Australia’s Crisis Obsession
When everything becomes a crisis, we lose the ability to recognise a real one
A Commentary by Victor Perton
Australia has a crisis problem.
Not the housing crisis. Not the cost-of-living crisis. Not the productivity crisis, the skills crisis, the aged-care crisis, the mental-health crisis, the youth-crime crisis or the biodiversity crisis.
I mean the crisis crisis.
Australia now seems to possess an almost inexhaustible supply of national crises, national emergencies, national shames and national disgraces. And if an ordinary crisis no longer seems sufficient, there are the theories of polycrisis, the metacrisis and the permacrisis.
At this rate, our next national crisis may be a shortage of sufficiently alarming words to describe all the other national crises.
I decided to count.
In Australian news reports, government releases, political statements, industry material and advocacy over roughly the past two years, we found more than 30 different things described as crises: housing, rents, homelessness, cost of living, productivity, skills, childcare, aged care, mental health, youth crime, insurance, construction, biodiversity, arts funding, loneliness and even pollination security among them.
I have been worrying about this for some time. In an earlier article, A Country Beset by Reports of Crisis, I found a childcare crisis, an aged-care crisis, a rental crisis, a cost-of-living crisis, a mental-health crisis, a GP crisis, a skills-shortage crisis, a climate crisis, a construction crisis and more.
It had even been reported that Australian bar associations faced “a profound crisis”.
I wondered then why we had not yet developed a crisis-manager skills-shortage crisis 😉
The language has not calmed down.
The Queensland Government has used “Labor’s Youth Crime Crisis” so often in official media releases that it is beginning to look like a registered trademark.
Beekeepers have warned of “a national crisis looming around pollination security”. Loneliness has been presented as “our national crisis”. A federal minister described Australia as facing “the worst skills crisis we have experienced in 50 years”. Young Australians have even been described as navigating a “polycrisis”.
Alongside the national crises and national emergencies comes a steady supply of “national shames” and “national disgraces”.
Many of the underlying problems are serious and should provoke action. But calling something a national shame spreads blame across millions of Australians who neither made the policy nor control the budgets or institutions that might fix it.
If shame is warranted, it should be directed at the decisions, systems and office-holders with the power to act.
Better still, move quickly from shame to responsibility, remedy and reform.
The point is not that Australia lacks serious problems. Of course we have them.
The point is that seriousness and crisis are not synonyms.
To distinguish a chronic national problem from a crisis is not to diminish the problem. It is to improve the chances of solving it.
A genuine crisis is usually acute. Something has happened, or is happening, that threatens to overwhelm ordinary arrangements and requires rapid mobilisation, exceptional coordination or temporary emergency measures.
A chronic national problem is different. It may be just as serious — sometimes more serious — but it persists because of underlying structures, incentives, institutions, behaviours or accumulated policy failures. It usually requires sustained reform, investment, experimentation, implementation and leadership over time.
Confusing the two matters because the response appropriate to one can be quite wrong for the other.
Australia actually has a National Emergency Declaration Act. When a Senate committee reviewed it in 2026, it recorded that since the legislation commenced there had been precisely one national emergency declaration: the 2022 New South Wales floods.
Apparently, the statutory threshold for declaring a national emergency is rather higher than the threshold for issuing a press release.
A bushfire racing towards a town may require an emergency operations centre, rapid command decisions and extraordinary deployment of people and resources.
But imagine establishing one for Australia’s productivity crisis.
Who sits in the operations room? What does the flashing red light signify? Does the Prime Minister receive hourly briefings on multifactor productivity? Do we deploy an emergency productivity taskforce to raise output per hour before sundown?
Housing affordability cannot be solved by assembling a crisis cabinet on Tuesday and standing it down on Friday.
Nor can workforce development, educational performance, aged-care capacity, much of mental health or productivity.
These problems call for something harder than crisis theatre: persistence.
They require governments and institutions to understand causes, consult properly, test ideas, invest, implement, measure, learn and sometimes change course.
There is something revealing about the phrase “this sector has been in crisis for years”.
If something has been in crisis for years, there is a fair chance we are not describing a crisis at all. We are describing a structural problem that has not yet been solved.
That does not make it less important.
It makes accurate diagnosis even more important.
Lin Hatfield Dodds of The Benevolent Society made a similar point when discussing violence against women: even a grave and morally urgent problem can be poorly served if it is treated as though it were the kind of crisis governments confront with a bushfire, pandemic or financial shock. Long-term problems need sustained work.
A problem can be morally urgent, and demand determined action while still requiring patient, sustained work rather than emergency management.
Crisis language can produce crisis policymaking.
Consultation begins to look like delay. Testing looks timid. Careful consideration of unintended consequences looks bureaucratic. An announcement looks like action. Money has to be found immediately.
And once a government has declared a crisis and announced the solution, it becomes politically harder to say later: we have learned something, this is not working as we expected, and we are going to change course.
Yet that is precisely what good government should be able to do.
Consultation takes time. Implementation takes time. Learning takes time.
Changing course in the light of evidence is not failure.
There is also a more uncomfortable reason for the proliferation of crises.
There is now a political and communications premium on declaring a crisis.
