From the war on terror to the "scourge" of ice addiction, a crisis can fuel our sense of belief in the effectiveness of the political process. Thus urgency guards the political status quo, writes Jonathan Green.

That was a distinguishing feature of the Global Financial Crisis: it was the real deal, an actual crisis.

How quickly we forget. How effectively our recollections are distorted by subsequent events, by personalities, distaste, and the thick crayon colourings of politics.

The quick effectiveness of the Australian response to the GFC was a standout impression from the first episode of The Killing Season, and a reminder of how differently government is perceived when it steps up in a moment of genuine need with the sole objective of securing the national interest.

We were stimulated, perhaps saved from ruin, and Kevin Rudd was never more popular. In purely political terms, the GFC presented the perfect confluence of necessity and solution. And of course it had the great advantage of being real; for voters schooled in the fantasy crises of conventional politics this was all that was needed to spark a surge of support.

The other lesson, the takeout piece of meta-analysis from watching Rudd and Wayne Swan staunch financial meltdown, is that this very sense of urgent need is a potent thing in itself. A sense of crisis can fuel our sense of belief in the effectiveness of the political process, can deepen our feeling of hopeful trust in political incumbents.

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Thus urgency guards the established position; crisis is a compelling argument for loyalty and against change.

Politics has long known that crisis is so powerful that when absent it is sometimes necessary to invent it. At the very least politicians are ever-eager to invent issues that to the uninitiated may appear simply as challenges with the full heat of imminent calamity. There is skill in that execution, but the full package has always been to manufacture both urgent anxiety and the companion sense that you alone of all the options available are uniquely placed to offer solutions.

Debt and deficit would see you all dead in your beds were it not for the surpluses in our DNA. That kind of thing.

The war on terror takes this thinking to an even more impressive place: taking an unsettling reality (foreign war) insisting on a local manifestation (homeland terror) and proposing a suite of policy responses that all speak of strength and steely determination. Will any of those responses be effective? Well that may not be the point.

It's hard not to see shades of Orwell in this state of endless but somehow almost invisible war, Eurasia taking on either Oceania or Eastasia as it always has, the sense of perpetual but unresolved disquiet serving the interests of the political status quo.

The great - and probably unintended - political cleverness of maintaining the current war on terror is that the policy solutions ranged against it seem destined to inflame rather than solve the base issue of Islamist antagonism. Thus we have a story of potentially perpetual conflict providing an unending political crisis deployed as an anxiety provoking staple to energise the loyalties of voters across decades.

In a purely political sense it is a masterwork: the self perpetuating, politically energising crisis.

And maybe it's a style of thinking that goes beyond terror into the more mundane issues of purely domestic politics. Perhaps the modern breed of politician, schooled in the Pavlovian exchange of shock and anxious awe is now tempted to frame an increasing set of issues as urgent necessities to be quickly resolved. Or perhaps that's just a function of both a limited rhetorical grasp and a politics that gravitates to all available extremities, pushing issues to the edge of ideological division, and seeing in all of them the seeds of either anxious division or desperate urgency.

Which might explain some otherwise paradoxical political behaviour.

Take domestic violence, an issue described by the Prime Minister as an "unfolding tragedy" yet one that received scant attention in the last federal budget and one that has long suffered cuts in resources. Or take Indigenous disadvantage, the vexed issue of "closing the gap" presenting a lingering chasm that comes as a "profound disappointment" to the PM, but an area that has also borne the brunt of severe cuts in funding. Or the "scourge" of ice addiction, another area in which the governments talks in terms of crisis, but fails to match action to the rhetoric, while families struggle to find publically funded rehab places for addicts.

There is an unsettling truth in all of this: that the creation of a sense of crisis serves a greater and more immediate political imperative than the relative invisibility of actually providing the gently positive flow of solutions to various social ills.

And perhaps that's the stale taste of modern power, all crisis and no solution. The GFC looks tolerable by comparison.

Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum.