New Year's Day.
After the beach (Australian tradition, salt still on my skin) I sat down to watch Emmanuel Macron's televised address to France. The Élysée Palace. The presidential desk. The tricolour. Macron in suit and tie, speaking directly to camera for twelve minutes.
More than one thousand three hundred words. Budget negotiations. European defence. Decentralisation. Municipal elections. Agricultural protection. Border control. Teacher training. Medical simplification. Corsican autonomy. The full presidential treatise.
Then I pulled up Anthony Albanese's message. Two hundred words approximately. Text statement. Bondi attack. Grief. Resilience. Moving forward together.
The contrast was visceral. Not just the length. The whole performance. Macron had to command attention, demand it, explain why France should listen. Albanese assumed Australians already were.
Same moment. Same ritual of national reflection. Completely different stories about what's broken and how to fix it.
I've spent fifteen years navigating between these two countries, France, where I built organisations and sat on national boards, and Australia, where I chose to become a citizen and build a new life. These speeches hit differently when you've actually lived the institutional realities they reveal. When you've experienced French parliamentary gridlock firsthand. When you've watched Australian federal-state coordination actually work, imperfectly but functionally.
What worries me is that Perth's business and government leaders look at France's dysfunction as distant warning rather than preview. The distance between Macron's 1,350 words and Albanese's 200 tells us something urgent about institutional resilience and fragility.
When the President Must Explain Everything
Macron talks for 1300+ words because he has to. Not by choice, but necessity.
He lists twenty priorities because there's no functional mechanism to decide which three actually matter. He invokes unity because division is the defining reality. He promises mobilisation because parliament can't agree on a budget. The length isn't ambition. It's diagnosis.
France's Fifth Republic was designed in 1958 specifically to concentrate power in the presidency when parliament fragments. It was a response to the instability that plagued the Fourth Republic. The president can bypass parliament entirely using Article 49.3, forcing through legislation without a vote. It's meant for emergencies. Macron's government has used it over thirty times since 2022.
The problem? This constitutional engineering assumed presidential authority would carry legitimacy. Macron's lost legitimacy without gaining capacity. He can still speak. He can still invoke Article 49.3. He just can't deliver lasting reform. So words substitute for action, rhetoric stands in for reform, and the annual address becomes an exercise in explaining why the system that's supposed to work isn't working.
Albanese's 200 words signal something else entirely: confidence that Australian institutions don't require constant justification. Parliament functions. Federal and state governments coordinate. Budgets pass. The system itself provides stability. The leader gestures towards shared values because the institutions embody them.
This isn't about Albanese being less eloquent. It's about not needing to be.
Shock Versus Strain
Australia faced a terrorist attack. Fifteen people killed at Bondi Beach during Hanukkah celebrations. Sudden. Violent. Unmistakably evil.
And therefore, paradoxically, unifying.
I watched the paddle-out ceremony. Over 2,000 people forming a circle in the ocean to honour the victims. Strangers, united by grief and defiance. This is what acute crisis does. It crystallises values that otherwise stay diffuse.
Albanese can invoke "the best of the Australian spirit" because the Bondi attack violated sacred Australian assumptions, public safety, multicultural harmony, the freedom to celebrate at the beach. The response becomes obvious: grieve together, affirm shared values, demonstrate resilience through community solidarity.
This is crisis as rupture. Painful, yes. But ultimately navigable because it stands apart from normal life. Australians can process the attack, honour victims, implement security measures, return to a baseline that, despite cost-of-living pressures and political cynicism, remains fundamentally recognisable.
France doesn't get ruptures anymore. Just chronic strain.
I lived through the November 2015 Paris attacks. The Bataclan. The cafés. The stadium. France mourned. France rallied. Briefly. Then the divisions returned, deeper than before. Muslims blamed. Secularism weaponised. The far-right gained ground. The attack became another data point in competing narratives about French identity rather than a moment of shared grief.
Macron's litany reads like a medical chart for a patient in gradual decline: divisions, doubts, growing solitude, falling birth rates, insecurity, purchasing power difficulties. These aren't problems to be solved and transcended. They're the fabric of contemporary French life.
