Simon Benson wrote in the Australian this week that the Liberal party’s collapse in Farrer had been ‘rapid and spectacular’. Electoral collapse, yes. Political collapse, no. Way wrong.

What happened in Farrer last weekend has been building for the better part of thirty years. Anyone in regional Australia with a brain (that’s most of us!) has watched it coming.

The mistake metropolitan commentators make is to assume these moments arrive suddenly, as though voters wake up one morning and decide to blow up the political order for sport. Regional voters are not like that. They are among the most loyal voters in the country. They stick with parties and incumbents long after city voters would have walked away. That loyalty has concealed the scale of the problem for years.

The deeper issue for the Coalition is that this is no longer a communications problem or even a leadership problem. It is a legitimacy problem. And that legitimacy has been eroding slowly across regional Australia for decades.

The story begins in the late-1990s, at precisely the moment Western governments became deeply confident in global institutions, technocratic governance and administrative expertise. Francis Fukuyama had famously declared the ‘end of history’. Liberal democracy, global markets and international rules-based systems appeared triumphant and permanent.

Australia was part of that mood. The Howard-Anderson government was right on board.

None of this was irrational at the time. Much of it appeared prudent, modern and inevitable. International agreements proliferated. Administrative agencies expanded. Environmental obligations deepened. Governments increasingly governed through delegated regulation and expert bodies.

Historians will observe that it is no accident that at almost exactly the same time, Pauline Hanson exploded onto the political scene. Looking back, Hanson was an early warning that this might not end well. In addition to immigration concerns Hanson voiced concerns about new gun laws and native title claims. Those issues are still with us in different manifestations.

And so it began. While the West was becoming more confident in global norms and technocratic governance, many people in regional Australia began, slowly and inexorably, to experience the practical consequences of it.

The Australia Clause in the Kyoto Protocol could be said to be the starting point. It created a huge incentive for governments. Global environmental targets had to be met somehow. One of the easiest ways to do it was through land-use regulation.

Farmers were compliant, geographically dispersed and poorly understood by metropolitan institutions. Since the mid-1990s, layer by layer, governments tightened native vegetation laws, land-clearing restrictions and environmental controls.

Some regulation was obviously necessary to stop cowboy land-clearing and environmental degradation. But over time the administrative state kept turning the screws to a point where much of the regulation became laughable. Still, it was not for turning. Governments discovered that regional Australia could absorb massive regulatory burdens and meet national emissions obligations with remarkably little political resistance.

After native vegetation came water regulation, then renewable energy infrastructure and transmission corridors. It arrived as one long continuum of external control and imposition over land, water and livelihood. In other words, cost. Meanwhile governments crowed about how we met our global targets and city media berated anyone who pushed back as deplorable.

The anger is not about one policy or one election cycle. It is about the cumulative effect of thirty years of decisions imposed from elsewhere. Those decisions are almost always in pursuit of broader global objectives, framed bureaucratically as local environmental necessities, but with little regard for how the burden translates on the ground.

In Farrer, water is a big part of that story. Of course regulation is necessary. But in many regional communities the system increasingly came to feel detached from practical reality and local interest. Water became financialised. Productive communities watched water trading enrich large corporate players while local towns hollowed out. Bureaucratic control over creeks, dams, floodplains and overflow became steadily more intrusive.

While some in the Coalition parties in recent years have pushed back against the madness, the machine – including every one of its leaders, you too Barnaby Joyce! – accommodated the direction of travel over time.

The most recent iteration is Labor’s industrial-scale renewables rollout. Transmission lines through farmland. Vast industrial infrastructure imposed upon many of the same regions that had already spent decades carrying the burden of water and land regulation supposedly for the national good.

The promises have been global and abstract. The consequences accumulated over time and are now intensely local. People who had spent decades being told they could not clear a tree, build a dam or manage their own land are now watching enormous industrial infrastructure carve through regional landscapes in the name of saving the environment – with no legal obligation for remediation on developers.

Finally, layered over mounting environmental, economic and administrative pressure, comes the inner-city cultural symbolism embraced by the laptop classes who had already signalled they knew what was best for the bush. Endless acknowledgements of country, gender identity genuflection and other imposed progressive institutional rituals are not much in themselves – just the last straw. They expose a political and media class attached to abstraction while failing to prioritise bigger real-world problems.

When you cannot keep irrigation pumps running, when transmission lines are marching across farmland, when managing weeds requires permits, consultants and thousands of dollars in compliance costs, being hectored by the so called knowledge classes begins to feel like estrangement.

That is why what happened in Farrer was a very long time coming. It is less about Coalition leadership or frankly even Pauline Hanson herself. It is more about a thirty-year hollowing out of trust between regional Australia and the political, bureaucratic and corporate interests that now govern modern life.

Ultimately it is a rejection of the technocratic managerialism that took hold across much of the West since the 1990s. Not because voters oppose environmental protection, sensible regulation or national coordination altogether. But because democratic legitimacy begins to fracture when people believe decisions affecting their livelihoods are being driven by others following delegated legislation, over whom their local representative has no influence whatsoever.

What happened in Farrer was less eruption and more a delayed and opportunistic political expression of a basic democratic truth: legitimacy depends upon people believing government still represents the communities it serves. The people of Farrer were boiling frogs. They simply stopped believing promises from the coalition they would turn the heat down.