use the word in everyday speech, we intuitively know what we mean when we refer to “the heart”. We are most often gesturing toward the essence of a thing, its core, what you reach once you strip everything non-essential away.That idea is very much in keeping with what we do each year during the month of Ramadan: we try to put wider concerns and contentious debates in politics, society and culture to the side in order to focus on some of the more fundamental dispositions and practices that sustain and deepen the moral life — essential things that we frequently neglect in our haste and agitation.But, of course, that’s not the only way we use the word “heart”. It’s also a reference to what is truest about us, our interior orientation, what we want and value, sometimes despite our attempts to present ourselves otherwise or dissemble what secretly resides within. When we use terms like “heartfelt” or “heart-to-heart”, aren’t we talking about a deeper kind of emotion or a more sincere or authentic kind of conversation, one in which certain conventions or forms of conventionalised self-presentation have been set aside?The idea of the centrality of the heart is a very old one, stretching back to the ancient cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China. But it was Aristotle in the fourth century BCE who gave the concept of ‘cardiocentrism’ its most thoroughgoing articulation. He considered the heart to be the organising principle of the body — its primary organ, its ‘archē’. The heart is the location of the soul and the source of the body’s heat; it is the organ that receives sensory stimuli from without and directs the body’s movements from within. He thus conceived of the heart as constituting, at once, the seat of intelligence, emotion, will, desire and sensation, and the inherent (or efficient) cause of the body’s unity, integrity and coordination.This cardiocentric conception would eventually be taken up in the High Middle Ages by theologians and philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averröes), Al-Ghazālī, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, and even in the seventeenth century by English physician William Harvey.While it is no longer credible as a psycho-physiological theory, it is nonetheless striking how the centrality of the heart continues to pervade our language and moral sensibilities. Even now, “the heart” seems to possess a kind of double-aspect, it faces simultaneously in two directions: it stands for our inner-most selves (consider the term “heart of hearts”); it is also that which makes us receptive to moral realities or truths outside of ourselves. As Stephen Darwall puts it, “the heart” refers to: “the cluster of emotional capabilities and susceptibilities that fit one for emotional connection: dispositions to feel joy, grief, sadness, fear and distress for others, gratitude, trust, love …”.Perhaps it is not a stretch to say that the moral life is cardiocentric, even though our physiology is not. Doesn’t this suggest that the health of our “hearts” should be a matter of moral, not just physical, concern?Guest: Stephen Darwall is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of a number of landmark works of modern moral philosophy — including, chiefly, The Second-Person Standpoint and, more recently, The Heart and Its Attitudes.

