May 2025 – Simon Sheridan

Thoughts on the Australian (and Canadian) election

It’s rather a strange coincidence that both Canada and Australia had elections in the last week. It provides a nice excuse to talk about the numerous parallels between the two countries, which apparently led to almost identical election results, with unexpected wins to the left-leaning parties. (The victory to Labor in Australia was not unexpected, although the magnitude of it certainly was).

Canada and Australia appear to be in some kind of competition to see who can blow the most insane real estate bubble. Those bubbles are in turn fuelled by unsustainable immigration, and yet the elites of both countries have zero intention of reducing the intake, with the entire subject of immigration rendered verboten in the public discourse. Both countries have hollowed-out manufacturing sectors and a heavy reliance on commodity exports to fund a decreasing standard of living. In short, both countries are on a road to nowhere and just had an election where neither party offered anything except more of the same.

To understand the current situation that Australia and Canada find themselves in, we need to zoom out. Let’s zoom all the way out to the 16th century, and let’s talk about the country that would eventually give rise to both Canada and Australia: England. At the start of the 16th century, England was a backwater whose economy was predicated on the commodity export of wool, which it traded primarily with the Benelux countries, whose wealth came from turning that wool into clothing.

The ruling class of England wanted a piece of the action and set about a long-term plan to develop their own clothing industry. This is what is known in the business world as vertical integration. Since the English owned the raw materials, they could cut out the middleman by developing the ability to manufacture the final product. That’s exactly what they eventually did. Once their domestic clothing industry was up and running, the English cut exports of wool to the Benelux countries.

This was an early example of using protectionism and other trade and economic measures to grow domestic industry. Since the technological improvements that came with the manufacturing of clothing led directly to the industrial revolution, it’s hard to understate how important this was to the later success of Britain and its evolution into an imperial power. Britain’s initial imperial success came from being an exporting powerhouse predicated on the innovations that came with a vibrant domestic manufacturing industry that had been deliberately nurtured into existence.

Fast forward to the 19th century, and there was a big policy shift in Britain towards what some historians have called the “imperialism of free trade”. Britain threw off its protectionism and ran an imperial policy based on control of trade and financial markets. At the same time that Britain decided to pursue free trade, there were two primary rivals emerging: the USA and Germany. Both of the latter countries had learned from Britain’s example and were using protectionist measures to provide a safe haven in which domestic industry could grow. In some sense, Britain was the beneficiary of that since its consumers received cheaper goods. But the tradeoff was the loss of domestic industry.

If all this is sounding very familiar, well, yes, it’s the same pattern the US has gone through in recent decades. But there’s one more parallel which is directly relevant to our time. Once the deleterious effects of free trade on domestic industry became impossible to ignore, some elites in Britain started to realise that a reversion back to the old paradigm was needed. Thus, by the early 1930s, Britain was once again pursuing protectionist policies alongside its two rivals, Germany and the USA.

However, the key point to understand is that the protectionism was not carried out at the national level but within three primary trading blocs. There was the British Empire. There was the German-dominated trading zone of central Europe. And there was the American zone that included South America and also Japan, the Philippines, etc.

Although Australia and Canada were nominally independent nations at that time, the reality is that we were very much a part of the British Empire, and trade and foreign policy were set in London for the most part. Thus, despite its proximity to the USA, Canada’s main trading partner at the start of WW2 was still Britain.

Heading into the war, the GDP of each of the three trading blocs was almost identical. If we think about it purely in terms of economics, let’s pretend Britain and the US stayed out of the fight. Germany would have united continental Europe into a trading bloc that very closely resembles the current EU. Setting aside the moral and political issues, that might have been a somewhat stable equilibrium, but there was a wild card in the pack.

Russia had made significant advances in industrial production in the 1930s. By the end of the decade it was, at least in terms of raw industrial output, comparable to the other three trading blocs. Germany’s breaking of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a game changer for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it opened the possibility that not only would Europe be unified but that it would also incorporate Russia. That would have easily been the largest trading bloc in the world.

In summary, by the start of WW2, there were four primary economic blocs: the British Empire, the German Empire, the USSR, and the USA. Britain and Germany went to war, followed shortly thereafter by the USSR. The USA got to stay out of the fray. That was its first big advantage. Its second big advantage was that the British Empire was not what it used to be. All that free trade and hollowing out of domestic industry had left the British with reduced capacity to compete with the Germans in war production. The Americans agreed to supply the British firstly via the Cash and Carry mechanism and then, when all British gold had been transferred to Washington, via the Lend Lease program.