The distinction matters. Acute crisis can strengthen institutions by demonstrating their necessity. Chronic strain erodes them by exposing inability to resolve fundamental tensions.
Albanese promises "we'll write the next chapter in a positive way and we'll do it together" because Australians believe the pen still works. Macron can only promise mobilisation, effort, perseverance meaning the vocabulary of grinding endurance rather than confident progress.
What National Spirit Actually Means
Both leaders invoke national character. But watch how differently they do it.
Albanese speaks of Australian spirit as self-evident: "our generosity, our resilience and our abiding sense of fairness." These aren't arguments to win. They're truths to recognise. The Bondi response (heroic bystanders, community solidarity, civic mourning) proves the spirit exists. The leader just names what everyone already knows.
Listen to his actual words: "In so many ways, our Australian story is such a remarkable one, and a beautifully distinctive one. In 2026, we will write the next chapter. We'll do it in a positive way and we'll do it together."
That's it. Forty words. No justification required.
Compare this to Macron's litany: "Notre unité suppose de lutter sans relâche contre l'antisémitisme, contre le racisme, contre toutes les formes de discrimination. Notre unité exige de reconnaître que chaque Française, chaque Français a un rôle à jouer pour relever les défis qui sont devant nous."
Fighting antisemitism and racism. Recognising everyone's role. Showing bienveillance and humanité. Resisting the law of the strongest. Defending independence. Choosing progress over resignation. Staying true to l'humain, la paix, la liberté.
These aren't organic solidarities emerging from shared experience. They're aspirational values requiring constant affirmation precisely because they're constantly contested. Macron's France must be argued into existence each time he speaks. He doesn't remind. He exhorts. Pleading with citizens to believe in bonds their daily experience increasingly contradicts.
What Actually Worries Me... And My Australian Friend Michel
Reading these speeches side by side, what strikes me isn't the policy differences. It's the distance between where each nation imagines itself and where it actually is.
France imagines itself as sovereign republic shaping European destiny. The reality? Technocratically-managed participant in supranational structures it can't control, with a parliament that can't reliably pass budgets and a president who governs through constitutional provisions designed for emergencies.
Australia imagines itself as fortunate, fair, coherent. The reality? Geographic luck, resource wealth, and inherited institutions facing pressures that good intentions won't resolve.
Both have gap problems. France's is wider. Australia's is growing.
Albanese doesn't announce policies in his New Year message because he doesn't need to. The system continues. Hospital funding gets negotiated. Municipal elections proceed. Even the Bondi response reflects institutional capacity that still functions: an independent review led by a former intelligence chief, clear lines of authority, established accountability processes.
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley reinforces this. She criticises government approaches within a framework of loyal opposition: "The year ahead brings new challenges, but it also brings opportunity to strengthen our communities, restore trust and to build a future that is safer, fairer and more hopeful."
Disagreement about means within consensus about ends. The hallmark of functioning democratic competition.
Macron must use his New Year's address to explain that "in the first weeks of the new year, the Government and Parliament will have to build agreements to provide the nation with a budget." He has to publicly state France will attempt to pass a budget (the most basic function of governance) because it's genuinely uncertain whether the fractured National Assembly can achieve it.
The crisis runs deeper than gridlock. France's Fifth Republic was designed to concentrate power in the presidency precisely to overcome parliamentary fragmentation. But when that concentrated power loses legitimacy through repeated use of Article 49.3 to bypass parliament, through executive decrees that circumvent democratic deliberation, the system has no democratic safety valve.
Power without legitimacy produces paralysis dressed as determination.
The Legitimacy Problem
Here's what went unsaid in each speech.
Albanese doesn't need to justify his right to speak or defend his position's legitimacy. Australia held an election in 2022. Labor won. Albanese governs. Next election comes in 2025 or early 2026. This basic democratic rhythm (contested elections producing legitimate governments that govern until the next contest)still functions.
