Australia’s post-Bondi debate has fixated on labels and symbolism instead of causes and capacity. What Australia needs now is a bigger frame – and stronger democratic protection against social breakdown.

Hate speech is dreadful – but it isn’t the most frightening thing happening in Australia right now. Australia’s post-Bondi political debate isn’t failing because one side is evil and the other is right. It’s failing because everyone’s frame is too small, and small frames produce big mistakes – crises don’t pity the obstinate.

Since the attack, the argument has often been less about diagnosis than about who gets to name “the crisis”. One side reaches for ‘antisemitism’. Another reaches for ‘Islamism’. Others reach for ’extremism’, ‘social division’, ‘public safety’, or the timeless language of ‘ancient evils’. The labels differ, but the habit is the same: pick one element of a complex emergency, inflate it into the whole, then treat disagreement as proof of bad faith. That is how politics becomes a competition in moral certainty instead of an interrogation of causes and consequences.

The uncomfortable point is that these frames aren’t necessarily wrong. Antisemitism is real. Anti-Muslim racism is real. Violent ideologies exist. Trust can disintegrate. People do feel less safe.

The failure is that none of these frames is right enough_._ They describe parts of a situation whose parts interlock. Symptoms overlap and reinforce one another; they can be driven by deeper conditions; and policy aimed at one symptom can easily aggravate another. Treating each symptom as the whole disease doesn’t just miss the mark – it invites the wrong medicine, delivered with confidence in a context where confidence itself is in short supply.

You can see the cost of narrow frames in the parliamentary sequence that followed Bondi: demands for sweeping inquiries and hard new measures, counter-demands for resolve framed in values and cohesion, then retreat and recalibration. Argue about each decision on its merits, but notice the pattern the public sees: escalation, certainty, and then backing down. Each cycle teaches the same lesson – not that the system is careful, but that it is performative. Confidence falls in both parties because both appear to be governing by gesture: signalling control, then discovering insurmountable limits.

This is not a mere communications failure. It is a conceptual one. We keep using big words with trifling meanings: ‘ideology’, ’extremism, even ‘values’. You cannot legislate against an ideology if you cannot say what ideology is. You cannot build special powers around extremism if the category expands to cover whatever the speaker fears. You cannot restore legitimacy by invoking “Australian values” as if they were a stable essence that only needs to be reaffirmed.

Beneath the partisan differences sits a flaw shared by all parties: ideological devotion – fixed assumptions treated as natural law. Call it “market fundamentalism”, and its political corollary: “no alternative” governance. Labor’s version often looks like managerial corporatism, wrapped in reassurance: keep the system running, signal unity, repair trust through procedure. The Coalition’s version is a “new-right” hybrid: the same market faith, this time with cultural aggression and “law-and-order” theatrics. Different accents; but the same coffin.

So what does the market have to do with hate, violence, or our cycle of crisis talk? Not everything, but enough to matter – it shapes the conditions by which symptoms spread.

First, market insecurity produces social insecurity. When housing, work, and status become unstable, the ground becomes more combustible. Most people do not become extremists – but resentment searches for an object, and fear searches for a story.

Second, “no alternative” governance hollows democratic agency. When major decisions are presented as technocratic necessity, citizens learn that politics cannot change the things that most shape their lives. Democracy starts to feel performative: you can change the faces but not the forces. In that atmosphere, populists and extremists can appear “authentic” even when their programs are incoherent – they offer the recognition and agency that the centre no longer does.

Third, thin social protection creates scarcity politics. When protections are pared back, everyday life becomes competition for essentials: housing, healthcare, schooling, stable work. People begin to see one another as rivals. That is a gift to scapegoaters and agitators. It makes out-group blame feel like practical realism, and punitive identity politics feel like governance.

If you want a summary for this dynamic: market expansion generates strain; society demands protection; yet the state’s capacity to protect is narrowed by dependence on the very forces producing the strain. Responsibilities grow, autonomy shrinks. Under pressure, politics reaches for spectacle.

None of this excuses hatred. It explains why a purely moral drama will not defeat it.

What would a bigger frame look like? Not a new slogan, but a new discipline:

One: name symptoms as symptoms, and refuse to treat them as stand-alone crises. Confronting antisemitism and every form of racial hatred is real work, but it becomes impossible when each party insists that one symptom is the whole story.

Two: define terms before you build powers around them. “Ideology”, “extremism”, “hate speech” – vague definitions invite selective enforcement; selective enforcement invites backlash; backlash invites the next escalation.

Three: match state power to state capacity. If a measure cannot be implemented fairly, consistently, and competently – if it mainly produces symbolic reassurance while deepening grievance – it should not be rushed through on fear’s coat sleeves.

And then the hard step: shift from reaction to prevention. Rebuild social protection. Expand democratic agency. Make politics capable of shaping the economy, rather than the economy dictating the limits of politics. That is not a distraction from confronting hatred. It is part of the condition of defeating it without breaking the society you claim to protect.

Crises don’t offer retries, so we need frames big enough to tell the truth, and modest enough to avoid the delusional fantasy that simply one law, inquiry, or speech can repair a society in flux. If we keep mistaking parts for wholes, we will keep producing grand gestures followed by embarrassed retreats, and the legitimacy damage will compound. If our institutions can’t do this anymore, then we need to get rid of them. We need to start a new life – not restore the old misery.