The result was that the British Empire was bankrupt by the end of the war. The German Empire was also finished. That just left the USSR, which had also accumulated large debts to the USA via Lend Lease but which decided simply to default on those and gobble up land in Eastern Europe, thereby ushering in the Cold War.

The upshot of all this is that both the British and German economic blocs were merged with the US bloc after the war, with the USSR creating its own bloc in eastern Europe while also attempting to expand into Asia. Since Canada and Australia were both members of the British Empire, our allegiance was transferred to the US by default. It’s important to understand that, even though this period was nominally a “decolonising” and “anti-imperial” time, in actual fact the USA had inherited the mechanism of imperialism that Britain had created, which is to say, domination through control of trade, financial networks and military alliances. For Australia and Canada, the transfer of power from Britain to the US was so subtle that few even noticed, although the arrival of Coca-Cola billboards and Hollywood films should have provided a clue.

In the decades immediately after WW2, most nations in the now US-led western trading bloc were allowed to run relatively protectionist economic policies, and these facilitated domestic industrial production during the post-war boom. That was all thrown away, however, with the collapse of the USSR and the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 90s, with markets opened up and manufacturing exported to China.

The whole thing looks a hell of a lot like the same blunder that Britain made back in the 19th century with its “imperialism of free trade”. Manufacturing in every western nation has been hollowed out in exchange for a “services-based economy”. The US Empire now runs almost exclusively on control of financial networks rather than on the production of goods and services. For its part, China has pursued exactly the same strategy that Britain, Germany, and the US once followed of nurturing domestic manufacturing through protectionist measures.

From the point of view of Australia and Canada, we’ve been through all this before. In the 1890s, there were enormous asset bubbles caused by British free trade and monetary policy. In the 1980s, the same thing happened under a similar set of policies pursued by the US. Logic says that the same thing should be about to happen, and Australia and Canada are in their familiar position of being pawns in a game over which we have little real control.

And that brings us back to the recent elections. On the surface of it, it’s quite incredible that the general public of Canada and Australia should so eagerly vote for more of the same given how fast our standard of living has slipped in recent years. But the reality is that the governments in our countries are not in control of the levers that could actually change the economic situation. The big decisions are now made in Washington D.C and Beijing.

Despite these similarities, there are several interesting differences between the status of Canada and Australia. Firstly, Canada’s economy is now completely dominated by the US. About 3/4 of Canadian trade is with its southern neighbour. By contrast, Australia trades little with the US, and we are relatively diversified compared to Canada, with China, Japan, and South Korea being large trading partners.

A second big difference is that Canada is being weaponised by China in its trade fight against the US, not to mention being used as a trading post for fentanyl distribution. Canada is kind of like that character who wanders in between the hero and the villain in a movie shoot-out.

Australia certainly benefits from our geographic distance. But we’ve been given much the same role as Canada in the imperial arrangements. Our job is to supply commodities and raw materials. The result is a hollowed-out economy that is apparently now entirely predicated on immigration, for which we simply cannot produce the housing stock, leading to a truly insane housing bubble that, if it were to crash, would make the 1890s look like a picnic.

Against this background, I suppose the recent election results in both countries make some sense. Neither party was promising any change to the status quo because neither country is in a position to make such a change. Both Canada and Australia are pawns in the larger power game going on between the US and China. In that sense, voting for the fluffy-cuddly leftist parties is the best bet since they are the ones who promise to keep you “safe” and “protected”, which in this case is code for protected against the economic machinations of global powers.

In Bruges

Long-term readers would know that the archetypal relationship between Orphan and Elder has been a particular interest of mine in the last few years, especially as it relates to its manifestation in film and literature. Learning to identify archetypes in stories is valuable on the assumption of Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye that the stories we tell ourselves (and the archetypes that we use) reveal patterns in the broader culture. If that’s true, then the question arises, what does the manifestation of the Orphan-Elder relationship in modern film and literature reveal about those archetypes in the broader culture?

The first thing to note about that is that the Orphan-Elder relationship almost never appears in stories that are realistic portrayals of modern life. Instead, its most common manifestation is in the science fiction and fantasy genres. That’s why we get Elders such as Obi-Wan, Yoda, Dumbledore, Morpheus, Gandalf, and the like.

A variation on this pattern is when the story nominally takes place in a realistic modern setting, but the Elder offering initiation to the Orphan is a foreigner. Thus, in Karate Kid you have the Japanese Elder, Mr Miyagi, paired up with American teenager, Daniel. The same idea was behind Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which gave us two Japanese Elders, Splinter and Shredder.

