Fraser Anning is in the parliament by accident. Having fluked his way into the Senate chamber because One Nation needed a replacement for Malcolm Roberts, he now wants your attention, and judging by his performance in the Senate on Tuesday night, he doesn’t care what lines he crosses to get it.

What we are witnessing in national politics is the latest manifestation of Australia’s cultural cringe. Far right political operatives, and the media voices prepared to give them succour, are importing the nationalist debates that have sprung up in the shadow of the global financial crisis – the biggest economic dislocation since the great depression.

We are building our own tinder box, bit by bit.

Debates about race, and sovereignty, and immigration have caught fire elsewhere because of deep resentments felt by the losers of globalisation. Australia didn’t suffer the biting effects of the global financial crisis, and the prolonged economic downturn that followed it. By comparison to the visceral experiences elsewhere, in this country we experienced a chilly, stiff breeze.

Notwithstanding these facts, we are importing the outrage consciousness that exists elsewhere, validating it, willingly projecting an alternate reality onto our own domestic circumstances as a grotesque form of entertainment.

We are building our own tinder box, bit by bit.

This would be pathetic. Almost laughable. Except in terms of race and politics, we are now in the most explosive period we’ve been in since John Howard sailed into choppy waters with his feelings on Asian immigration in the 1980s.

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There is nothing to laugh about. Right now, there are all the ingredients of a perfect storm.

The first ingredient is a fractured bunch of far-right leaning political voices in mortal competition with one another for votes. The last 24 hours has been a public competition between Anning, and his new running mate Bob Katter, and One Nation, for attention. Anning and Katter apparently want to establish a new beach head, charting territory where Pauline won’t follow. Just let that happy thought settle on you for a minute or two.

The second ingredient is a polity profoundly disaffected by the repeated failings and default narcissism of Australia’s major party politics, frustrated by their congested cities and low wages growth and by governments who spent more time fighting their fractured internals than navigating the future. The third is a disrupted media landscape where conflict – the louder and more notorious the better – is hard currency.

Fraser Anning used his first speech to parliament to spin his own obscurity into notoriety: to try on a troll suit in full public view.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Katter’s Australian Party Senator Fraser Anning makes his maiden speech at Parliament House in Canberra. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Laying out an ethno-nationalist treatise in a soporific tone that lulled his Senate colleagues into a late afternoon stupor, Anning courted outrage from progressive media outlets, which gratifies his base and allows him to style himself as a victim of censorious political correctness.

There was also an implicit invitation to anyone in the right commentariat prepared to play footsie with despicable views on a free speech rationale: please like me, I am available for short interviews on the Bolt Report.

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Anyone who has kicked around alt-right politics understands the potency of the final solution as a bit of rhetorical shorthand. The idea the phrase was invoked by accident is laughable.

By invoking “the final solution” Anning projected himself into territory where his contribution would not be ignored, where the echo chamber would pick it up and blast it into public consciousness, inviting a secondary pile on in the social media space.

You don’t have to think too hard to understand how the perverse incentives of our busted national affairs landscape can lead a country into a very dark place – can construct a large hook for collective anxiety to hang on.

We also need to be very clear that this drift into darkness isn’t a boutique enterprise, something happening on the fringe of respectable political conversation, a blur of movement in our peripheral #auspol vision.

We need to be clear there has been too much permissiveness on the part of the current government when it comes to this debate.

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Significant figures in the government have been nudging the political hornets’ nest for their own purposes. Tony Abbott. Peter Dutton. Alan Tudge, warning that Australia is veering towards a “European separatist multicultural model” – whatever the hell that means.

Malcolm Turnbull in Melbourne recently heard stuff about African gangs. The prime minister had heard from “colleagues” that there was real anxiety about crime, never mind the statistical inconvenience that crime in Victoria is falling. “There is real concern about Sudanese gangs,” Turnbull said. “You’d have to be walking around with your hands over your ears in Melbourne not to hear it”.

Key government figures on Wednesday morning said all the right things – condemned Anning’s Senate contribution unequivocally.

Malcolm Turnbull said Australia is a nation that does not define its nationality, its identity, by reference to race or religion, or cultural or ethnic background.

“We define ourselves by commitment to shared political values of freedom, of democracy and the rule of law. And people from every corner of the earth, from every religion or of none, and every race, can connect, be inspired by, be part of those values.

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“That is Australia. So we reject, we condemn racism in any form, and the remarks by Senator Anning are justly condemned and rejected by us all.”

Stirring stuff. It was actually deeply gratifying to see the Australian parliament come together and condemn Anning’s foray in unequivocal terms.

But the correct words on Wednesday morning don’t airbrush the recent history.

The government has been playing with fire as one pathway to retaining office. This is a government with nothing to say to disaffected voters about their economic circumstances, casting around for a way to connect, hanging lanterns over problems rather than seeking solutions, and constructing partisan points of difference with their opponents.

Penny Wong got it exactly right when she told the Senate chamber on Wednesday morning that a nation divided is never safe. You can come to the concept of seeking unity in diversity either as a moral imperative – a core part of being a decent person – or a pragmatic one, a sense that bridges are better than walls in complex times.

So what needs to happen, in the national interest, is clear.

In the national interest, the permissiveness, the normalising of racism and xenophobia and fear of the other, the nudges, nods and winks and the culture war nonsense, has to stop.

A line has been crossed in Australian politics. At least we know a line still exists. It is time for all decent people to stand up and position themselves on the right side of the line.