Australia Day is a day for a snooze, not a flag

Just a drowse with the flies and the heat; a bookend to a slow dozy season that began before Christmas. A silly season, as ever, punctuated by political pratfalls, own goals and signs of serious political and bureaucratic dopiness, and declining popularity of whichever politicians are in sight. And the usual political expenses rorts, and self-harm by senior bureaucrats and ministers over welfare payments. Plus the turnover of yet another NSW premier once hailed as the saviour, now plainly failing to excite popular enthusiasm or the reverence of the Murdoch media. Nothing much to get excited about, nor to much frighten the horses.

In a nervier Australia, there might be a serious sense of foreboding. By the end of the Australia Day long weekend, Donald Trump will have been in power for 10 days. That's enough to start several serious wars – shooting and economic – as well as any number of border clashes, and to imprison or immobilise any number of Democrats, film stars or disloyal or fat Miss Universe contestants. If he, or his staff, have a plan or a timetable for whatever it is they have in mind, neither the public nor the political and diplomatic establishment have any idea what it is. Perhaps we'll be informed by tweet.

One doesn't necessarily need to fear the worst. It may well be that the great surprise about Trump will be that he turns out to be more cautious, deliberate and careful than anyone hopes or believes. It may well be that the sheer violence of his speech is but negotiating bluster from a businessman, and that he'll always settle, as he generally has in business, for roughly what you'd expect. It may well be that he'll quickly develop quarrels with his notional allies in the Republican Party and find himself with the same sort of paralysed government that plagued Barack Obama.

For Australians, as much as for Americans, or Russians or Chinese, the big problem is that, so far, we have no pedigree, record, or even platform against which serious prediction of life under Trump can be made. All we can be sure of is a bumpy ride. Trump may have campaigned brilliantly, but he gave little indication of what he was going to do. It's plain he has constituencies whom he wants to appease, but it's also plain that they expect nothing in particular other than some breaking of old and predictable political patterns. His political enemies – and he has as many on the Republican side as on the Democrat side – have no doubt dug some trenches and fortifications to protect their favourite institutions. But they do not, as yet, know from where the attack will come. Or if it will come in the form they fear at all. There's no sign that any of these experts learnt much from the primaries or the election campaign.

Malcolm Turnbull may be perfectly correct in arguing that Australians should not be battening down but should instead be looking for economic opportunities from the new US administration. But Turnbull has no more idea of what will happen than anyone else, and no reasonable expectation that Australia's diplomatic, economic, political or historic weight will have any real influence on what occurs. Thank God we have Joe Hockey on watch to give us advance warning.

There has been a continuous conversation over the past year about a new political world in which people who have been neglected or ignored, or who have felt they have been, have come into their own. This new world is said to be xenophobic, tired of ever-increasing social and economic insecurity, opposed to immigration, leaning towards protectionism, yearning for some imagined glorious and secure past, and deeply suspicious of the slick politicians who have misrepresented them for years. They have become responsive to populists and demagogues, particularly on the right. The latest manifestation of this in Australia is with the Pauline Hanson One Nation movement.

That Australia Day might be thought to be declining in its power over the national imagination might seem odd at a time Hansonism seems to be riding high. No one has draped herself more often in the national flag. Quite apart from her power in the Senate (even after the loss of Rod Culleton) is the fear that her party will do very well in Queensland elections, and probably in later elections in Western Australia and NSW.

But even assuming her continuing popularity, it may well be that her very appropriation of a strident and in-your-face nationalism serves to remind non-supporters of why it is that ostentatious hands-on-the-heart stuff is regarded by a good many citizens as spurious, alien and unAustralian.

Hanson is not, of course, the only political leader to have wrapped herself in the flag, nor to pretend that there is some sort of crisis of our national security or identity coming from sinister alien forces. Our senior military, security and police establishments rushed to provide backdrops of national flags in front of which Tony Abbott could try to incite national panic and division. But there is no great evidence that ordinary Australians, least of all potential Hansonites, were ever much fooled, nor that they signed up to Team Australia.

Sadly, most Australians may support the brutalisation of boat people, and more and more have been encouraged, by Labor politicians as much as Coalition ones, to blame foreigners for anything wrong. But the Australian temper is not for Cronulla-style riots. Those who yearn for them get fairly short shrift. One can sustain a sense of siege – particularly one intended to divide rather more than to unite – for only so long. The risk is not so much of fire as of the audience falling asleep.

That's a process much assisted by the general want of credibility of our politicians and, sometimes, our bureaucrats. We have seen some good and entirely "Australian" examples of this over the past few weeks.