One of the common laments we heard last November, as Australia marked the fiftieth anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam government, was that Australian politics has lost its ambition — that the Labor Party, in particular, no longer had the stomach to take big risks and pursue sweeping reforms. The very act of celebrating the audacity of Gough Whitlam, it seemed, was designed to deliver a stinging rebuke to the moderation of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.There is, of course, a compelling counterargument that can be made. Voters tend not to reward ambitious proposals for reform — especially not from opposition, as both John Hewson and Bill Shorten learned — and they will sooner withdraw support from an incumbent government than vest it with confidence and a broad mandate. Voters’ fear of finding themselves on the wrong side of the “winners/losers” ledger is just too great. The decline of centrist political parties, the fragmentation of the electorate and the rise of opportunistic electoral coalitions around sometimes incommensurable, often inchoate grievances, moreover, has made it easier for political entrepreneurs and the parties of grievance amass influence.The French political philosopher Pierre Rosanvallon characterised this as the politics of rejection, as the exercise of “negative sovereignty”, as the aggregation of discontent — and, as he puts it: “Rejection is the simplest thing to aggregate. Indeed, all rejections are identical, regardless of what may have motivated them.” Put otherwise, it’s easier to get to “No” than it is to “Yes”.Albanese is clearly attuned to these political realities. At the 2022 election, he was the beneficiary of widespread disaffection with Scott Morrison and of his own self-presentation as an inoffensive, steady, safe pair of hands. He watched the Voice referendum come undone through the aggregation of rejection. In 2025, Labor’s large parliamentary majority owed plenty to Australian voters’ disdain for Donald Trump, and Peter Dutton’s unwise efforts to lash himself to Trump’s mast in order to reap the benefits from his political tailwinds.Since the attacks on 7 October 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza, Albanese has assiduously tried to walk a middle-path through a deeply divided society, making important concessions to each side (including recognition of a Palestinian state) and appealing to the democratic virtues of common decency and mutual respect. His accession to call a royal commission into antisemitism after the Bondi massacre and the haste with which hate speech legislation was pushed through parliament are, perhaps, the exceptions that prove the general rule.Everything Albanese has done as Prime Minister seems to have been geared toward promoting a more inclusive, more cohesive society through incremental changes.During his second term, Albanese has benefited from a Coalition in disarray, that no longer seems capable of or willing to paper over the philosophical and temperamental differences between them. Under Sussan Ley, the Liberals are more of a centre-right party, even as rivals within her party and her erstwhile Coalition partners are seeking to position themselves to reap the electoral gains from the surge in support for One Nation.Deep social and ideological divisions — over Gaza, immigration, housing affordability, intergenerational wealth disparity, racial discrimination, religious freedom — are now poised to embolden the political extremes in this country. As it already has in the United States, the UK, Germany and France, the political centre is under threat from the unyielding (and often irresponsible) demands of grievance. And after years of incremental changes and promises of progress, the electoral bill is coming due.The question now becomes whether moderation, inclusivity, decency and incremental change are still political virtues, or are they electoral liabilities?Guest: Sean Kelly is a columnist for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and a regular contributor to The Monthly. He is a former advisor to Labor prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. He is the author, most recently, of Quarterly Essay 100, The Good Fight: What Does Labor Stand For?

The massacre at Bondi Beach on 14 December 2025 — during which two gunmen targeted a group of Jewish Australians who had gathered to mark the first day of Hanukkah, killing 15 people — violently punctuated two years of escalating antisemitic incidents.Bondi was an act of terror that realised the worst fears of many Australian Jews, who had seen their synagogues and restaurants torched, their houses, schools and electorate offices vandalised, and members of their community ostracised, harassed and abused on city streets, in cultural institutions, on university campuses.Adding insult to grievous injury was the fact that so many Australian Jews had expressed their feeling of being estranged and afraid within their own country, only to have their fears routinely minimised or dismissed.Horrific events of this kind invariably elicit a collective reckoning. What are the contributing factors that created the conditions in which something like this could occur, and what can be done to ensure nothing like it happens again? For many Australians, the act of discriminatory violence at Bondi represented a four-fold failure:the inability of police and intelligence services to prevent the attack;the laxness of existing gun control laws;the inadequacy of laws involving hate speech, hate crimes and hate groups;the unwillingness to take the fears and experiences of members of the Jewish community seriously in the face of rising antisemitism.The first and last of these failures will be the particular focus of the recently announced royal commission. But the Albanese government was intent on moving quickly to address the second and third by recalling parliament to pass new legislation. In so doing, the federal government confronted some of the dangers involved in legislating in the aftermath of a national tragedy.Not only are there the general risks of overreach, of scapegoating, or of unintended consequences due to laws that are written either too specifically or too vaguely. There is also the role that the emotion can play in attempting to craft a legislative response to the loss of these particular lives — which included someone who survived the Holocaust, some who died protecting others, rabbis, parents, grandparents and siblings, a 10-years-old girl.But then there is also the fact that this mass shooting took place in the context of a period of heightened social conflict and emotion over the war in Gaza following the 7 October 2023 attacks. There can be little doubt that the large public displays of anger at the State of Israel and grief over the killing of tens of thousands of men, women and children in Gaza contributed to the climate of hostility experienced by many Jewish Australians — whether they supported the actions of the Netanyahu government or not.So it seemed inevitable that the tidal wave of sorrow and remorse over the victims of Bondi would slam into the wall of anger and grief over the devastation of Gaza — to say nothing of concerns, on the left and the right, that new hate speech laws would supress or criminalise forms of robust political expression that should otherwise be protected. For the new laws to pass, something would have to give.In the end, on Tuesday, the federal government was able to pass two significantly amended bills — one involving gun control, the other addressing hate speech, hate crimes and hate groups; the first with support from the Greens, the second with members of the Coalition. The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Bill 2026 focusses now on the grounds on which an organisation could be specified as a “prohibited hate group”, an expanded definition of “hate crimes”, new visa refusal powers and the creation of an “aggravated grooming offence” aimed at “religious official[s] or other spiritual leader[s]” who advocate violence or teach hate to those under the age of 18.What the public and political debate over these laws has exposed, in the process, is a fundamental lack of agreement over the nature and harms of “hate speech”, or understanding of its effect on groups and individuals in a democratic and diverse society. We have also seen how risky it is to address hate speech simply by criminalising it.You can read Kath Gelber’s reflections on the first and final versions of the federal government’s hate speech laws on ABC Religion and Ethics (here and here).

