Beat extremism by being more extreme

There is another name to add to the lengthening list of conservative, often anti-immigrant national leaders. Scott Morrison, the architect of Australia’s hardline asylum policies, became that country’s 30th prime minister when he replaced the moderate Malcolm Turnbull yesterday.

An active Evangelical Christian who opposes marriage equality, Morrison is Australia’s fifth prime minister in just over five years. Since 2010, four have lost office, but not at the ballot box. They were dumped by their own fractured parties. Just as in other democracies, instability leaning towards chaos has given extremists an opportunity they might not win through the ballot box.

Morrison joins Recep Erdogan, Benjamin Netanyahu, Viktor Orbán, Giuseppe Conte, Mateusz Morawiecki, Sebastian Kurz, Bashar al-Assad and the two unquestioned silverbacks in this gallery of reactionaries, Donald Trump and his benefactor, Vladimir Putin. That the chaos of Brexit may allow Boris Johnson, an opportunist unburdened by principle, join this list can hardly be a cause for celebration, either. Nor can Marine Le Pen’s climb in French polls — she won 46% of votes in a recent election.

Most of these men have a hard attitude towards immigrants and globalisation. They have not been shy about stoking latent fears, when a society feels under siege from others who live by principles diametrically opposed to their own. This has proved fertile ground for extremism, especially in Europe, where the well-intentioned plans of moderates, as epitomised by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, were swamped by the sheer number of those who sought refuge. Unless this issue, now a permanent feature of our world, is managed better, it will continue to fuel extremism.

That extremism is active on this island, though because of sectarianism rather than immigration. At midnight on Tuesday, Northern Ireland will set an unenviable record. It will usurp Belgium as the democracy with the longest peacetime period without a government. Belgium did not have an administration for 589 days at the turn of this decade, when Flemish and Walloon interests could not be reconciled. Just this week, former US senator George Mitchell warned that Stormont intransigence is a threat to peace. Should that peace collapse, extremists will — once again — exploit it.

If the rise of hardline leaders is disconcerting, the low-watt response of many governments, including our own, to the issues that encourage extremism is more disconcerting.

The candidacy of the flawed Hilary Clinton in the 2016 US election should have been the high watermark of liberal hubris, an arrogance Putin and Trump gleefully exploited, but there is little evidence that it was. Sadly, our government’s response to the great issues of the day is so underwhelming that it seems like a rabbit frozen in headlights. Our political culture seems so unaware of the frustration — quickly turning to anger — around a long list of issues ,that they have opened the door for our own Scott Morrison. What an abject failure that would be, just as we prepare to mark a centenary of our independence. We can do better; we must do better.