The popularity of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in recent by-elections is clearly due to protest votes. Immediate issues are the price of housing, and the cost of living more generally, wealth inequality and high immigration rates. PHON is scapegoating some immigrants, but there is also a real case for reducing immigration rates to reduce the commonly overlooked and large cost of providing a new city’s worth of durable assets every year.

These immediate issues are genuine, but they don’t explain the depth of resentment, nor its rise in many other countries. Deeper causes are insecurity of employment and income, lack of services or difficult access to services, the high visibility of the ultra-rich and powerful, and a rising dread of global crises including global warming, though the latter is commonly left unnamed.

The deeper causes in turn derive from an approach to government that is becoming more commonly questioned, though the full force of the problem is still not widely appreciated.

Much of our current dysfunction, and the resentment it generates, comes from the neoliberal ideology that was foisted upon the world in the early 1980s, starting with Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the USA. It reached full force in Australia through the Hawke-Keating governments.

Neoliberalism was never going to work, because people are not such selfish competitors as it assumes, we are highly social, and because markets do not ensure the efficient or desirable results claimed by the laughably naïve neoclassical theory of free markets. Furthermore the preceding regime of Keynesian social democracy was far more successful than neoliberalism was to prove, and it was not broken. The disruptions of the 1970s were due to the quadrupling of oil prices imposed by the oil cartel, causing stagnation, and to the US overspending on its war in Vietnam, causing inflation.

The world would have recovered from those disruptions, but anti-government neoliberal zealots were waiting their chance to take over, which they did, very successfully.

The result of promoting selfish competition is that our society has become increasingly divided and fragmented, and the result of the neoliberal economic agenda has been a rapid rise in wealth inequality that has slowed economic growth. The wealthy invest in asset inflation and the poor can’t spend enough to keep the economy going. Privatised human services are generally failing, most obviously in aged care and child care. Outsourced services, that used to be provided by governments, are commonly difficult to access and function poorly.

It is not too much to say that neoliberalism has been an economic failure and a social disaster.

The Albanese government shows little awareness of the depth of these problems. Its approach is to tinker with some regulations rather than to reform the basic approach. Anthony Albanese himself is probably the most timid, action-averse prime minister in our history. His approach seems to be entirely based on short-term political calculation. If something good is legislated it is because political ‘pressure’ makes it advisable and safe to do so. More often, regressive policies are pursued in order to avoid criticism from the far-right media, or to satisfy wealthy lobbyists.

In fact the Albanese government often goes against the known wishes of the people, most notably recently with its failures to ban gambling advertising or to impose a gas tax, and also cutting NDIS and pandering to the Zionist-Israeli lobby. It is also continuing to approve fossil fuel extraction projects, continuing the AUKUS debacle, approving ever-more US military bases in our territory that are obvious potential nuclear targets, and failing more generally to pull back from the deranged and dysfunctional USA. The latter issues are less decisively disapproved by voters but attract scathing assessments from relevant experts. This is not an exhaustive list.

The failure to act on the wishes of citizens is commonly attributed to the ‘influence’ of wealthy lobby groups. We need to name the influence for what it is: corruption. Receiving money in return for favourable treatment. Regardless, it is another reason the Albanese government will not easily change its approach.

So now the resentment of the battlers is boiling over into votes for One Nation. Labor says it will attend to the cost of living and reduce immigration rates a little. These are bandaids that fail to address the structural issues.

It is plausible that Anthony Albanese is the worst Labor prime minister in our brief history. Billy Hughes’ racist and sectarian ranting did us great harm, dividing society and helping to provoke German and Japanese aggression. But Albanese’s obdurate unwillingness to step out and lead may do us the greater harm. He seems to be a back-room factional schemer with no vision, no charisma, no gravitas. His overriding ambition seems to be to keep the seat of power warm for as long as possible, and keeping the channels of corruption open is part of the deal.

This is disastrous in the face of the climate emergency, which his actions and inactions exacerbate. Apparently the lobbyists whisper in his ear that there is no rush, we still have decades in which to act. The truth is that the climate is at a critical point right now in which several major climate systems are known to be close to tipping into causing irreversible heating. Ominously, the rate of heating has accelerated significantly over the past decade.

But we face a ‘polycrisis’ in which humanity is using too many resources (soil, fresh water, forests …), destroying ecosystems, dumping too much pollution (plastics, poisons, carbon dioxide …) and releasing dangerous technologies, notably so-called artificial intelligence, which already shows signs of running out of control and in any case will interfere with behaviours fundamental to our humanity.

It is clearly quite beyond Albanese to address these profound challenges effectively. The old Coalition would do no better, it is simply more open about not addressing them, and One Nation would make many of them worse, following the example of Trump in the US.

The progressive independents and the Greens are at least aware of some of these challenges. A parliament led by progressives would be far less damaging, and would presumably be more open to understanding and addressing the real challenges.

We are still some way from installing enough people more able to face our existential situation, so it is unfortunate that One Nation, with its billionaire backing, is now suddenly prospering, and it may well win the race.

We are in for hard times. Anthony Albanese will be no help. He is an obstruction.