Australia’s political and media establishments are struggling to adapt to a world where narratives can no longer be tightly managed. And attempts to restore authority through censorship, moral panic and regulation are deepening public alienation rather than restoring trust.

Australia’s political and media elites are slowly realising that outside their hermetically-sealed echo-bubble, the world has changed.

They are losing control of the narratives. And there is no going back. We have gone beyond both the “ revolt” and the “ twilight” of the elites. Panic has set in.

The foolish decision of Prime Minister Albanese to invite Israel President Herzog to Australia, and the predictable collapse of the social cohesion Australians were promised after the Bondi slaughter, is a perfect illustration of how local elites now struggle to deal with new realities: the public just isn’t buying their old shtick anymore.

Herzog’s visit follows extreme and absurd recommendations from Jillian Segal’s report, which aims to exploit the curse of antisemitism to silence pro-Palestine voices and shield Israel from legitimate criticism of its crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Astroturfed pressure after the Bondi terror attack last December forced the Albanese Government to establish a Royal Commission into antisemitism in Australia on the basis of two dubious assumptions: that this country has a unique problem with Jew-hate, and that the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza could not be a contributing factor to the rise of antisemitism across the world.

Much of this has stoked public disquiet, confusion and anger. And yet none of it has conferred an advantage on the government’s political opponents. That’s because the bipartisanship of the major parties on most key issues has effectively robbed voters of meaningful political choices. The public now realises that the major obstacle to social, economic and political change in Australia is an amorphous elite that encompasses both the ALP and the LNP.

An almost identical trend operates amongst the media elite, where it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between the Murdoch empire, Nine newspapers and the ABC.

Attempts to regulate attitudes in civil society are doomed to failure but they indicate that political and media elites today are deeply concerned that the public is not receptive to their messaging. Their attempts at indoctrination look gauche and are widely ridiculed by tech-savvy younger generations who are much more sceptical and less compliant than their predecessors.

People have learnt to circumvent the information and communication gatekeepers who previously locked down “mainstream” orthodoxy. It’s not just that the public has become more politically aware. They are now in a much better position to understand how their thoughts have been manipulated.

Not long ago John Howard could test public attitudes towards his policy proposals by jumping on talkback radio and scanning the letters pages of the daily newspapers. Adroit adjustments could then be made and, in concert, some red meat could be thrown at populist prejudices within the coalition base so almost no announcements came as a surprise.

That only worked because, with the co-operation of sympathetic media fed with a dripping tap of self-serving government leaks, the information pipelines could be tightly controlled.

Now the pipes have been swamped by an Internet flood. Legacy media – newspapers, radio and free to air TV – are increasingly unpopular and unprofitable. They have been overtaken by social media, blogs, micro-media and online streaming services. This is especially the case for voters under 40 interested in the world around them.

Sometimes things can go awry. Nonsensical anti-vaxxer conspiracies spread widely on Facebook during the COVID lockdown, endangering not only the lives of those foolish enough to believe them but the wider community who depended on herd immunity to limit their exposure to the virus.

Nonetheless, opinion management just isn’t as easy for elites as it used to be. The opportunities for indoctrination are less effective now because the parameters which confined legitimate thinkable thought have been blown away by alternative sources of information and communication.

The result is a growing gap between elite and popular opinion on key issues and challenges facing humanity in the 21st century: from climate change, AUKUS and the recrudescence of neo-fascism to the US alliance under Trump, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and inequalities and unfairness resulting from tax avoidance by the wealthy.

The accompanying moral panics by elites have been largely reactive and equally ineffective in changing people’s minds. They have taken depressingly predictable forms:

• a revivified censorial instinct which avoids coverage of politically-sensitive subjects or those which cannot be reconciled with long-standing narratives
• de-funding the humanities and social sciences at universities to punish and silence critical, left-wing voices
• cowering the ABC into political timidity with ever-present threats of funding cuts and the collapse of a public broadcasting ethos
• the algorithmic censorship of online search engines and social media to steer thinking back to the ’extreme centre'
• in the US the state-enforced purchase (takeover) of TV networks and social media platforms to prevent the sharing of information and videos which expose the lies behind official government narratives
• legal restrictions on free assembly and speech critical of government crimes under the guise of protecting people from hate and vilification
• the repetitive targeting or ‘monstering’ of political enemies in newspapers such as The Australian to discredit and silence them, and
• portraying business as the victims of a ‘class war’ conducted by organised labour rather than being the successful perpetrators of it, resulting in entrenched and growing disparities of wealth and income.

If our political elites do not break out of their self-imposed bubble, and the panic continues, we will see even more disillusionment, alienation and public estrangement from the political system. The only beneficiaries of such a legitimation crisis will be parties such as One Nation and the sovereign citizens movement, which have no solutions to offer and can only act as a locus of anger and resentment.

In the compelling distinction of the Australian historian Manning Clark, our political elites can remain “punishers and straighteners” or choose to be “enlargers of life”. The former are instinctively compliant and conformist. The latter seek to expand the domains of human freedom, encourage creativity and seek abundance for all.

All the evidence at hand suggests that, because of their panic at losing control over political narratives both here and outside Australia, the default setting for Australia’s political elites will remain conservative and restrictive. That will come as a cost to us and, ultimately, them.