On a scale of one to Donald Trump, just how bad are we doing?

This was among the questions pondered on Monday night's Q&A, whose panel assessed the health of the Australian body politic via the helpful yardstick of the American presidential candidate - a man recently summed up with understatement by comedian Samantha Bee as a "tangerine-tinted trash can fire".

How could we possibly compete? How indeed.

With wall-building, Muslim-banning, woman-spurning Trump as the measure, it was to be presumed that Australia would score as a rank amateur for displays of bats-in-the-belfry bastardry. But this is not to say we haven't been trying. America has Guantanamo Bay; Australia has its Guano Gulag, a tropical prison camp comprised of fossilised bird shit and human misery, from where news had just emerged that another asylum seeker had set themselves on fire.

With the nation entering its first election campaign featuring a tally board for self-immolations, comparing ourselves even to the extremes of Trump-land left us still needing a compass to find the moral high ground. Or, as writer and broadcaster George Megalogenis noted, perhaps we'd beaten Trump in the race to that area of the political map best described as No Man's Land.

"It doesn't matter how many boats come or don't, if one person a week is setting themselves alight, sooner or later it is going to target our consciousness that we're holding hostage hundreds of people because we can't sort this out," Megalogenis said.

"I think in the long run, the world, when it pays attention to Australia, wants to see a good citizen because we are quite well off, we have been able to manage prosperity better than any other society over the long haul, and when we start playing other games, trying to be the nastiest country in the region, trying to be the nastiest - out-trumping Trump before Trump had even been invented in terms of asylum seeker policy - I think it's only a matter of time before our luck rans out."

Historically, nasty hasn't suited Australia as a national personality - and as American writer and former presidential speechwriter James Fallows noted, it doesn't suit us particularly well now.

"Australia does not look good at the moment with this policy, either side of the debate, but no-one looks good right now," Fallows said. "Angela Merkel is having terrible trouble in Germany because of a relatively liberal policy. The rest of Europe is splitting itself apart. We have Trump in the United States and I think that this is an example of a problem of human inequality, of combat, of cruelty around the world that will make all of our countries look and be bad until ... the actual sources that are making people flee around the world are addressed."

We had "a moral duty" to help, Fallows declared.

Of Trump - and to an audience member's question of whether a disillusioned, disengaged Australia might see the rise of a similar "anti-establishment" leader - Fallows offered both gloom and encouragement.

Trump was "a conflation, a merger of the skills of politics with the skills of pure entertainment" who had been "profoundly damaging …he has legitimised a kind of hatred that was not legitimate before". The answer, Fallows said, was engagement and "conscious thought, like [what] people were doing centuries ago on how to make a democracy work. If those of you who are young voters think hard about what it takes to make democracy function, it can work."

Wise words, but easier said than done both here and in the US as we face difficult choices. Q&A debated the broad philosophical questions - do voters have the stomach for real political reform? Do our politicians? Or are they, it was asked, too timid "to take a stand on important and divisive issues for fear of damaging their re-election chances?".

There was only one politician on the panel to weigh in, and NSW Minister Pru Goward was happy to assure us: "I think Australian politicians absolutely are prepared to do that."

It was an answer that might have carried some weight - had the audience not minutes earlier digested a Goward reply that seemed only to illustrate the questioner's point. On the issue of the moment - asylum seekers, and specifically Australia's knock-back of New Zealand's offer to take people on our behalf - she had the following exchange with Tony Jones:

Goward: "That's not an issue I have to say I follow very closely and it's something that obviously the Australian Government has decided it doesn't want to deal with."

Jones: "Just after your opinion, really."

Goward: "And I'm giving it to you."

Jones: "Do you have an opinion?"

Goward: "I don't have an opinion. Because my opinions have to be based on facts."

It was an exquisite dodge, the kind of dodge for which we have no ready shorthand in Australia. But fortunately, in this year of duelling election campaigns, the Americans have us covered.

They call that taking the Fifth. Brace yourselves for a whole lot more of it.