First, we see a host of senior politicians using public money to support their lifestyles, leisure and family security, then, equally predictably, insisting that what they did was permitted by the rules. Generally, of course, they have been right, because the rules have been so constructed, by the politicians themselves, to provide for maximum ambiguity and minimum accountability. As ever when the media takes advantage of a lack of news to dig through deliberately difficult to retrieve files, and the breath and stench of the rorting mentality is hinted at, a prime minister or someone similar will promise to revise the rules to make rorting and rip-offs, less possible or more likely to be discovered. There is an extensive literature of what could be done to achieve this, but one can always be certain that the new rules will be as weak as the politicians think they can manage.

It's always seemed to me that politicians ought to get their travel allowances and airline tickets from Centrelink staff after providing them, in advance, with the sort of paperwork and documentation that would be needed to access an invalidity pension. With payments, of course, on a scale matching that which is considered (by the lifting class) more than ample for frugal dignity (of the leaning class).

Public enjoyment and disgust at the discomfort of politicians over the random acts of disclosure of their rorting mentalities has been amplified by the fact that these very politicians have been engaged in that quintessentially Australian sport of cracking down on welfare bludgers, and making sure no one gets a penny more (or, supposedly, less) than his or entitlement.

Naturally, this has been coupled with an innocent-until-proven-guilty implementation system, a manifestly imperfect set of computer algorithms calculated to produce regular but random injustices, and agency staff as furious, overworked and frustrated as many of those on the other side of the counter.

It would hardly be Australia if there were not an array of ministers and senior officials thinking there was a popular constituency for being as mean as possible to anyone receiving welfare. In the mind's eye, of course, such recipients are dole bludgers, and probably of the underclass. The fact that by far the greater proportion of those intended to be punished by the system are age pensioners, or people receiving family-allowance payments, or students from middle-class Australia never seems to figure in the political calculus.

Our leaders' political and bureaucratic incompetence, as much as their artlessness and heartlessness, may be one of Australia's glories worth celebrating on Australia Day, as among the greatest of our checks and balances. Some would actually be dangerous if they were more competent.

I've long argued that one should look within the wider system for the best checks and balances. Thus, for example, the best rule to curb political self-indulgence with travel allowances would be to subject MPs to the same checking regime as is imposed with receiving government benefits. Likewise, questions of just where one draws the line about the surveillance state, or the intrusive powers of police and the security services can be resolved by determining that the national security is as much imperilled by tax dodgers and corrupt politicians and officials as it is by terrorists. Ergo, both the tax commissioner and the long-awaited federal independent commission against corruption ought to have the same powers of investigation, bugging, pre-emptive arrest, dragnet raids and free use of Uzi submachine guns as ASIO, the federal police and our ludicrous Border Force.

A good many citizens would agree but, in the Australian manner, it would be amazing how many politicians, lawyers and policemen would be leery if it were to be thought that the real power of the state could be exercised against them.

There is, of course, never an Australia Day without someone's thinking that it is a time to hector others with fine sentiments about the need for duty and sacrifice, and the imagined values of the Australian citizen, almost invariably, in the mind of the hectorer, some Protestant or British stock, with an ingrained sense of deference to authority, and respect for tradition and authority. One doesn't need to be of non-British background, nor Indigenous, to find this not only comical but at odds with that image of the larrikin, the anarchist and the irreverent guttersnipe that a good many Australians have of themselves. In this image, pomp equals pomposity, spit and polish represents the nark and sneak, and earnestness the hypocrite, wowser and straitener.

It's certainly hard to imagine Turnbull as the sombre statesmen summonsing all Australians to arms, whether against enemies domestic or foreign. It's not so much a matter of his supposedly moderate instincts, if these still exist, so much as his apparent lack of passion, and a certain incapacity to pretend that matters are serious this time. A man who has ducked every challenge, moral, political and economic, he could have faced since he became leader is hardly the one to inspire citizens to sacrifice or unity.

A proud Australian is not a paranoid Australian, nor one as focused on resentment of the positions of others. The Australian crowd has never been kind, particularly when it has been orchestrated. Such a time is not a good time if one is already marginalised in the community. Sometimes, of course, by short residence. Sometimes, it seems in respect of Indigenous people, by long residence. And sometimes merely by difference, particularly difference from the mainstream. The legendary Australian tolerance, and belief in a fair go, has never, in our history, gone far from the veranda.

Jack Waterford is a former Canberra Times editor.