IT’S time. Time that is, for the room of mirrors. Time for a nation to examine how far it has strayed from the image it has of itself. Time in fact, to ask the harshest of questions: is Australia failing, mired in nostalgia, and paralysed by fear not just of the future, but of social trends already here?
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Consider this week's diminishing events around the return of the parliament for the spring session.
One might reasonably have expected a logjam of visionary economic bills backed by an activist government moving on multiple fronts at once to address low business confidence, pale growth, sagging productivity and high youth unemployment.
Yet upon making a virtue of courageously pitching for the mediocre middle on emissions reductions – consistent with the accepted internal wisdom that to lead is bad - and dashing hopes of updating marriage to reflect contemporary realities, the parliament itself dropped back to idle speed.
True, some important legislation has been passed this term and plenty blocked, but hours this week alone, have been devoted to bloated speech-making about deceased former MPs and an uncontested motion commemorating the Gallipoli landings 100 years ago.
Indeed, our national character has long been framed by its curiously concocted Anzac legend. We are, we like to believe, a nation of iconoclasts, or as we might prefer to say, larrikins - good natured if disrespectful, egalitarian by instinct, inclined to challenge authority, suspicious of station and wealth, and above all, courageous.
But how courageous really? And how genuinely egalitarian? The marriage equality challenge has revealed a woeful failure on both scores with fear of the future again emerging as the locomotive 'force majeure'.
On Wednesday, Trade Minister Andrew Robb addressed the National Press Club to defend free trade agreements currently under attack from unions.
Robb's frustration at the scare campaigns being mounted by unions against the ChAFTA is understandable.
But he should not be surprised. There is virtually no area where the government behaves outside its own narrow ideological tramlines.
Same sex marriage offered that opportunity – the prospect that just once, on a policy that would have cost it nothing and even confounded critics, it could surprise voters on the upside.
It needn't be this hard nor this combative.
Comparable countries have moved on marriage equality and done so under conservative governments. Think David Cameron's Britain, Stephen Harper's Canada, and John Key's New Zealand, not to mention predominantly Catholic Ireland.
But not Australia. The famed social laboratory of the 19th and 20th centuries has become the laggard of the 21st.
Scared, meek, backward-looking, gripped by polarisation and lumbered with a class of political leaders cowering against change.