For politicians and the bureaucracy, declaring a crisis creates urgency, attracts attention to the response and can make new spending or intervention sound indispensable — while also becoming an excuse for inadequate consultation, rushed decisions and poor policymaking.
For an industry association, declaring a crisis attracts news media attention and strengthens the argument for assistance.
For an advocacy organisation, crisis language helps attract news media attention to a cause and can strengthen the case for funding or government intervention.
And for the media, crisis is itself a powerful organising frame: immediate, dramatic and highly newsworthy.
None of that means the people using the language are dishonest. Often they are dealing with real problems and responding rationally to the incentives around them.
The problem is cumulative.
Everyone has an incentive to turn the rhetorical dial upwards. Almost nobody is rewarded for turning it down — for saying: slow down, this may take years, perhaps decades; the causes are complex; the first intervention may not work; and this may not be something government can solve on its own, or even solve completely.
That kind of candour is harder to sell than a crisis declaration. But it is often much closer to the truth.
Over time, “crisis” stops being an exceptional description and becomes the default language of public debate.
Consider the now almost ubiquitous “cost-of-living crisis”.
There are Australians experiencing genuine financial hardship. Some households face very difficult choices, and housing costs in particular have placed enormous pressure on many people.
But Australia is not one household.
I often think about that when I walk past long queues for gourmet sandwiches, wraps, croissants, $6.50 takeaway coffees, chai and matcha.
Those queues do not disprove hardship.
They do complicate the picture.
So does our consumption.
Australia Institute research found Australians purchasing an average of 56 new clothing items per person each year, more than the United States, United Kingdom and China in its comparison.
Surely there is an interesting question here.
How can Australians experience significant cost pressures while simultaneously displaying extraordinary levels of discretionary consumption?
Both things can be true.
Australia can contain hardship and affluence, mortgage stress and packed cafés, households struggling with bills and people queuing for $6.50 coffees.
Good journalism should be curious about both.
The ABC is only one example, but it interests me because so many household stories are readily viewed through the prism of the “cost-of-living crisis”.
That frame may be entirely appropriate in a particular story. But when the same broadcaster reports very high consumption of clothing or other discretionary goods, surely the natural instinct of a questioning journalist should be to ask how these apparently conflicting realities fit together.
Not to dismiss hardship.
To understand Australia better.
The same curiosity should apply more broadly. Are we looking at a universal national crisis, or very different experiences across income, age, housing status and geography? Are prices the whole story, or are consumption habits, expectations and choices part of it too? Where is government action essential, where can it help only at the margin, and where are we expecting government to solve things it simply cannot solve for us?
Those are harder questions than attaching “crisis” to the headline.
They are also more interesting.
And this is not merely an ABC habit. “Crisis” has become part of the grammar of Australian politics, journalism and advocacy.
That is also why I was irritated when I opened the ABC website and saw the headline on Jacob Greber’s analysis:
“‘Afraid of change’: political optimism now a rare commodity in Australia.”
It is an interesting article. It deals with weak growth in living standards, dissatisfaction with national direction, perceptions of government performance and Paul Keating’s call for greater political boldness.
But those things are not the same thing as optimism.
What particularly struck me was that the headline does most of the work with the word. The article itself does not really examine optimism as a belief, disposition or source of agency.
And a little searching immediately complicates the proposition.
In June, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said politicians had a particular responsibility to “talk Australia up”, adding simply: “Be optimistic.”
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has likewise spoken of being “optimistic but realistic” about Australia’s future.
That does not prove Australians are optimistic.
It does show why journalists should question their own frames as rigorously as they question governments.
A headline does not merely describe a problem. Repeated often enough, it contributes to the story a country tells about itself.
If Australians are continually told that housing is in crisis, health is in crisis, education is in crisis, productivity is in crisis, the environment is in crisis, social cohesion is in crisis and the cost of living is in crisis, eventually we are left with something larger than a collection of policy problems.
We are left with a picture of a country permanently overwhelmed.
That picture is not accurate.
We do not need to pretend that Australia’s problems are small.
We need to describe them accurately.
When there is a genuine crisis, call it a crisis. Mobilise quickly. Coordinate nationally. Act with urgency.
When the problem is chronic and structural, say so. Explain what is causing it. Be honest that improvement may take years. Consult properly. Test ideas. Measure results. Change course when something is not working.
And stop reaching automatically for “national crisis”, “national emergency”, “national shame” and “national disgrace” when what we really need is responsibility, remedy and reform.
That is not complacency.
It is seriousness.
It is also optimistic leadership.
Optimistic leadership is best equipped to lead through uncertainty.
It faces reality without surrendering possibility. It can acknowledge that a problem is difficult, that there may be no instant solution and that government cannot solve everything — while still helping people see what can be done next.
Australia does not need to be frightened into action by a permanent state of rhetorical emergency.
We need leaders, institutions, journalists, advocates and citizens who can distinguish danger from difficulty, emergency from endurance, and alarm from action.
Because when everything becomes a crisis, we lose the ability to recognise a real one.
And perhaps worse, we begin to forget something equally important:
Australia is a good country with the capacity to become better.
That is the story worth acting on.