Could a stand-up routine ever rise to the level of "art" — the kind of performance that rewards multiple viewings, whose humour grows and deepens, which contains subtleties waiting to be discovered? Enter US comedian John Mulaney with a 2017 comedy sketch. There is something undeniably enduring, timeless even about Mulaney's act.

There are few things more peculiar to a person than their preferences; why they favour one genre of music or one style of writing over another. And in our world of endless digital reproduction, we increasingly rely on recommendation algorithms to curate or triage our encounters with culture. But algorithms tend toward massification; they rule out the possibilities of both aesthetic achievement and sheer surprise.

It is one of the casualties of democratic politics that citizens rarely remain indifferent about the governments they elect. By investing politicians with their hopes or fears, their aspirations and anxieties, voters ensure that they will take the performance of a government personally. This is why politics cannot be emptied of emotion: electors and the elected are bound together by filaments of expectation and accountability, and the conditions of their common life depend on the maintenance of those delicate affective bonds.But when contempt, corruption, greed, incompetence, inattentiveness, unresponsiveness, popular suspicion and outright violence are allowed to eat away at these bonds, it is the political and civil life of the nation as a whole that suffers. For in such conditions, good governance becomes impossible — either because politicians habitually treat the electorate with disdain or because voters are so aggrieved that they gravitate towards those who will give voice to their discontent.That’s why it is imperative to do what can be done to strengthen the political, civic and moral bonds that connect citizens with one another and governors with the governed.How might we cultivate the capacity to imagine that politics can, in fact, be a means of pursuing and achieving the good, that there are virtues inherent to the political vocation? It may well begin with the recovery of an almost pastoral vision of politics as what emerges out of a people’s concern to care for their common life.It is just such an imagination that is richly on display in a series of murals painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti on the walls of the Sala dei Nova (the Hall of the Nine, otherwise known as Sala della Pace, the Hall of Peace) in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico between 1337 and 1340. Lorenzetti’s commission was at once to visualise the philosophical undergirding of the political system of Siena under the stewardship of nine self-selecting governors, and to remind those dispensing justice and those seeking it of the stakes of their deliberations.Lorenzetti evidently drew on the political vision of the Nine — their own understanding of the virtues that are inherent to the vocation of good governance — and he/they drew liberally from the tradition of soulcraft/statecraft from the Italian renaissance, as well as from Seneca and Cicero, Augustine and Aquinas. The question is whether we, in our time, with our resources, can recover an analogously compelling vision of guarded optimism, of mutual accountability, of prudence and wisdom, such that we, too, can articulate the conditions in which politics can be a force for good.