I would argue that the Tom Cruise movie, The Last Samurai, is also an Orphan-Elder story with Cruise’s character receiving initiation from the samurai, Katsumoto. The same idea is behind the initiation of Jake in the movie Avatar. He is inducted into the foreign tribe of the Na’vi.

Although the use of foreign and fantasy elements in these stories reflects the absence of the Orphan-Elder relationship in the modern world, it’s also true that it is a realistic depiction of initiation, which requires a break from normality. That’s why armies have boot camps. These form a sudden and severe departure from everyday life.

It’s also why hazing rituals used to be given to apprentice tradesmen (before that became illegal). The point of initiation is that you are being inducted into a new world (the adult world) that is unlike that which you have known up until this point (childhood). Because modern society has no such initiation, it can only represent it as an aberration.

There is a third way in which modern storytellers can represent the Orphan-Elder relationship and that is in a criminal context. That’s what the Netflix show Adolescence does by having Jamie arrested at the beginning. As I noted in recent posts, his “initiation” is incredibly similar to that received by an adolescent boy in tribal and warrior societies. But in Jamie’s case, it is the justice system stealing him from his bed and carrying him away from his parents.

More broadly, though, organised crime works as a context to depict initiation because such organisations still operate in that fashion in the modern world. Thus, bikie gangs and other crime syndicates use hazing rituals and other formal methods to induct new members. The initiate usually must pass a proper test to prove that they are up to the job, which almost always amounts to committing some crime or other.

And this leads us into the subject of this week’s post because I happened to catch a film a few weeks ago featuring just such an initiation into a crime organisation. The movie is called In Bruges. I’d never heard of it before and had no idea what it was about, but I decided to give it a chance.

These days, most of the time I give an unknown film a chance, I find myself reaching for the off button by the 10 or 15 minute mark. So it was a pleasant surprise to discover that not only was In Bruges worth watching, it’s actually one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a great piece of storytelling with a couple of surprise twists, likeable characters, excellent acting, and cool dialogue. What surprised me more, though, was that the first big twist in the movie sets up a classic Orphan-Elder relationship that begins in the criminal world and then turns into something far deeper. The movie is really about what Orphan initiation means in the modern West.

The story begins with two Irish hitmen arriving in Bruges after a job gone wrong in London. The younger man of the pair is Ray (Colin Farrell), who was supposed to knock off a priest but accidentally killed a young boy. The older gangster is Ken (Brendan Gleeson). The two have been sent to Bruges by their boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) and told to lay low until the furore around the death of the young boy has subsided. For the first half of the film, the story works as an odd-couple comedy with the two very different men getting on each other’s nerves now that they’re stuck in a quasi-domestic relationship in a Bruges hotel.

As the experienced gangster, Ken is unperturbed by the death of the boy. Presumably, he’s seen worse in his career. He’s delighted to take some time off work to be a tourist and see the sights of Bruges. Ray, on the other hand, can’t sit still, which is partly due to his guilt over the boy’s death and also because he’s a young man looking for fun, which he later finds in a romantic love interest, Chloe. With Chloe to take his mind off his guilty conscience, Ray also starts to enjoy himself, and both men look like they might have a pleasant stay in Bruges after all.

Then the brilliant twist near the midpoint of the film hits.

Now, maybe I missed the cues earlier in the movie, but the twist turns the story from an oddball comedy into a very unique kind of Orphan-Elder story. Harry, the big boss back in London, calls Ken and tells him the real reason he ordered him and Ray to go to Bruges. It’s not about laying low after all; Harry wants Ken to kill Ray so that there’s no loose ends over the death of the young boy.

What we learn at this point of the story is that the botched assassination was actually Ray’s first job. It was his induction into the crime syndicate, his test to prove his worth, a test he failed. This twist forces a re-evaluation of Ray’s character. We realise his scatter-brained behaviour earlier in the film was not just due to the stress of the situation but the fact that he’s not a career-criminal. His genuine remorse over the situation also reveals that fact. In fact, Ray is just a young fool who got in with the wrong crowd.

As the audience, we learn that. But, more importantly, Ken learns it too, and this sets up the brilliant second half of the film because now Ken has a moral conundrum as well. Presumably, an assassin like Ken does not get to know his victims before he kills them. But, after a couple of days in Bruges, he’s gotten to know Ray and also to like him. He knows as well as we do that Ray is in over his head. Crucially, because Ray has failed his gangster initiation, it’s not too late for him to be able to attain some kind of redemption. That’s true in the sense that he’s young enough to start again. It’s more importantly true in the sense that Ray has not yet learned how to kill without remorse. He still has a conscience.

