Border security is the great flexible proxy of Australian politics: a dog whistle not to racism, but to uncertainty. We may not have sorted out the economy, jobs or the deficit, but we stopped the boats. Jonathan Green writes.

It's a sign, a sign of the near collapse of this process.

Why does Australian politics, under stress, revert to defiant sloganeering on border security?

A dog whistle to racists? Too neat, and too niche. Do you really imagine that electoral outcomes hinge on the preferences of a few thousand neck-tattooed knuckle draggers? That key marginals on our suburban fringes with their patchwork of diverse ethnicity are riven with hostile xenophobia?

Border security is of course the great flexible proxy of Australian politics: a dog whistle not to racism, but to uncertainty. The uncertainty of a shifting job market, of the tenuous fortunes of the broader economy, the cancerous deficit eating at our public finances: tough issues that are hard to resolve.

But we stopped the boats.

There's pain and a whiff of moral rot in the solution we've plumped for in border security, but it has at least brought some kind of defined outcome, a show of strength. Competence.

And this is where it becomes a little more than a simple proxy, a whistled sop toward voter anxiety. Maybe this is as good as it gets, the one fixed point in a political universe of gesture and empty hyperbole: we stopped the boats.

We're asked to take it, to take that single certainty as a symbol of government's capacity to master the invidious, to calmly confront a world of wicked problems.

The implied admission: We can't fix the economy, in fact we don't even want to talk about that in detail. But we can offer you some economic comfort in the form of this well-worn, but strangely comforting gesture toward your true concerns.

And so we confront the shadows that confront us and skirt the substance of the problems themselves.

"We stopped the boats." Rinse and repeat.

As politics retreats further and further from tackling any sort of awkward reality, the boat proxy has become a heightened symbol of determined action and authority. In case of policy emergency: stop the boats.

It speaks to economic security, even if economic security can't be delivered.

The proxy has extended its ambit, become an excuse for not actually having a plan, a sweeping gesture instead of meaningful specifics.

And these diversions, these distracting feints, seem all we can hope for from parties who may well sense, as many do, how close we seem to the brink of dysfunction.

Our political leaders must surely have some sense of this country's deep, and growing, incapacity to service its sense of self.

Where does the money come from to fund the healthcare we either take for granted or crave?

How do we inject forward thinking dynamism and equality of opportunity into education?

How do we prepare a culture primed to demand "jobs and growth" for the looming possibility that work will never again offer stable certainty and continuing reward?

How do we navigate the paralysing inequities of childcare, or the cruel poverty of our response to an ageing population?

What to do about the atrophying muddle of our infrastructure? The absence of intelligent design in urban planning?

Never mind the joker in the pack, the impending crisis in our climate and ecology.

Where is the political conversation that confronts these issues?

Blithe silence seems the consensus response to all of it, to burgeoning inequality, climate, and the end of work.

They kid us of course, and make expansive gestures toward the far policy horizons. Sensing the collective unease, the need for seriousness, both major parties talk reassuringly about the long term, but with the identical vapid airiness with which they address the here and now.

The resulting vista is of a political inertia that extends to the horizon. The key policy objectives are sent off out of reach, punted past the forward estimates to a place beyond recognisable effect or accountability.

It's just one example among many, but consider the absurdity of an economic strategy that dwells on 10-year tax cuts as a key engine of growth, cuts promised by a government steaming toward the uncertainty of election within the fluid chaos of a system that has had five prime ministers in nine years.

In 10 years? Tax? Who knows.

It's close to magical thinking in a time of clamouring ugly realities demanding sophisticated policy response and the knowing co-operation of an informed and determined population, a population that ideally would be flattered by inclusion and true choice.

The great hope is that many of us know all this, and sense the crippled incapacity of this late-stage parliamentary democracy.

Putting words before action and proxies in place of fact, it might be that Australian politics had pushed this policy of avoidance and deferment to its limit.

Jonathan Green is presenter of RN Sunday Extra and editor of the literary journal Meanjin.