The death of an Australian economist two weeks ago may seem a strange starting point to reflect on a momentous week — and turning point — in global politics and policy.

If the hyperbole and verbiage already expended on the US presidential election took physical form, we'd be cleaning it up for months, like some giant oil slick.

So let's start instead with the death of Geoff Carmody, and all he contributed and represented, as a way of considering just how far Australia's own political and policy debates have shifted in the past four decades: shifts that are echoed, amplified and even thrown into question by Donald Trump's return.

Carmody was my friend for 40 years. More relevantly here, he has also been an important touchstone for considering many of the big policy debates that have dominated the Australian landscape during that time.

It wasn't so much a matter of "What would Geoff think about this?" as "How would he think about this?" that would often lead me to call him in the rush to understand and consider some particular policy idea before deadline.

Carmody was a product of the federal Treasury of the 1970s: an institution equally galvanised and appalled by the wilder days of the Whitlam government and left cynical and frustrated by the big talk but little action of the Fraser years.fa

He would leave Treasury in the early 1980s to establish Access Economics with his friend David Chessell with the aim of providing a credible source of policy assessment and advice outside the public service.

He worked on Fightback! and the National Commission of Audit for the federal Coalition and provided advice and policy costings for Labor oppositions at both federal and state levels.

A new unravelling

Carmody's economics was dry but his mind was always open. He would approach any policy idea with fresh eyes.

Why is it particularly worth remembering him this week?

Donald Trump's victory throws into sharp relief not just the seismic shift in the way policy debates and politics are now conducted in Australia — and globally — but because even the "self-evident truths" that underpinned the thinking of Geoff Carmody and many of his contemporaries cannot now be regarded as self-evident to those in positions of power.

Free trade and small government were ideas implicit in the economics of the past 40 years. Trump's proposed tariff wars would seem to put a full stop on what has been a gradual unravelling of any remaining free trade ambition in the world.

Small government? Well, there now seems to be a very confused view of the role of government in places like the United States. It is seen to have failed voters, yet most of the rage is about its overreach.

When the Bretton Woods economic system of fixed exchange rates unravelled in the 1970s, it was replaced with the mantras of free trade and small government and monetarism.

The new unravelling occurs without any such clearly organised replacement.

Populism and ultra-partisanship would seem to make even more difficult the chances of forming any underlying policy consensus that can survive changes of government.

Both in the US and Australia, a trend to perceive or portray economic outcomes as ones that can solely be blamed on the incumbent government or administration has become stark.

Voters in the US would repeatedly tell reporters that everything that had gone wrong in their economy had happened under Joe Biden's watch.

There is little real focus on policy today

In Australia, Peter Dutton and his colleagues blame Labor's policies since 2022 for things that have not just been problems for years but ones that are at the least the outcome of either their own policies, or the underlying policy consensus.

Clear examples of that are the surge in post-COVID immigration (let alone the entire structure of an immigration system that is demand driven); the reliance of our universities on funding from foreign students; the many flaws now in our student debt systems, not to mention the housing supply crisis.

It's hardly new to try to put all the blame on your opponents for things going wrong (and shift the blame from your own mistakes). But it feels like there is a breakdown in any agreement on what the underpinnings of policy might or should be.

Denied joint ownership of policy means there is little interest in stewardship of that policy in the longer term.

In Australia, the past 40 years have also been a period in which no self-respecting political party would put forward policies to voters unless they were not just fully articulated but fully costed: a process in which Carmody played a central part.

We have long moved away from that self-respect. And from media scrutiny which demanded it. There is little real focus on policy, just on the politics of policy.

Politicians like Donald Trump say they can now make things better. But only because they are promising to get rid of the very instruments of government by which they would make that happen: for example, functioning bureaucracies that can deliver services (no matter how dysfunctional they may currently be).

Commentators in the United States have ascribed the Trump victory at its most simple to resentment about the cost of living. But it is also said to be a resentment based, longer term, in the failings of politics, government with a small 'g' and economics over those last 40 years when free market policies were linked to the decline in so much US industry, income levels and jobs.

The political failure is often described as the one which dismissed the anger of middle America to have its grievances acknowledged and seen as legitimate.

Americans may rightly feel their political, economic and government services have let them down. Real average wages, for starters, have barely moved in the past 40 years, except for those on the highest incomes.

So it may be an entirely rational decision for voters to turn to a disrupter like Trump in their disillusion. But little that Trump has said, in policy terms, actually offers a clear solution to the problems. His most explicit policy prescriptions are the mass deportation of millions of undocumented workers and cutting taxes.

Cutting taxes that is, except for where he is proposing to put them up in the form of tariffs which will make the cost of living higher for most Americans.

The lessons our political leaders have taken out of the US election are (for the prime minister) the voters' message on the cost of living and (for the opposition leader) immigration.

Those fights were already well underway here before this week's events.

And our election campaign will not be fought out in the way the US campaign — at its most fatuous — was fought: as a battle between choosing rage or joy.

But we should despair that it will feature little of the policy rigour or ambition that people like Geoff Carmody brought to battles gone by.

Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.