From Kylie to Bluey: Let me tell you about Australia’s secret superpower |
From Kylie to Bluey: Let me tell you about Australia’s secret superpower
May 30, 2026 — 5:00am
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Often we talk of hard power, the use of military and economic might to coerce other countries. Frequently we hear of soft power, the term introduced into the lexicon by the late Harvard professor Joseph Nye to describe how nations can use cultural capital and subtler forms of persuasion to accrue global influence. In the AI age, we are going to be exposed more to “sharp power”, when authoritarian regimes use information manipulation and political interference to poison the civic well of democratic rivals.
But, readers, I want to have a stab at fresh coinage, and talk of “formative power”, and in particular Australia’s unusually strong influence over the global young.
A frivolous example, as the new Netflix documentary Kylie reminds us, is the so-called “Neighbours effect” in Britain. The dominance of an Australian soapie led to a dialectical shift. Many of those who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s started ending sentences with an upward inflection, and using Australianisms such as “no worries” and “mate”. I am a walking, talking case study. Long before I felt the sand of Bondi between my toes, there were colleagues who thought I was antipodean, partly because, like so many of my student cohort, I was a two-Neighbours-a-day guy at college.
Confessedly, I never intended to speak like an Australian, but I did want to write like one. The first adult book I ever bought was a collection of TV reviews penned by Clive James for The Observer. Like others in my generation of journalists, I yearned to mimic his........