Macron's address is haunted by illegitimacy. Re-elected in 2022 against Marine Le Pen as lesser evil rather than through positive mandate. Lost parliamentary majority immediately. Governs through minority government, constitutional provisions allowing executive action without parliamentary approval, appointment of prime ministers who represent deals among parties rather than electoral victory.
When he says "I will be, until the last second, at work, trying each day to be worthy of the mandate you confided in me," he protests too much. The assertion reveals the doubt. Does he still hold a mandate? Do French citizens believe he's worthy? His promise to ensure the 2027 election proceeds "as serenely as possible, particularly sheltered from all foreign interference" inadvertently acknowledges even this basic democratic function can't be assumed.
What This Means for Institutions
These speeches diagnose institutional health through what leaders must explain versus what they can presume.
Australia's advantages: federal system distributes power and responsibility, regular electoral competition, civil service continuity, modest expectations of political leaders, geographic buffer from major conflicts.
France's pathologies: hyper-centralisation bottlenecks decision-making, executive-legislative dysfunction gridlocks the system, technocratic elite operates within assumptions disconnected from citizen experience, European subordination without genuine sovereignty, fundamental disagreement about what France even is paralyses collective action.
But here's what worries me about Australia, specifically about Western Australia: the institutional advantages could erode faster than anyone expects.
I've watched this pattern before. In France, institutional decay didn't announce itself. It accumulated. Budget processes that "usually" worked stopped working around 2016. Parliamentary majorities that "normally" formed stopped forming after 2017. Social cohesion that "generally" held stopped holding after 2015. By the time people recognised the system had fundamentally changed (around 2022) the tools to fix it had already corroded.
That's seven years from first cracks to structural failure. Seven years from "concerning but manageable" to "explaining why we can't pass a budget."
Warning signs visible in both addresses: declining institutional trust (Ley's reference to "rebuilding confidence"), security state expansion after Bondi, leadership personalisation, economic anxiety transitioning from cyclical to chronic, cultural fragmentation requiring constant renewal rather than being assumed.
Australia's federal system provides resilience but creates duplication. Frustrated publics might demand centralisation without recognising diffusion provides strength. We're already seeing this in WA - every infrastructure delay, every federal-state funding dispute, every duplicated regulation feeds the narrative that federation is inefficient rather than protective.
And we're particularly vulnerable. Geographically isolated from eastern decision-making. Economically dependent on commodity cycles we don't control. Politically underrepresented in a federation designed when Australia's population centre looked completely different. The institutions that protect WA's interests work until they don't.
Then what? Do we assume Canberra will suddenly become more responsive? Do we believe resource revenues will always fund our way out of structural problems? Do we trust that geographic distance from conflict zones guarantees security when the Indian Ocean is becoming the world's most contested strategic space?
Compulsory voting ensures participation but can't guarantee informed engagement as media fragments and algorithms curate reality. Geographic isolation provides security but won't respect climate change or regional instability indefinitely.
The deeper question these addresses provoke: what happens when national spirit and functional institutions diverge?
France has institutions without spirit. I mean structures persisting in form but lacking democratic legitimacy and practical efficacy. Political "necrotism". Systems that look alive but lack animating force of genuine popular sovereignty.
Australia has spirit without sufficient institutional investment and I thinking about resilient national character and functioning democratic processes, but insufficient attention to patient work of institutional strengthening that would weather serious stress.
Neither condition is sustainable. And the transition from one to the other happens faster than you think.
The Sovereignty Question Nobody Wants to Answer
Here's what interests me: both countries talk about sovereignty, but only one actually has it.
Australia faces external sovereignty challenges. Managing the US alliance without subordination. Navigating China between economic benefit and security risk. Asserting regional influence despite limited hard power. Difficult, yes. But not existential. Australia maintains internal sovereignty meaning the actual capacity to make collective decisions and implement them through functioning institutions.
France's sovereignty crisis is internal. And nobody wants to admit it.
The list is brutal: cannot control borders (Schengen), cannot set monetary policy (Eurozone), cannot implement independent economic policy (EU single market rules), cannot rebuild industrial capacity (state aid restrictions), cannot develop independent military capacity (NATO dependencies), cannot reliably pass a budget (parliamentary fragmentation).
