Australia’s ‘Swift’ National Cabinet Is Bad, Actually

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, December 16, 2025

 

NPR explains why Australia’s government is able to make “swift legal changes” — unlike, say, the federal government here in the United States:

 

Part of the reason Australia’s government can act so quickly on political matters of national importance is because of something called the National Cabinet.

 

The National Cabinet is composed of the prime minister and the premiers and chief ministers of Australia’s six states and two territories.

 

It was first established in early 2020 as a way for Australia to coordinate its national response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, the group has convened to discuss a number of national issues, from a rise in antisemitic hate crimes to proposed age restrictions on social media use.

 

The National Cabinet doesn’t make laws, but its members attempt to agree on a set of strategies or priorities and work with their respective parliaments to put them into practice.

 

In America, NPR notes, things are rather different:

 

Gun control efforts in Australia inevitably draw comparisons to the U.S., where the Second Amendment dominates any discussion about firearms restrictions.

 

Clearly, NPR is frustrated by this. I am not. It is, of course, true that the Second Amendment prevents the federal government from imposing the sorts of gun-control regulations that now obtain in Australia. But so, by design, does the rest of the Constitution in which that provision sits. The enumerated powers doctrine limits what Congress may do per se. The Senate makes it difficult to pass controversial alterations to the status quo. And the Bill of Rights — not just the Second Amendment, but the Fifth and Fourth, too — serves to stack the deck in favor of the individual. NPR is correct to observe that, in Australia, the government can move in a “swift” manner. It is incorrect to imply that this is desirable. Over the last few decades, Americans have watched as countries that are ostensibly similar to the United States have responded to tragedies or national panics by rushing to roll back rights that, in America, have been set in stone. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom all now have “hate speech” laws that are routinely used to punish dissent. New Zealand has wiped out the right to bear arms. The United Kingdom is in the process of abolishing jury trials. Were such proposals to be introduced in the United States, the Bill of Rights would, indeed, “dominate any discussion.” And thank goodness for that!

 

To understand why this matters, one needs to look no further than to the fact that the institution that NPR is touting here — the “National Cabinet” — was created in response to Covid-19. One assumes that NPR thinks that this is a selling point. I think it is a warning sign. Australia’s response to Covid-19 was a totalitarian nightmare. Australia required its citizens to obtain exit visas before leaving the country, and then, thanks to the arrival caps and quarantine bottlenecks it imposed, barred many of them from returning for extended periods of time. It set up barriers between Australian states, separating families for months. It established a draconian quarantine system that had no parallel anywhere else in the Western world — except, perhaps, New Zealand. Melbourne, one of its major cities, instituted a lockdown for 260 days — the longest anywhere in the Anglosphere. And it did much of this without meaningful legislation or judicial oversight. These decisions were not coincidental to the establishment of the National Cabinet; they were the purpose of the National Cabinet. That this tool is now being used to respond to other crises all but guarantees that Australia will get similar results elsewhere.

 

Lest I be accused of Pollyannaism, let me concede upfront that the United States is not perfect, and that its systems do not always hold. While much better than Australia, America during Covid-19 was no paradise, either. Nevertheless, that we sometimes see American politicians doing illiberal or illegal things is not a flaw in our setup, but a confirmation of why that setup exists in the first instance. As James Madison famously observed, the Founders wrote down the rules by which the government must live because it knew full well that that, being human, those who ran that government would repeatedly try to break them. Thus, the material question is not, “does America’s Constitution immediately prevail in every single case?” but “does America’s Constitution prevail in most cases, and are the worst infractions eventually dealt with?” In America the answer to this second question is a resounding yes. In Australia, it is most decidedly not. That isn’t a bug; it’s the feature atop which our entire civilization has been built.