The Minefield

Ever since the eighteenth century, there has been a prevailing belief that mutually beneficial commercial relationships between nations provide a powerful disincentive to international conflict.
Montesquieu perhaps put it best in his Spirit of the Laws (XX.1-2):
“Commerce cures destructive prejudices, and it is an almost general rule that everywhere there are gentle mores, there is commerce and that everywhere there is commerce there are gentle mores … The natural effect of commerce leads to peace. Two nations that trade with each other become reciprocally dependent; if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling, and all unions are founded on mutual needs.”
After the devastation of the First and Second World Wars, the principle that commerce is conducive to peace was the guiding philosophy behind the establishment of some of our vital international institutions. And even if its implementation has been inconsistent and most of the economic benefits have tended to flow upward toward wealthier nations, the belief was that such disparities represent a fault in design not in the animating principle itself. We should remember, for instance, the role interdependence played in thawing Cold War antipathies. As West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt told US President Jimmy Carter in 1980 regarding Germany’s decision to develop a joint energy policy with the Soviet Union, “those engaged in trade with each other do not shoot at one another”.
But the practices of interdependence and “oil diplomacy” that emerged from energy crises of 1973 and 1979 paradoxically reinforced the reality of a further source of instability — one that has become especially pronounced in 2022 and again in 2026, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the current conflict in the Middle East. And that is what Michael LaBelle calls the use of energy as a “weapon of war”, in which assertions of state sovereignty intentionally disrupt relationships of energy interdependence in order to inflict economic pain.
This leaves nations like Australia — which is both a major energy exporter (of LNG and the critical materials for solar panels, among other things) and extremely reliant on fuel imports for our own energy needs — vulnerable to disruptions in the global supply chain as the result of international conflict. When this sense of vulnerability translates into higher fuel costs or uncertain supply, and when it accentuates an already palpable sense of rising unaffordability, it can be a catalyst for democratic instability and popular resentment.
Even as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese acknowledges the reality of Australia’s dependence on other countries for our fuel needs by making diplomatic trips to Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei, he has also stressed the need to reduce that dependence: “The Middle East conflict has reminded us of … the need to make more things [in Australia], of the need to not be at the end of supply chains and to be less vulnerable to global events.”
For many, becoming “less vulnerable” means pursuing greater “energy sovereignty”, or even “energy nationalism”. But what would that pursuit entail? Some insist it means a turn to far greater reliance on renewables; for others, the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Act (EPBC) has denied Australia access to its own oil reserves. And then there is the vexed question of the balance between Australia’s LNG exports and its domestic reserves. But on top of all this is the likelihood that greater “energy sovereignty” will likely prove more costly to voters.
The tension between these three elements — the benefits of interdependence, the dangers of vulnerability to global supply chains, and the domestic costs of greater self-reliance — presents one of the most vexing problems of our time.
Guest: Hamish McKenzie, Deputy Program Director of Grattan Institute’s Energy and Climate Change program.

There is a thread that’s been left dangling from our show at the end of last year on Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fourteenth century “Allegory of Good and Bad Government”, painted on the walls of the Sala dei Nova in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico.
The dominant figure of Justice sits on the left side of the central mural. She has her thumbs on two scales to hold them in balance, with angels on either side meeting out punishment and just recompense. Directly below her sits the figure of Concord (Concordia), a carpenter’s plane across her lap, as she weaves together the judgements into a red-and-white braided rope. This rope then passes from her hand to the hand of the first of 24 citizens who stand along the base of the mural.
The rope finally becomes the staff held by the figure of “the Good Commune” — or, perhaps, “the Common Good”. It is as though the Common Good is constituted by concord among citizens, from which citizens in turn hope to receive what is necessary for their shared life.
From Roman philosophers like Cicero down to the artists of the Italian Renaissance, there has been an understanding that concord — or what we now might call “social cohesion” — proceeds from the fair distribution of justice, and is grounded in the confidence of citizens that it is being distributed fairly. But what happens when concord begins to fray?
This month, the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion will be handing down its interim report. It is fair to say that, since the horrific attack at Bondi Beach that precipitated the establishment of the commission, social cohesion is under severe strain, perhaps to breaking point for some communities.
The question for us now is: When the conditions of public trust in a society have weakened, could the deliberative capacity of a mini-public — such as a citizens’ assembly — help restore it?
Guest: Ron Levy is a Professor in the College of Law, Governance and Policy at the Australian National University.

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.

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 the 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.