For many people, all of this creates a sense of dislocation and anxiety. Even within national borders, it’s hard to know what’s really shaping daily life as the world feels progressively harder to understand.

At The New York Times, of course, we believe that part of our job is to help with that — for readers in Australia and everywhere. But we also rely on political leaders to frame goals and strategies for dealing with the forces that affect us all.

This week, I got a taste of how Australia’s leaders are managing.

Both Bill Shorten, the opposition leader, and Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister, gave speeches in Sydney on foreign policy. I attended both.

I’d hoped to hear them grapple with some of the new challenges that go beyond nation-states or China vs. America. I’d hoped to hear a sophisticated argument and maybe a vision for what the world could learn from Australia, and what Australia could learn from the world.

Instead, I heard status quo thinking and caution.

Mr. Shorten’s lecture at the Lowy Institute emphasized that if Labor wins the next election, Australia will not view China solely through the lens of “worst-case scenarios,” seemingly a dig at the Liberals’ focus on foreign interference. He emphasized a need for independence, but did not provide much clarity when I asked about Australia’s areas of concern. Perhaps that was because the Chinese ambassador was in attendance.

Mr. Morrison, speaking at an Asia Society gathering hosted by Bloomberg, focused more on the benefits of trade and expanded military spending. He started out trying to emphasize values: “We are more than the sum of our deals,” he said. “We are better than that.”

Then he proceeded to talk mostly in transactional terms. The word “technology” did not appear once in his prepared remarks.