It feels like, for so much of this year, in one form or another, we’ve been trying to count the costs that technological innovations are exacting on our humanity — how AI, in particular, is altering (perhaps irrevocably) our relationship to words, to writing, to beauty, to creativity, to taste, to work, to the natural world, to our interior life.From the very beginning, our concern has been that the allure of convenience — or, better, of frictionlessness — is making us overlook or fail to reflect adequately upon what is lost when certain forms of difficulty are eliminated from our lives. After all, difficulty can be one of the ways we register the true value an activity. To lose the difficulty is to lose precisely what it is that makes the pursuit worthwhile in the first place.A perfect example of this dilemma presents itself in Apple’s announcement that its new AirPods would include a “Live Translation” feature that would allow users who speak English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese to understand each other (with the promise of more languages to follow). Particularly for travellers, this technology promises to break down the language barrier and alleviate the stress of not being able to understand one’s taxi driver or waiter. It purports to be the digital equivalent of Douglas Adams’s “Babel fish” from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — your own private in-ear interpreter.Now, there are questions about the AI technology — and the large language models that undergird it — that give plenty of reasons to doubt the adequacy or accuracy of the automated translation. As anyone who has tried Google Translate knows, the translation-by-prediction-and-equivalence that machine learning is capable of producing is most often shallow, error-ridden and has a tin-ear for idiom, allusion or humour.But let’s leave those drawbacks to the side for now, and suppose that the technology will eventually be capable of producing fluent, largely accurate translations from one language into another. This still doesn’t overcome the importance of friction, of difficulty, the experience of being suspended between, not just languages, but also cultures and conceptual worlds, and the patterns and rhythms of expression that cannot easily be separated from the meaning of the sentences themselves. At best, automated translation can provide the illusion of, or a kind of ersatz substitute for, “understanding”.To translate from one language into another — particularly when what is involved is poetry or literature — is not merely to find a series of relatively accurate equivalences; rather, it is to find oneself suspended between two worlds, acutely aware of precisely what is not translatable from one language into the other. And yet it is just this experience that at once exposes the limits of our own modes of expression and thinking, and opens up the possibility of creation, discovery and surprise.If translation becomes one more of those difficult tasks we are content to sacrifice on the altar of convenience, we may find that the difficulty is not the only thing we lose.You can read Ross Benjamin’s article “The Costs of Instant Translation” in The Atlantic, and his reflections on translating Daniel Kehlmann’s novel “The Director” on ABC Religion & Ethics.

Ever since 2023, a class of GPL-1 based drugs — which for two decades were used to treat type 2 diabetes — have been heralded as a “revolution in weight loss” and signalling the “end of obesity”. While these drugs go by different names, they’ve become popularly grouped under the shorthand “Ozempic”.It’s no exaggeration to say that Ozempic has become a cultural phenomenon. Millions of people in the United States, Australia, South Korea, the UK, the EU take semaglutide injections, not to treat diabetes, but in order to reduce their hunger and eliminate what is sometimes called “food noise”.Obesity has long been moralised — associated with laziness, ill-disciplined eating, poor diet, a general lack of self-control. But expensive weight loss drugs like Ozempic have, to date, exacerbated the class dimension of obesity. This was nicely captured in a 2024 South Park episode (called “The End of Obesity”), in which Cartman is denied a prescription because the drug isn’t covered by insurance and his mother can’t afford it; as a consolation, the doctor recommends that he listens to more Lizzo. Cartman’s response: “Rich people get Ozempic, poor people get body positivity.”This begins to point to one of the most troubling aspects of the widespread use of weight loss drugs. It does not have to do with their use per se, or their further applications (to other health conditions or to treat other forms of addiction). Even the question of prohibitive cost may soon be partially resolved with plans underway to make some GPL-1 drugs more affordable.The more concerning issue is the cultural environment in which drugs like Wegovy or Mounjaro or Ozempic are now being taken up — cultures long preoccupied with dieting and weight loss, and which have elevated the physical aesthetic attributes of thinness, firmness, smoothness and vigour to the level of virtues, even moral demands. Conversely, obesity is stigmatised as ugliness, incontinence, laziness, a sign of servitude to cravings and bad habits.Such that, even when the sleek physical appearance achieved by means of, say, Ozempic, and has nothing to do with self-control or superior habits, its users continue to accrue the social benefits associated with thinness.The testimony of women and men, for instance, who have career or social opportunities open up to them after using Ozempic is, frankly, heartbreaking and often contemptible.If we want to laud the health benefits of weight loss drugs, and explore their application to help address other forms of harmful behaviour, that’s one thing. But to use such drugs to reinforce a kind of cultural aesthetic hierarchy is both troubling and ethically problematic.If you, or someone you know, is struggling with an eating disorder or with body image, support is available. You can call the Butterfly Foundation on 1800 33 4673.