The speed of technological advance should give us hope that we can find solutions, including even for climate change once the politicians stop bickering. Technologies such as battery storage and electric cars, which were at the prototype stage a decade ago, are now a practical reality. Loading Politicians such as Barnaby Joyce should stop undermining faith in science by ignoring climate science and start boasting about our scientific and technological achievements: In the past decade Australia has produced its first tech billionaires with the founding of Atlassian and it has led the world in installation of roof-top solar panels. Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he wants to lead the world in regulating the internet but Australia should also aspire to lead in the use of science and technology to deal with drought or transport congestion or an ageing population. The global political scene may also be less dire than it seems. Australia is now stalked by the fear of China’s rising power but in reality it was never safe to assume that the US would stay the world’s lone superpower for ever.

It was still possible to dream 10 years ago of a global concert of like-minded nations led by the US working together to solve the world’s great problems. Loading In 2009 world leaders had just seen off the global financial crisis by co-ordinating economic stimulus and keeping global trade open. Some predicted a new wave of democracy in the Middle East and Asia driven by brave young people with smartphones. A lot went wrong. Democracy has gone backwards from China to the Middle East and the former Soviet bloc, partly because a new generation of strong-man politicians have worked out how to use a mixture of new surveillance technology and old-fashioned violence to suppress dissent. The US, meanwhile, has given up some of its leadership role, especially under President Donald Trump. It no longer talks much about spreading values such as free trade or human rights. And China’s rise has shown many countries that you do not need to be free and democratic to get rich.

As the 2020s open, some pessimists will fear the world will degenerate into hostile unstable blocs of tinpot strongmen. The new multipolar world order may be unfamiliar but on the other hand it might not always worse. Loading Australia may find the US a less reliable bulwark but we can help build a new system where countries such as Indonesia, Japan and India help us maintain the strategic balance with China. The past few years have been good for strongmen like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin but that might not last. But they are not as strong as they like to act. They have lots of weapons but faced with resolute opposition, either internal or international, they often back down.

They are also not as irrational as some caricatures of them suggest. It should be possible to work constructively with China in areas such as climate change and development finance but Australia must stand up to it and bullies everywhere. For Australia the past decade has been marked by political in-fighting and a gradual loss of economic advantage. At the start of 2010 Australia was winning global praise as one of the only big countries to have avoided recession during the GFC. Helped by the mining boom, that continued for some years but we have fallen back and today the unemployment rate here is well above the US, Japan and Britain. As countless opinion pieces over the past decade have lamented, Australia has failed to carry out reforms in areas such as taxation and energy policy. Yet the Herald remains confident that Australia has fundamental strengths, including a tolerant, multicultural society, a strong tradition of public debate and people who really care. They should stand us in good stead for the decade of the 2020s.

The Herald's editor Lisa Davies writes a weekly newsletter exclusively for subscribers. To have it delivered to your inbox, please sign up here