The Minefield

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.

One of the words we use to describe political authority gone wrong is "autocracy": which is to say, the concentration of power in a unitary figure who then exercises that power without countervailing constraints and for its own sake. To borrow an expression of St Augustine, autocracy is a form of political authority that curves in on itself.Because most citizens have a clear sense that governance ought to be for something beyond political self-interest or naked self-enrichment, we rightly take a dim view of politicians who are unmoved by the interests and opinions of their constituents. But, of course, only tyrants are prepared to present themselves as wholly disinterested in the lives of those over whom they rule.Autocrats don't claim to be in it for themselves; they typically insist that they represent, serve and fight for "the people" — but "the people" politically defined as those who truly belong to the nation, those who build and contribute, those who are loyal and patriotic. In short, those who can be encompassed by the political pronouns "us"/"we". Accordingly, autocrats also claim to be defending the nation and its interests against "they"/"them", who have no part or place in the nation's life and are therefore no voice in the conversation of politics.What is corrupting about autocratic rule, then, is not simply that it is "corrupt" in the conventional sense of using the affordances of political office for private gain. Rather, it is the way autocracy throws off the basic constraints that define political authority in a representative democracy, and thereby betrays its character.In democratic life, we are constantly being reminded of the contingency of political authority and its fundamental accountability. When autocratic power lays claim to the necessity of an unconstrainted mode of executive decision-making — most often in the face of some "emergency" which suspends the normal functioning of democratic scrutiny — it corrodes the conditions of democratic life, precisely because representative democracy reveals what political authority really is: contingent, correctable and inherently contestable.As George Kateb writes in "The Moral Distinctiveness of Representative Democracy": “political authority is suspect when undivided and thus untroubled by antithetical voices … when it moves too easily or takes shortcuts to accomplish its ends, or when it prevents appeals and second thoughts, or when it closes itself off in secrecy or unapproachability.”It is no stretch, then, to say that autocracy is a politics of contempt. It is contemptuous of deliberation and mutual accountability; it is contemptuous of expertise and the constraints of precedent; it is contemptuous of any notion that the source of one's legitimacy could be extrinsic to one's own self. Which is why, ultimately, autocracy is a form of contempt for the people.It is for this reason, perhaps, that autocracy depends so much on the aesthetics of power: spectacular performances of force mask the lack of substance beneath, designed as they to eliminate accountability and overwhelm deliberation.This episode of The Minefield was recorded in front of a live audience at Customs House in Brisbane as part of the University of Queensland's "Dialogues Across Difference" event series.Guest: M Gessen is an acclaimed and multi-award winning Russian-American journalist, author and activist, known for their influential writing on authoritarianism, human rights and LGBTQ+ issues — most notably in their columns for The New Yorker and The New York Times, and their books Surviving Autocracy and The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Gessen is a Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

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.

If there is something inherently suspicious about political appeals to “the heart” — which is to say, attempts to exploit unreflective prejudices and reactive emotions — then it is also true that a form of politics that is unresponsive to heart-felt appeals to a common humanity, to compassion, to decency, is dangerous.How can we maintain the precarious balance between a politics that trades cheaply on emotion, and one that both comes from and appeals to the heart?Guest: Christos Tsiolkas is the author of eight novels — Loaded, The Jesus Man, Dead Europe, The Slap, Barracuda, Damascus, 7 ½, The In-Between — and the short story collection, Merciless Gods. He is a playwright, screen writer, essayist, radio host and currently a film critic for The Saturday Paper. In September last year, he delivered the 2025 Ray Mathew Lecture at the National Library of Australia, on the topic “Fence-Sitting”.

Avril Alba, Professor of Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation, reflects on Jewish texts and thinkers like Primo Levi and Levinas. She discusses moral attentiveness, the risk of a heart becoming hardened, and how ritual, wonder and covenant work to keep the heart open. Short, thoughtful conversations link ethical witnessing, seeing the other and the inner life that sustains moral responsiveness.

Claire Zorn, award-winning novelist known for Better Days, talks about storytelling and imagination as ways to open the heart. She explores how fiction softens callousness and fosters empathy. Short reflections range from ritual and fasting to guarding the senses and practicing imaginative perspective-taking.

Stephen Darwall, Yale moral philosopher known for work on the second-person standpoint and moral emotions, joins to explore the heart as our moral core. He defines the heart as a syndrome of emotional capacities. He contrasts remorse and guilt, teases apart deontic versus heartfelt forgiveness, and discusses how vulnerability and heartfelt exchange transform moral perception.

