A little over a year ago, Creative Australia announced Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Six days later, after media and political scrutiny and an emergency board meeting, Sabsabi was dropped over a 2007 ‘installation’ featuring an address by Hassan Nasrallah – the megalomaniac Hezbollah leader Israeli reporting had previously described as suffering from bunker-induced vitamin D deficiency. Federal Arts Imam, Tony Burke, expressed public shock that he had not been briefed. The head of visual arts resigned. The board chair retired early. The arts community erupted with the particular fury reserved for institutions that betray their own stated purpose.

An external review was commissioned. The review found no single or predominant failure of process, governance or decision-making. It also found a series of missteps, missed opportunities, and assumptions – and recommended remedies. Sabsabi was reinstated. Creative Australia apologised. The argument against this type of agitprop art did not close.

The review settled the review. It did not settle the dispute. The institution satisfied itself that it had behaved properly. Yet the outcome remained suspended in mid-air, procedurally certified and socially unsettled. Australia had produced, with great administrative effort, the bureaucratic equivalent of a magic trick in which the rabbit is successfully removed from the hat, independently audited, and then found to be a different rabbit entirely.

The Venice Biennale is, it should be said, no stranger to this kind of political self-combustion. In 1977, its socialist president staged the ‘Biennale of Dissent’, a showcase of Soviet dissident art so politically awkward it humiliated the Italian Communist Party and cost him his job. Since then, the Biennale has operated on a settled structural principle: anti-capitalist art, priced for gazillionaires, denouncing the system that prices it. Australia could not have chosen a more appropriate venue for its own molto chic demonstration of ceremony in place of substance.

This is not merely a story about Creative Australia, cultural politics, or the increasingly comic inability of arts bureaucracies to tell the difference between provocation and self-parody. It is a demonstration of something that has become structurally Australian: the ability to complete every step of a process correctly and still fail to produce the one thing the process was for.

The Albanese government’s ministers are educated, credentialled, and by all appearances genuinely surprised when the machinery fails to deliver what they expected. What they keep getting wrong is not a problem of intent – intent is beside the point – but a problem of category: they mistake process for judgment, credential for authority, and the appearance of action for the thing itself.

They know how to convene. They do not seem to know that convening is not problem-solving. Always was, always will be.

Hawke at least understood that consultation without binding capacity is theatre. Labor built the Accord. Now it stages summits as if the machinery enabling agreement still existed. That machinery was union and employer discipline. Albanese held a summit anyway.

The same joke, told in a darker register, is now playing in aged care.

The government’s Integrated Assessment Tool – designed to determine what support elderly Australians need – is under Ombudsman investigation after complaints about its operation, though the investigation covers the complaints, not the algorithm itself. Assessors’ roles have been reduced to quality assurance, unable to override the outputs they are meant to oversee. People are receiving lower support assessments even as their needs worsen. The human being once known as an assessor is still present in the process like a mannequin in a menswear shop: upright, visible, and no longer central to the transaction. Critics say the system continues to call itself assessment even as the act of assessing is transferred to the machine.

The machine is running perfectly. That is the problem.

What disappears is not the procedure but the thing the procedure still claims to embody: human judgment, exercised in circumstances where judgment is precisely what is needed. Calling this assessment is rather like replacing a family doctor with a QR code and insisting that continuity of care has been preserved because the waiting room magazines are still there.

Across a remarkable range of domains, Australian institutions are producing outputs that satisfy their own procedural logic while failing to produce the kind of authority that makes those outputs look like answers rather than openings for the next argument.

Process without closure. Assessment without judgment. Consultation without mediation. Commissions without cohesion.

The government’s answer to contested multiculturalism is the Office for Multicultural Affairs, elevated to Cabinet for the first time. Its answer to social breakdown after the Bondi Massacre is a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. Its answer to every contested question is another panel, portal, commissioner, toolkit, taskforce, framework, or ministerial title. Canberra now resembles the fire chief who turns up to a house fire, discovers the beautifully laminated evacuation brochure has not yet been approved by the relevant committee, and commissions a review.

The brochures keep improving. The frameworks keep multiplying. The commissioners become more distinguished. The ashes remain stubbornly unimpressed.

Canberra increasingly offers cheap authority, cheap cohesion, cheap consultation, cheap care, cheap fixes. Not fake, exactly. Not nothing. Something more irritating than either: real procedures producing outputs just plausible enough to defer a reckoning with what is actually absent.

The review handles it without settling it. The assessment determines without judging. The summit consults without binding.

These are not failed versions of stronger institutions. They are what remains when stronger institutions are gone: substitutes with the right shape, but eaten out from the middle.

This is not uniquely Labor’s problem. The Coalition governed for years on the same faith in process. But Albanese illustrates the condition especially well because Labor still speaks in the language of thicker settlement – accord, consultation, representation, cohesion – while the machinery that once made those words mean something has gone. The old nouns survive. The old capacities do not.

And that, in the end, is why the Albanese government feels so curiously weightless. Not because it never acts. It acts all the time. Not because it lacks language. It has language to spare. Not because it is cynical. On the contrary, its procedural sincerity is part of the comedy. The problem is that it keeps mistaking a process for a verdict, a review for a judgment, a commission for a settlement, a summit for a binding agreement, and an office for a social fabric.

It has a framework for everything and authority over nothing.

It is a particularly modern form of confusion: the belief that if one more panel can be convened, one more review released, one more commissioner appointed, one more toolkit deployed, the corpse might yet be summoned back into speech.

The next review is already being commissioned.