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When politics doesn't address the big issues it's not surprising people lose faith in the system

<span>Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/Getty Images

Just three months after its re-election, the Morrison government playbook is emerging: a haphazard procession of pieces of “wedge-islation” to fill the empty space where an agenda would normally lie.

Whether it’s drug-testing welfare recipients, bashing unions or confecting attacks on religious freedom, the government is deploying incumbency to shrink the national agenda to a series of cage fights with those perceived to be on the margins.

It helps the prime minister’s self-serving narrative that he is the defender of the “quiet Australians”, placing the acid on Labor to alienate the centre or disappoint its already bereft base.

Related: Essential poll: majority of Australians support medevac or better asylum care

If politics were all there was to governing, you’d have to say “fair play”. Except this is not all there is and it’s in no way a fair play. Because the current round of parlour games is dominating our parliament at a time when Australia faces a series of existential challenges – environmental, economic and moral – that go to the core of our national interest.

After more than a decade of inaction, Australia is lagging in reaching its global commitments to reduce carbon emissions, looking to amp up rather than reduce both coal imports and local consumption of fossil fuels.

As our regions bear the brunt of climate change, the minister responsible for natural disasters has spent a week struggling to answer the most basic of questions on whether climate change is scientific fact or a socialist chimera.

While the United Nations works with world leaders to raise ambitions on Paris, Scott Morrison will not to be attending the conference even though he will be in the US at the time. The implication is clear: on the world stage our PM has nothing to offer.

Devoid of national leadership, the majority of Australians who have consistently recognised the threat appear to be switching off. If the figures in this weeks’ Essential Report are anything to go by, the entreaties of our children to act are likely to fall on deaf ears too.

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It’s a similar playbook as the global trade showdown between America and China gathers momentum, dragging Australia inevitably into geopolitical choices with profound long-term consequences. But for our government, the decision matrix is all politics.

Donald Trump is treated less as a menace and more as an inspiration. While revelations of Chinese influence inside the Morrison government are disingenuously batted away, the imperative to clean up foreign political donations as a condition for asserting national sovereignty is subservient to the imperative of not losing an early scalp.

The PM will feign outrage at ALP fundraising, but push back on any proposition that the challenge is more systemic than specific.

And all the while we turn a blind eye to the moral implications of our border policies as the souls languishing on Manus and Nauru sink further into the abyss. The majority support this wilful cruelty, either anaesthetised to the concept of indefinite detention or convinced the measures are required to save them from the scourge of people-smugglers (curiously the only time they’re seen as something approaching human).

To what extent do you support or oppose the Australian government’s policy of indefinite offshore detention?

With this ballast, the government will continue to prosecute its border security agenda, attempting to wind back the medevac procedures that purport to assert that even this cruelty should have limits.

And every step of the game is another “test for Labor”, another chance to score a point, while the job of governing for the long term is wilfully ignored.

My favourite piece of media analysis was written 35 years go by the late, great Douglas Adams, in one of the many sequels to his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy masterpiece. Having failed to warn humanity that Earth was about to be destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass, the world’s dolphin population has packed up and headed off to another dimension with the simple farewell message “so long, and thanks for all the fish”.

The story dominates global headlines for weeks, as the world’s leaders come to terms with the metaphysical implications of the amphibious diaspora. But over time, interest wanes until one day it drops off the news pages altogether. As the Times editor muses: what are we supposed to write – “dolphins still missing”?

Adams’ genius was to critique the decline of consequence before it was hyper-charged by clicks and shares. But in so many ways our politics reflects his post-dolphin world where we lack the curiosity and staying power to make sense of the big questions: “Earth Still Warming”, “Showdown Still Coming”, “Humans Still Rotting”.

When our politics can’t find a way of addressing the big issues is it really surprising that people lose faith in the system? And while there may be surface diversion in scandals and sideshows, the deep engagement between citizen and nation can only erode over time.

As Labor attempts to work its way back into the narrative, surely this must be the entry point: not just jumping to avoid the wedge but taking the hits as it works to build something bigger.

• Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential. He is the author of Webtopia – the Worldwide Wreck of Tech and How to Make the Net Work