One of the most unyielding aspects of life in the modern West is, perhaps, the ultimate value that we’ve come to accord to appearance. It is as though our essence, all that matters most about us as human beings, lies on the surface: our soul resides in our skin; how we look reveals who we truly are.Over the last three decades, this has become especially pronounced through our various forms, not so much of self-expression as self-creation — from hair removal (or recovery) to body art, from strict fitness regimens and body sculpting through to the widespread uptake of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs.None of these activities are wrong or detrimental in and of themselves. But when the gap between people is an ontological one — those who are self-creations are of a higher order than those who are still subject to the natural order — the result can be a hierarchy of beings whereby one is viewed with envy and the other with contempt. This can, of course, create its own drive toward conformity and belonging (experienced as an elevation in status) and the desire to escape social punishment, from shame.Fashion can work similarly. As W. David Marx puts it:“Fashion is a never-ending process of ‘chase and flight’. Low-status individuals chase high-status individuals by imitating their conventions, which forces elites to flee to new ones. Since this fleeing will lead to another round of chasing and then fleeing, fashion creates perpetual cultural change, with status serving as the motor.”Again, there is nothing inherently problematic about the desire to conform — which is to say, belong — or the complex cultural demands asserted by fashion. But when it becomes a form of tyranny, the criterion by which our social status is judged, and either fashion or its fashionable refusal becomes the primary means by which we express our sense of ‘self’, the effect can have a suffocating, rather than freeing, effect on our inner life.We partly acknowledge as much already in places like Australia in our insistence on school uniforms: for a particular period of our children’s lives, during which education, the cultivation of habits of learning, curiosity, discovery and surprise, takes precedence, we don’t want them judging others or being judged on the basis of what clothes they can afford. But taking ‘fashion’ out of the equation, we hope they will distinguish and express themselves in other ways. Which is to say: a certain denial of forms of individual expression (clothing) elevates everyone to a common level (community of learners) thereby enabling other ways to distinguish or express themselves (through the cultivation of interiority and sociality).Within certain traditions of moral philosophy, this could find an analogue in a kind of modesty of expression: call it a commitment to non-ostentatiousness, a certain understatedness, a reticence to draw attention to oneself in order that one’s actions may not distract attention from others. It is not invisibility so much as it is principled transparency: desiring that the gracious light of one’s dignified life and actions be the means by which others are seen as worthy objects of love and bearers of dignity.But this also has expressions in certain religious registers — as when a modest uniformity of appearance (such as the use of headcoverings, habits, robes and so on) signifies not so much the suppression of individuality as a common dedication and even the dignity of service to others or to the divine.Could this point us in the direction of ways that the preciousness of the individual — and the richness of the interior life — can be saved from the tyranny of cultural demands for individuality?

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?

If there is a single adjective that captures the difference, both in tone and in action, between Donald Trump’s first presidential term and his second, it’s “unconstrained”.Whatever limits might have been placed on his conduct, his designs, his instincts during his first administration — legal, congressional, electoral, conventional — now seem to have fallen away, leaving Trump emboldened to pursue a series of ambitions that he’s long harboured.Mass deportations by militarised agents, revenge against his political opponents, the extortion of purportedly unsympathetic institutions (most notably law firms and universities) and his own personal enrichment have, perhaps, been the most brazen of these pursuits. But over the last two months, a different kind of ambition has come into view: the desire for territorial expansion and absolute sway over the countries and territories of the western hemisphere.This first manifested itself in the Trump administration’s increasing fixation on Venezuela. It began as a series of nearly two dozen missile strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean that were purportedly carrying narcotics on behalf of drug cartels, then proceeded to the seizure of oil tankers departing Venezuela, and finally culminating in the brazen capture and arraignment of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro on drug trafficking charges.While Maduro’s corruption and brutality are notorious, and there is some precedent for the kind of case that is being brought against him, what was alarming was Trump’s clear interest in Venezuela’s oil reserves and his insistence on keeping Maduro’s unelected government in place under a care-taker leader, Delcy Rodríguez. His rationale was as brutal as it was clear: “if [Rodríguez] doesn’t do what’s right” — which is to say, what the Trump administration dictates — “she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro”. It’s no stretch to suspect that Maduro’s capture and prosecution was meant to communicate that same message to Venezuela’s neighbours.The imperial logic here would have been familiar to city-states of Athens or Rome: the rulers of conquered territories and peoples would be kept in place but reduced to vassals, and would pay for their survival by offering tribute (taxes, natural wealth, crops, slave labour) to enrich the centre. Failure to pay tribute would be met with lavish punishment. (Karl Marx famously called this the first expression of “the tributary mode of production” in pre-capitalist societies.)So successful was this Venezuela operation, and having been met with such little international resistance, Trump seemed emboldened to press his long-standing claim on the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland. This was the second shoe to drop, as it were. Like Venezuela, his desire for the United States to “own” Greenland was framed as a kind of international security imperative: “Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China … The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.” But upon meeting with resistance on the part of NATO nations — which Trump, unsurprisingly, interpreted as ingratitude (“I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States”) — his willingness to threaten coercion in the form of military force or punitive tariffs laid bare the underlying sense of territorial entitlement.In his justly praised speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered one response to Trump’s ambitions:“if great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from ‘transactionalism’ will become harder to replicate. Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships.”This was then reiterated in the determination of European leaders to resist Trump’s bullying tactics.But the prospect of what might be called hemispheric hegemony — the refusal of “great powers” to be constrained by the interests of what Joseph Goebbels called “crummy little states”, the “reorganisation of the world” along the lines of regional sway and each powerful nation being given “its own proper place” — has unsettling echoes not just of the Monroe Doctrine but of the Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan that signaled the end of the “tottering” and “effete” League of Nations.Are we justified in worrying about a similar disregard of law- or rules-based restraint?You can read Brendon O’Connor’s reflections on Trump’s posturing over Greenland on ABC Religion & Ethics.