Good morning, and Happy New Year.

This week I'm writing from Bondi Beach, Australia. A friend from college is getting married this weekend and a big group of us turned the wedding into a two-week Aussie holiday. The days have settled into a pleasant rhythm: morning walks, afternoon swims, and big dinners with lots of seafood.

The coffee alone justifies the 15-hour flight. I've had four flat whites today. It's 1pm.

Mandatory stop at the Sydney Opera House.

A week or so before I arrived, a gunman killed 15 people just a few blocks from where I'm staying. The nation was shaken; the last mass shooting of this scale in Australia was nearly 30 years ago. There were flowers and candles and national mourning, not too dissimilar from what happens in the States.

Then something happened that felt foreign to me as an American.

Within days, Australia passed stricter gun laws. New restrictions on ownership, expanded background checks, tighter controls. The legislation moved through parliament with bipartisan support. There was debate, sure. But the debate ended in action.

I thought about the American loop: tragedy, thoughts and prayers, punditry, politicization, dissipation. We've adapted to mass shootings so thoroughly that paralysis feels like the natural order.

Australia reminded me it doesn't have to be.

Before this trip I watched a lecture from Justin Wolfers, an Australian economist who spent years in the US, titled "Australia is Freaking Amazing." It sounds like tourism board copy, but the argument underneath is sharper.

Wolfers makes a case I've been circling all year: institutions determine outcomes. The rules of the game shape what's possible before anyone steps onto the field. Australia, he argues, has built some of the best democratic infrastructure on earth.

Three things stood out.

  1. Voting Infrastructure

    Australians are required to vote. If you don't show up, you get fined. Elections happen on Saturdays.

    This sounded vaguely authoritarian to me at first… mandatory civic participation enforced by the state.

    But the downstream effects are compelling. Voter suppression tactics become pointless when everyone has to show up anyway. Politicians can't win by "firing up the base" because the base is already guaranteed to appear. The whole strategic apparatus of American campaigns loses its power when participation is mandatory and weekend timing removes the question of who can afford to take Tuesday off.

    They also use ranked-choice voting. You number your preferences, which mitigates the spoiler effect. Wolfers argues Trump might never have won the 2016 GOP primary under this system. The anyone-but-Trump vote would have consolidated instead of splitting between Cruz, Kasich, and Rubio.

  2. Independent Redistricting.

    Australia's Electoral Commission draws district boundaries. The body is independent, nonpartisan, and operates with a single mandate: fair representation.

    Wolfers delivers the line that stuck with me: "Gerrymandering lets American politicians choose their voters. In Australia, voters choose their politicians."

    The people who draw the maps have no stake in who wins. The incentive to manipulate boundaries for partisan advantage simply doesn't exist.

  3. National Cabinet

    During COVID, Australia invented a new governing body on the fly. The Prime Minister and all state premiers convened as "National Cabinet," a structure designed to coordinate pandemic response above the partisan fray. Leaders from different parties sat in the same room, bound by cabinet confidentiality. Discussions could be frank without everyone posturing for cameras.

    The contrast with America is painful to recall. Governors competed for PPE like bidders at an auction. Mask-wearing became tribal signaling. The federal government treated briefings as campaign rallies.

    Australia built new infrastructure mid-crisis, then, they kept it.

    National Cabinet has become permanent. The body now handles energy policy, housing, climate coordination, health reform. Australia looked at an emergency workaround and decided to institutionalize it. Crisis became the mechanism for building durable capacity that outlasted the emergency.

I'm headed to New Zealand next week before returning home. To a country where gun violence is a daily occurrence, gerrymandering is accelerating, and crisis governance means attaching controversial riders to must-pass bills at 2am.

America isn’t uniquely broken and it doesn’t have to be.

And being in Australia clarified how much of our dysfunction is institutional, not inevitable.

Up and to the right.