You could be forgiven for thinking that there is a general pall of weariness across Western democracies. The continuing aftershocks of the late-century push for liberalisation and — more recently — the global financial crisis has bred generations of dislocated voters who seek answers outside of the limited solutions presented by centrist governance.
This provides ample opportunity for true progressive change, the signs of which were seen first across Europe and Latin America, and now the United States and the United Kingdom.
Jeremy Corbyn led an insurgent socialist movement from within the UK Labour Party that seems more at home with Clement Atlee's postwar program than the liberalism of Blairism.
In the US, Bernie Sanders seeks to rejuvenate the New Deal model of labour-centred consensus, which is almost entirely atrophied in the midst of corporate Third Way political economy.
Where's Australia? Nowhere to be seen, really. As Jason Wilson writes over at The Guardian, Australian politics is 'reactive and defensive', abrogating itself of any responsibility for real structural change in favour of keeping our post-GFC prosperity stable.
We face similar problems — the Australian Council of Social Service's 2015 report on inequality found a trend of growing wealth disparity not unlike that of other Western nations — but it's hard to imagine a radically progressive candidate emerging here.
There are, I think, a few reasons for this.
In both the Corbyn and Sanders campaigns a populist progressive movement found its roots in the dominant centre-left party. Corbyn came from within UK Labour and Sanders, though nominally an independent, is running for president on the Democratic ticket and has caucused with Democrats in the Senate for some time.
There have been progressive figures with platforms outside the status quo in the Australian Labor Party — Melissa Parke and Doug Cameron come to mind — but it is near-impossible to imagine them finding greater success within the hermetic confines of Labor's factional warzone.
And the Greens, the third force in Australian politics, aren't likely to buck the status quo. If anything, their messaging under Richard Di Natale hews closer to consensus governance than it ever has before.
Some of the leftward push globally, especially in the US, hinges on the corrupting influence of money in politics. Sanders rails against the enormous lobbying money enabled by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which effectively unbounded the amount of cash that could be poured into political campaigns.
Donations have at best an ancillary role in the Australian political psyche. Outside of major events, like New South Wales' ICAC debacle, it's hard to imagine a candidate making it the central issue of a popular movement.
There is another response to this new global mood. Figures of the Right, like Donald Drumpf in America and Nigel Farage in the UK, have redirected what are fundamentally economic grievances (offshoring, loss of income, joblessness) along nativist lines. Jim McDermott wrote here at Eureka Street that Drumpf and Sanders are like two sides of the same coin, candidates 'of dream, rather than practicalities'.
Our populist right starts and ends with Clive Palmer, who was unable to convert initial goodwill into any kind of lasting political program, and may not actually believe anything at all.
Though many analyses of Sanders and Drumpf as strange political bedfellows greatly overshoot the mark, there's some merit. The Economist suggested that white, uneducated working class men in wealthy countries have 'not adapted well to trade and technology', and are more damaged by the juddering pivot towards becoming service economies.
This is in many ways the base that both Drumpf and Sanders have activated — but whereas Sanders ultimately sees the degradation of the working class, Drumpf sees a deepening wound in white identity politics, especially around Mexican immigration. You can easily see the results.
Australia's economic politics are not quite so fractious along those lines. We weathered the GFC relatively unscathed, and the inequality that comes with globalised finance and economics has been kept in check by our heretofore solid welfare state. The ugly side of racialised economic politics manifests mostly in debates over housing and foreign investment.
And, if recent reports on 7/11's labour abuses are any indication, Asian immigrants are the ones slipping through the cracks of our industrial relations safeguards, with uniformly awful results.
What then, might an Australian Bernie Sanders look like, or fight for? If we are somewhat naïve to the degradation of social democracy elsewhere in the world, there are more pressing problems for progressives that have bubbled below the surface for some time.
We preside over one of the world's harshest border regimes, and both major political parties are in functional consensus on maintaining it. The economic gap between rich and poor pales in comparison to the one between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, who have suffered dispossession in all its forms since colonisation.
Any progressive movement, driven by young voters as has been the case elsewhere, would have to move in those areas first.
The world is in a state of upheaval against the status quo and the social and economic legacies of the 20th century. Australia, with its welfare state and resource economy, has been insulated from the worst of this. With our ossified political structures in mind, perhaps radical change should come from outside the system altogether.
J. R. Hennessy is a writer in Sydney. He is the deputy editor of Pedestrian Daily, writes on media and politics, and tweets @jrhennessy.