Will we heed the warning signs from other countries?
By Mark Kenny June 13 2026 - 3:30pm
The lucky country continues to ride its good fortune. Violent unrest in Britain has given us a window into a still avoidable future which promises our ruin.
Violent protests unfolded in Belfast. Picture AAP
In plain view are the uncivilised consequences of allowing wider disappointment in harsh economic conditions to morph into persecution of minorities, and a departure from human rights.
But will we take heed?
Ugly riots there and the flight away from the major parties in both countries point to a deeper abandonment of the terms of engagement which have settled and safeguarded our respective communities.
With its parliamentary and cultural similarities, Britain's fracture is a real-time warning on the galloping risks when the temperature of political discourse is ratcheted up to rage-levels for partisan advantage. Incidents become flashpoints. Unrelated crimes get joined together. Mobs form. Morality is parked. Decency, truth and process, cast aside.
Australia should take careful note - that way lay only heartache, unhappiness and a vulnerable nation. Weakened inwardly and therefore across the region.
Generally, Australia has celebrated its egalitarianism and its tolerance, earning it the reputation as perhaps "the most successful multicultural country in the world".
Now it stands at a fork in the road, its peaceful post-war politics may have often under-performed, but now they seem to be unravelling, yielding to low instincts and a kind of careworn rancour.
A febrile tantrum polity is emerging, and its cynical progenitors have an entirely different Australia in mind.
Their aims are destructive and shallow, the very opposite of nation-building. The nostalgic allure of their pitch is emotional and their promise of a regained prosperity, fancifully thin.
For these self-anointed "true patriots", internal fragmentation is the whole game. In both countries and in others too, they oppose minimum wage increases, while siding with the mega-wealthy benefactors who fund them to fan divisions.
Draped in the flag, their love-of-country claims make a stark contrast with their boundless despair. It is a specious patriotism - hyper-masculine, white, angry and spittle-flecked.
Australia will be a very different country if they succeed.
How did it come to this? An enraged grievance disposition is worlds away from John Howard's ambition for Australians as "comfortable and relaxed". While his entreaty was always a dog-whistle against political correctness and identity politics, the emboldened right's new message is more overt: it insists you should be angry. Angry at "the worst government in Australia's history", angry at migrants taking your jobs, houses, parking spaces. Angry at the moon for everything from gender parity to toll roads. And of course, you should be incandescent when it comes to cosmopolitan guilt-trips like climate change.
This project of socio-political delamination is more advanced in Britain and the US where random incidents are quickly skewed for political advantage.
There's no shortage of fodder, particularly if the simple aim is to shift complaint to chaos, disdain to disorder, resentment to rebellion.
The wrongful arrest by Southampton Police of the actual victim of a fatal stabbing attack last December was one such case. Unquestionably, it was a tragedy.
But it was the release earlier this month of Police body-cam video of the bungled arrest that kicked things off.
Because the victim, Henry Nowak, was a white male and his murderer was Sikh, it has been used for political gain by Nigel Farage - leader of the Reform UK Party - and seized upon even beyond Britain by hard-right zealots with enormous power including Elon Musk, Vice President JD Vance (no less).
None of these men has any role to play in the matter but their enormous reach and influence in the UK has helped to energise protests which have seen police attacked, migrants assaulted and death threats issued.
Explicit calls by the father of the deceased were simply ignored by Farage and his new ultra-wealthy opportunist competitor, Rupert Lowe - a Reform UK defector who has started his own little passion party, Restore Britain.
"We want to use Henry's heartbreaking story to make change for the better," the actual grieving father said. "We do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension".
What have the populist leaders and their handmaidens in the press done to respect these dignified goals? Nothing. Musk asserts, that migrants break more laws than non-migrants and agreed with a simple "yes" to the claim that "woke policing" had killed Henry Nowak.
Then came Belfast a week back where phone camera vision of a Sudanese national attacking another man with a knife, slotted well into the anti-migrant narrative. It went viral, prompting an upwelling of angry men in balaclavas ransacking houses, cars, and setting things alight, a bus included.
The family of the assaulted man had also pleaded for calm saying, "we do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility".
Again, these admirable sentiments were ignored by those eyeing political gains. Indeed, using personal tragedy to divide people and fuel hostility is the modus operandi of populist opportunists.
Are we immune? For years now, ASIO boss Mike Burgess has been warning of the pre-eminent danger of far-right extremism.
In today's anti-establishment atmosphere, it is no stretch to imagine something sparking violence here, irrespective of the facts. It's a warning.
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
