> something really weird about the contemporary Australian culture

One problem is that countries around the world are increasingly being run by Twitter and social media. We're not looking at a blip near the end of history. We're in the middle of a tectonic disruption similar in scale to the introduction of agriculture or the printing press.

"Extremely online" people have found an endless spring of resentment, fear, and totalitarian thinking welling up from some place inside themselves, an ancient and primal source that you can read about in sociology or cultural anthropology textbooks. Regular people don't think like this, but the "extremely online" dominate online conversation through sheer weight of the hours they spend on it. Politicians, journalists, and other decision-makers internalize this online environment as their view of the real world --- consciously or not --- due to availability bias [1]. Regular people have become progressively disenfranchised by the extreme skew of participation in public discussion. (Censorship isn't helping either.)

Yes, policymakers poll the public --- but polls provide only intellectual information. A policymaker might know, at some level, from the polls, that the people as a whole prefer policy X --- but when his experience, online, day to day, is seeing nothing but volume-11 support for policy Y instead and vicious attacks on policy X, the primate part of his brain guides him towards finding a reason to support policy X instead. Motivated reasoning is extremely powerful.

You might think that elections would make policymakers accountable, but that's not really how it works. Elections are infrequent and subject to thousands of confounding factors that make it difficult for them to act as an accountability mechanism for day-by-day decisions. Policymakers have always relied on public feedback for that, and now the "public" (as least the part visible to policymakers) consists of those with some personality tic or mood disorder or whatever that prompts them to spend eight billion hours per day dunking on everyone else on social media.

For a while now, I've had doubts about the fundamental compatibility of the internet with liberal democracy. Social media takes the whole world and puts it into one village, one city-state, one tight ball of low-friction engagement-optimized information flow. It moves actual governance closer to a direct democracy --- but a direct democracy of the dysfunctional and aggrieved.

Thing is, direct democracies tend to be quite unstable. Look at the histories of the Greek and Italian city-states: they end up, via the their beloved democracies, enacting boggingly stupid policy [2], perpetrating grave injustices [3] [4], and ultimately getting destroyed by tyrants [5]. In a community with low-friction, low-latency information sharing (like a tiny ancient city-state or a modern country with Twitter), there's no impediment to memetic propagation. You see wave after wave of resentment, gossip, fear, and anger bounce around the meme-sphere, interacting with each other, intensifying under conformity pressure. Memetic pressure spikes rapidly, and bad decisions get made under incredible passions without proper reflection. It's like a washing machine with a brick in it. It gets worse and worse until --- without the damping effect of high-latency communication latency and indirect representation --- the whole thing explodes into a cloud of outrage. (That might be a mushroom cloud in our age.)

The printing press led to sweeping structural reforms in society that took centuries to play out, and so will the internet, and I don't think the old forms of governance are viable in the new technological environment. What's happening in Australia is this disruption playing out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Expedition

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Melos

[5] https://www.historynet.com/the-end-of-athens.htm