Another year passes: again, the sublime, ridiculous and tragic

With the flick of his wrist, John McEnroe, who it is ridiculous to think will be 67 in February, would often execute a sublime half-volley, when the ball seemed past him. Crowds would gasp in disbelief. The impossible was made easy.

If only the same could be said of entering a new secular year. The closing of one calendar and the opening of another is remarkably easy. However, the intractable problems of one year inevitably follow us into the next, leaving us wondering whether some will be impossible to resolve.

2025 ends with many serious Australian and international problems and concerns:

-peace remains inherently fragile in the Middle East; Iran is again engulfed by political protest and dissent;

-peace remains elusive in Ukraine;

-developed nations are struggling to cope with an invidious trinity of political concerns. Ageing populations are placing inexorable pressure on governments to provide services that are increasingly impossible to pay for as the taxpaying base of the population shrinks.  Add hostile political reactions to immigration pressures and cost of living crises and is it any wonder faith in the effectiveness of democracy is faltering?; and

-the promised economic fruits of the globalised world seem as elusive for the developing world as ever.

For so long Australia has been seen as permanently lucky, and unaffected by broader world concerns. No longer.

The Bondi beach massacre on 14^th December continues to distress beyond measure.

Australia’s Prime Minister, who has often lauded himself as a man who lives to “fight Tories”, has failed to display either appropriate leadership or responses in the wake of the massacre to fight antisemitism.  Anthony Albanese has been exposed as a man who cannot respond philosophically to a national crisis. He can only live and breathe factional politics.

The man who readily  ordered a Royal Commission into a highly inappropriate social welfare debt recovery programme of the previous government, cannot bring himself to order a Royal Commission into Australia’s most repulsive act of political violence. His fatuous argument is that a Royal Commission would provide a ”platform for hate speech.” As a journalist has written, “that’s equivalent to calling off the Nuremberg trials on the basis that they might have promoted Nazi ideology.” Albanese’s sheepish and pallid countenance confirms that he is not capable of acknowledging what needs to be done.

Suddenly, Albanese’s luck appears to have run out. There are a series of difficult challenges that he and his government have failed to respond to for close to four years.

For some strange reason, I felt compelled to visit Melbourne’s stores during the mayhem of Boxing Day sales. Standing alone in a store, I was approached by a Scottish visitor who asked me, “Are you from Australia?”. Feeling I had understood his Glasgow drawl sufficiently to say I was, he immediately asked,  “Can you tell me why everything in this country is so ‘F…ing” expensive?” And this from a man benefitting from an exchange rage that doubles the value of his English pound when compared to the anaemic value of the Australian dollar!

Depressingly, it was easy for me to recite the reasons why: “well we have State and Federal governments that overly spend creating non-productive public service jobs and unsustainable public work projects,  runaway social welfare and defence budgets, which, themselves are soon to be eclipsed by the costs of our well intentioned National Disability Insurance scheme,  we have the highest minimum wage rates in the world, policies that have led to exponential increases in domestic and industrial energy costs, excessive government regulation of every aspect of corporate life and indefensible wage practices such as penalty rates on a Sunday, which is now typically the busiest trading day of the commercial week.”

Game, set and match to faltering economic growth and productivity. Welcome lower living standards! Not long after the Australian Open Champions of 2026 are crowned, Australia’s Reserve Bank are likely to increase interest rates.

Throw in increasingly unaffordable costs of housing, growing gaps of disadvantage between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians and urban and regional Australia (not forgetting the growing disparities between inner and outer urban areas of Australia's major cities), and a chronic national shortage of teachers that is reflected in falling standards of education. The government cannot volley away these problems for any longer.

The tennis world ended the year with the most pitiful display of the ridiculous with the ghastly ‘Battle of the sexes tennis match’ between Nick Kyrgios and Arnya Sabalenka. If a poorly prepared cricket pitch in Melbourne diminished the lustre of Test cricket when the fabled Boxing Day Test ended in just two days, this utterly gratuitous display on a hideoulsy modified court went close to annihilating the integrity of tennis in just over an hour. Never again. Never should have been.

The decision by the Danish government to end a postal service for letters is equally distressing. It has been a service that has been provided for 400 years. As someone who happily pays an extortionate amount of $1.70 to send personal notes within Australia, I cannot imagine a world where the privacy, sincerity and warmth of personal correspondence is made impossible. Notes of condolence or congratulation via e-mail or text? Sacre bleu! I think not!

The year also ends with tragic reminders of the passing of time that none of us can escape. Hamlet reminds us, “ It will be short: the interim is mine; And a life’s no more than to say ‘One’.

Not one, but three vital, intelligent, important women have lost their lives in recent days. Their time was hauntingly brief. In Australia an esteemed paediatrician and former Federal politician, Katie Allen died before Christmas aged only 59.

Days later, the University of Melbourne’s first ever female Vice-Chancellor, Emma Johnston, died aged 51.

Both succumbed quickly to rare and untreatable cancers.

Today, Tatiana Schlossberg, JFK’s grand-daughter, who told the world last month that a virulent strain of leukaemia had given her less than a year to live died.

No matter how many years pass, the pathos and riddles of the human condition remain permanent.