A wish for 2026: Less grandstanding, more attempts to truly tackle nation’s challenges

2 months ago 5

Editorial

December 31, 2025 — 5.00am

The way that 2025 has ended – with the worst terrorist attack ever carried out on Australian soil – is likely to shape our understanding of the year that preceded it and the one to come.

Before the massacre at Bondi Beach, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was already being chided – not least by our columnists – for leading a government that shied away from doing difficult things.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

After the atrocity, such criticisms took on a darker tone. Now Albanese’s political caution and his foreign policy shifts were parsed as grievous moral failures that marked him as responsible for the massacre, with the niece of one victim calling him a coward. The bipartisanship at first promised in response to a sickening crime evaporated faster than water on Bondi’s pavers.

One has to wonder if any of the major challenges facing us as a nation can be tackled effectively in such an atmosphere. Can we make space for consultation and act in concert when our daily language is that of condemnation?

Before Bondi, questions around the federal government’s course often returned to weakness and division within the opposition. Here in Victoria, Jacinta Allan’s Labor government enters an election year having benefited from a similar lack of focus from the Coalition.

After landing the leadership of the Victorian Liberals on the eve of 2025, Brad Battin couldn’t see out a year in the job. The divisions that sank him may have been different from those that accounted for his predecessor John Pesutto, but the pattern of instability and infighting was the same.

The arrival of Jess Wilson in the opposition leader’s chair has been accompanied by a surge in the Coalition’s poll numbers, though it should be noted that better numbers didn’t save Pesutto. The year to come will see the rubber hit the road for Allan and her government in a whole series of areas where the situation demands decisive and effective action, from youth crime and housing supply to a childcare sector in crisis.

Each of these challenges – as well as the government’s mounting debt, ticking away steadily in the background – could unravel Allan’s hold on power come November, provided Wilson can keep her team pulling in one direction. But as Albanese discovered this year, a single unanticipated event has the power to throw even the most cautious political plans into doubt.

We have all learnt that making New Year’s resolutions is a hazardous and often futile pursuit, but if we can hope for some changes in 2026, one should surely be that our politics at state and federal level is conducted with less grandstanding and more earnest attempts to improve outcomes.

That’s a challenge for Spring Street, but the rest of us could also draw from it. Grandstanding, after all, caters to a society that reads the world through a screen, doomscrolling its way from one sensation or outrage to the next. Could we instead be using that time to find the people we can help, and who can help us, through the simple act of working through difficulties together?

When the federal government’s social media legislation for under-16s came into force on December 10, some saw this sort of opportunity in it. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote of the possibility that younger teens would find themselves “feeling freer, less distracted, and more present, with more time and energy for the things that matter to them”.

Author Brodie Lancaster argued that “what we need is education for navigating this space, not bans”, while Shaun Rowland, a parent who worked in IT, pointed out that “the social media world is not some alternate reality our children ‘escape’ into – it is the reality they live in”.

The sum of such opinions is more useful than any single account in isolation. That’s why The Age publishes various viewpoints, quotes more than one source and looks for a meaningful contest in our politics. We promise to continue doing so, and hope you’ll continue to rely on us.

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