There is a feeling in politics right now – widely shared among politicos and the otherwise engaged, and even if we struggle to name it – that we are standing on the edge of something. A precipice. A tipping point. A moment where the ground beneath us is no longer solid and might fall away.

It feels like a moment but we didn’t land here overnight. For years, tectonic plates have shifted beneath the surface of Australian and global politics – slowly, separately, in ways that might have been easy to treat as isolated problems had we acted.

Now these plates are overlapping and compounding. They will create new faultlines, new volcanoes, a whole new terrain. The rules that have traditionally determined who wins government and how power is exercised are being rewritten – whether we’re ready or not.

So, what are these plates? A massive generational shift in voting behaviour, with young people voting wildly differently to their parents, and with zero party loyalty. An energy crisis triggered by a war that nobody fully understands (and nobody seems to know how to stop). A housing system that functions as a wealth transfer machine instead of a realistic pathway to security. The rise of artificial intelligence, reshaping work and power in ways we are only beginning to understand. Extreme weather events increasing in frequency and severity. The breakdown of the global rules-based order itself, with the nation that arguably built that order now actively dismantling it.

The plates built gently enough to be treated as ordinary but are now breaking a promise at the heart of the Australian dream. They felt distant until they weren’t, exposing the fiction that we were different. They showed up in the data, but haven’t yet shown up in how power is won and lost.

Each of these would be significant on its own. Together, they are a convergence that challenges the fundamental settlement Australian politics has been built on since at least the Hawke-Keating era: Ride globalisation, shelter under the US alliance, rotate two major parties, and a commitment that each generation would do better than the last.

Every single one of those pillars is under strain at the same time. We’re in the Long Fracture – our era – where the plates don’t just reverberate, they drift with indifference but heavy momentum into collision.

We can almost never see what big moments will lead to while we’re living through them. But looking back, we can almost always pinpoint them – and trace the decades that follow back to them. The collapse of the USSR. September 11. The global financial crisis. Brexit. People felt the ground moving but couldn’t see the shape of what was coming.

The Great Depression produced the New Deal in the United States – a rewriting of the social contract that shaped life for half a century. In Western Europe, the same crisis, the same sense of institutions failing ordinary people, produced fascism.

We can’t predict where the fracture leads. But we can be certain that the political response – what we choose to do (and fail to do) in these years – will determine our trajectory as a nation.

Australia has real advantages. Compulsory voting that stops our politics being captured by the most motivated extremes, preferential voting that ensures every voice matters and that rewards consensus over polarisation, and institutions that still command respect. These things matter. But even the strongest structures crack if the ground beneath them shifts far enough.

The 2025 election was a landslide for Labor, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it was just the legacy electoral seesaw doing its thing. But underneath, the primary figures tell a different story. Labor’s result was barely above its lowest since 1934. The Liberal vote was the worst since the party was founded. For the first time, more Australians voted for a minor party or independent than for the Coalition.

The trend continues. In South Australia, One Nation has outpolled the Liberals.

Meanwhile, only 32 per cent of Australians think people in government can be trusted. The electorate is fragmenting. It’s not a blip. It’s the fracture reaching the surface.

Whether you work in politics, advocate for causes, contribute to a community organisation, or just care about how our nation is run – I think we owe it to ourselves to lift our heads from the daily news cycle and ask: Are we thinking seriously enough about how this Long Fracture can be shaped to strengthen our democracy rather than damage it?

Because these tectonic plates don’t care. They’re moving regardless. We may feel powerless to stop them, but we are not powerless in determining what is built on the new landscape. The ground has shifted. What comes next is up for grabs.

Peter Stahel is managing director and co-owner of Essential, a progressive research and communications company, and a former Greens adviser

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