Australia’s federal government is corrupt. Not in the brown-paper-bags type of corruption, although that has been known to happen, but in what is called ‘soft’ or ‘grey’ corruption, where the results are the same—perversion of policy outcomes in favour of vested interests, misallocation of taxpayer money, regulatory favours—but the methods are entirely legal, secured through effective exploitation of links with decision-makers.

That pervasive soft corruption is a product not of bad individuals—though there are many of those—but the result of the systems that we’ve put in place in our democracy. They’re the consequences of the incentives we’ve built into the kind of politics we have in Australia. We’ve outsourced our democracy, to save ourselves the hard work of having to be informed and engaged and run it ourselves, relying on a system that automates how the country is governed without much in the way of effort by its citizens—sufficient that we’ve been able to set it and forget it.