The fact that Ray still has a conscience inadvertently awakens Ken’s conscience too, which has presumably been kept quiet during his long service to the syndicate. Ken is the Elder in the story. His job is to initiate Ray. But it turns out that Ray has something to teach Ken. The man who apparently had no problem watching a young boy get killed now has the job of killing another young man who, while not entirely innocent, is also not entirely guilty either.

Thus, what begins as an oddball comedy turns into a potential double-redemption arc, one that involves both the Orphan character of Ray and the Elder character of Ken. In theory, it’s too late for Ken to attain redemption. He’s already a career criminal. But Ray is just a dumb kid who should never have been given the job in the first place. Thus, Ken is presented with the chance of redeeming Ray, but in order to do so, he must betray his orders. He must choose between his conscience and his duty.

I won’t spoil any more of the story. Suffice to say that there are a couple more twists that keep the audience guessing right til the end. In Bruges turned out to be one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. It’s also quite a coincidence that I saw it at the same time that I was working through my analysis of Adolescence, because the inversion that comes at the midpoint of the movie is very similar to the one I analysed in the tv series.

As I pointed out in recent posts, Adolescence is really about the father, Eddie, and the pain of the parent who must let go of their child. In Bruges gives us a similar perspective, only now it is about the pain of the Elder who must let go of the Orphan. Ken can let Ray go metaphorically (kill him) or literally. The latter option would be to let Ray out of the initiation into a life of crime and into something more like the “normal” initiation that we all receive in the modern West.

Because induction into a crime syndicate is one of the few areas of modern life that does fulfil the criteria for a formal initiation, In Bruges is able to contrast this formal initiation against the “normal” initiation in Western culture, which really looks like no initiation at all. If Ken lets Ray go, Ray will be without an Elder. This matches the broader absence of the Elder archetype in modern. But what In Bruges symbolically shows us is that this process is not easy for the Elder, just as Adolescence shows us that it is not easy for Parents to let go. It’s not easy because it makes the Elder redundant. But it’s also not easy because it entails leaving the Orphan to face the pain of the world alone.

As I alluded to in last week’s post, the ideal behind the lack of initiation in the modern West is at least partly contained in the stories of Wagner’s Parsifal and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In Bruges shares this ideal to a large extent. Like Parsifal and Alyosha, Ray is the pure fool whose naivete is what allows him to confront the world directly, including all of its most difficult aspects. To initiate the Orphan almost always amounts to killing the pure fool, or inner child. Thus, Harry’s order to Ken to kill Ray works perfectly as a piece of symbolism that Wagner and Dostoevsky would have understood. When the Elder initiates the Orphan, he kills the Child.

According to this way of looking at it, initiation is always a narrowing of the individual. Ray can be initiated into killing other people, but only by killing the part of himself that might object i.e. his conscience. It is because Ray has failed initiation that his conscience is still there to torture him over the death of the innocent boy. In Wagnerian or Dostoevskyan terms, it’s because the innocent in Ray is not dead that he can empathise with the innocence in the world and suffer with it. That is something that Harry can no longer do. Ken also couldn’t do at the start of the movie, but he learns by association with Ray.

Thus, In Bruges follows in the footsteps of Parsifal and The Brothers Karamazov in showing us the Elder whose role is precisely not to initiate the Orphan. It turns out that the hardest form of initiation is no initiation at all. If there’s no Elder giving us orders, then there’s nobody we can blame when things go wrong (except ourselves). The same goes for punishment. Ken and Harry can punish Ray for his blunder. But in doing so they only turn him into a kind of Pavlovian machine who does what he’s supposed to not from conscience but from fear.

By giving Ray a couple of days with nothing to do, Ken and Harry accidentally allow him to face his own conscience and thereby to open up an opportunity for redemption. Ken realises that because he’s spent time with the young man. Harry does not because he’s back home in Britain calculating the best way forward in a purely intellectual fashion. Even crime bosses need to be rational and logical. Thus, the second half of the movie also plays out as a kind of spiritual battle between the two Elders.

In Bruges ends up providing one of the rarest types of stories in the modern West: an Orphan-Elder story based in real life. The more I write about it, the more I come to think that it might actually be a modern classic. Since this post has ended up becoming a movie review, I suppose I should end it by giving the film a rating: