Nicholas Stuart | Can Anthony Albanese solve these real problems for Australia's future?

Take last week's story about the Queensland government slapping an enormous, $100 million fine on Star Casino.

Listen to the news - the massive penalty - and you miss what's really going on. The point, the real issue here, is that nothing has really changed.

Over the past two years a stream of reviews ranging across four states have repeatedly found serious, fundamental problems are deeply embedded within the very structure of the gambling industry itself. The noise surrounding the penalties levied and the conditions imposed don't actually change anything.

The simple reality is that no government is prepared to risk this lucrative and huge revenue stream, no matter how much potential for corruption, misery and pain it causes or leaves in its wake.

The politicians will, eventually, act, but only after the problems have gotten so big it's become impossible to brush them aside. Until then, well, they'll be busy defending voters' right to gamble (responsibly - even though they know people are irresponsible) and the industry is allowed to continue unchallenged, no matter how much anguish it brings or distress it causes.

Political parties have spent so long being pragmatic they've now forgotten how to identify with moral positions: doing so might offend somebody in a focus group and neither side wants to risk losing a vote.

The professionalisation of politics has resulted in the great gulf of emptiness at the heart of our society.

Neither major party wants to risk alienating a single voter and the result is they both shy away from tackling the big issues that confront society.

The irony is that this reluctance to adopt genuine policies to address these problems breeds problems of its own, and the success of the independents can be directly traced to the failure of the main political parties as they search for electoral success.

The very thing that's turning electors off is the desire of traditional politicians to promise everything to everyone and this is the critical dilemma that faces Anthony Albanese as he wraps up the political year before heading off for Christmas on Sydney Harbour.

Will he use the break to chart a new way forward and tackle the problems we've ignored for years? Or, like his predecessors, is he going to rest on his (real) achievement in becoming PM and shovel the intractable problems off into the too-hard basket?

Kevin Rudd was the last leader who at least attempted to identify the issues the country would have to face in the future. Since then an emptiness has enveloped our political debate as we've squabbled about the detail rather than the big picture. It's time to change.

It's becoming obvious that what's urgently needed is a major structural overhaul of the economy, because things will never improve unless we tackle the serious issues warping its fundamentals.

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Our politicians are acting like a Formula One team that's slipping down the rankings. It's pinning all its hopes the car will run faster if they can just get better efficiency from tinkering with the fuel, when what's really needed is a thorough overhaul of the engine. Similarly, the time has come for us to admit that the economy's broken and we'll never win a jackpot at the casino. This is difficult because it means accepting the models we've been using in the past are now out of date, but we need to do it if we want to move forward.

Take interest rate settings. It's great that the Bureau of Statistics is now providing monthly figures of what's actually happening in the economy. It would be a mistake, however, to think this will enable the Reserve Bank to fine-tune rate hikes to avoid plunging the country into recession. The bank only possesses one lever and is forced - reverting to our racing car analogy - to control the vehicle's speed by lifting its foot on and off the break. It's no wonder the economy is jerking backwards and forwards.

The amazing thing is that we all pretend to be surprised when it does eventually crash: we act as if this is somehow not embedded in the very design of our economic model. Our economic policies are trapped in a vortex of despair and the only way to escape this is to identify the problems and tackle them head on. That will require enormous courage. A basic rule of politics is not to mention a problem until you have a solution. The difficulty with this approach is that until issues are articulated they can't be put on the agenda, and until that happens we will never find effective solutions.

Take something as simple as air travel. For nearly half a century politicians have blathered on about the prospect of a fast rail link between Sydney and Canberra and yet there are exactly the same number of services as there were in 1980. If there was any real determination to fix this problem we would have more than three services a day, each taking about four hours, joining the country's commercial and political hubs.

But government stood back leaving private enterprise to step in and creating the choice of either bus services or a pleasurable airport experience for commuters between the capitals. Solutions always evolve and sometimes, when government does eventually intervene, its answers often causes more angst than the original problem they were designed to solve. Western Sydney airport and Canberra light rail offer two dramatic examples of the risk governments face when they get involved in backing projects instead of simply creating opportunities and standing out of the way.

Albanese confronted both these issues over a decade ago, when he was a minister in Rudd's government.

It seems we'll have to wait until next year to discover if he has any ideas to solve these real problems for Australia's future.