This isn't sovereignty. It's sovereignty theatre.
Macron proclaims independence while governing a country that has systematically surrendered the instruments through which independence would be exercised. The institutions through which sovereignty operates either don't function (parliament) or don't exist at national level (central bank, trade policy, industrial strategy).
And his European vision emerges directly from this incapacity. A truly sovereign France wouldn't need to plead for "European preference" for jobs and businesses. It would simply implement national preference. His call for European independence in spatial industry, quantum computing, artificial intelligence sounds bold until you recognise France has already dismantled its own capacity in these domains through decades of financialisation and industrial hollowing.
Here's the business parallel Perth leaders should understand: France is the company that outsourced its core competencies in the 1990s because "specialisation creates efficiency," then spent the 2000s discovering it no longer controlled the functions critical to strategic autonomy, then spent the 2010s arguing it needed bigger partnerships because it couldn't act alone, then spent the 2020s explaining why it couldn't deliver on commitments because partners wouldn't cooperate.
You've seen this pattern. You might be living it. Sovereign capability surrendered as operational efficiency. Strategic autonomy traded for quarterly improvements. Then surprise when the external dependencies you created limit your ability to respond to crisis.
European cooperation becomes necessary not as strategic choice but as consolation prize. When you can't act nationally, you argue for European action. When European action doesn't materialise, you give more speeches about European action.
France has surrendered sovereignty as fait accompli while maintaining sovereignty as rhetoric. Macron's 1300+ words can't paper over that gap.
The Work Words Can't Do
Both Macron and Albanese face the fundamental limitation of political speech: words can't substitute for institutional capacity or political will.
Macron's comprehensive address attempts to do through rhetoric what France's institutions can no longer accomplish through normal democratic process. Set priorities. Build consensus. Mobilise action. Create hope. The speech's length and ambition are direct measures of institutional failure. The more a leader must explain, the less their institutions can be assumed to function.
Albanese's brevity succeeds because Australia's institutions, imperfect as they are, still provide the framework within which collective action becomes possible. The prime minister need not explain the budget process, justify parliamentary democracy, or construct national unity from scratch. These can be presumed. For now.
Which brings me to what actually matters going forward.
The new year begins. France will struggle to pass a budget. Australia will implement security reviews. Both nations will navigate 2026 through some combination of institutional inertia, political manoeuvring, and popular resilience.
But these speeches reveal the distance between where nations imagine themselves and where they actually are. Macron's 1,300+ words explaining why France's systems should work. Albanese's 200 words assuming Australia's actually do.
What Perth Needs to Understand
For those of us in Western Australia, business leaders, senior executives, board directors, the lesson isn't about France's dysfunction. It's about recognising when institutional advantages become institutional inertia.
We assume the federation works because it currently functions. We assume federal-state coordination happens because it usually does. We assume parliamentary democracy delivers because recent elections produced clear results. We assume our geographic isolation provides security because threats haven't materialised on our doorstep yet.
France made all those assumptions too. In 2005, France's institutions looked robust. The Fifth Republic had survived multiple crises. Presidential authority commanded respect. Parliamentary democracy functioned adequately. European integration seemed to multiply French influence rather than diminish it.
Twenty years later, the gap between institutional forms and institutional capacity has become unbridgeable.
The work words can't do is the work of institutional renovation. Not the exciting work of disruption or transformation, but the patient, unglamorous work of maintenance, adaptation, and honest assessment of what's actually working versus what we pretend is working.
Three questions for Australian leaders in 2026, answer them honestly, not aspirationally:
First: When did you last stress-test your organisation's dependencies on institutional stability?
Not in a risk register. In reality. What happens when federal-state coordination fails on a project critical to your operations? When regulatory certainty you depend on evaporates because a new government has different priorities? When the assumption that "parliaments pass budgets" stops being reliable and your planning cycles extend indefinitely?
Have you actually modelled institutional dysfunction or just assumed it won't happen here? Because I've sat in French boardrooms where executives were still planning three-year strategies while parliament couldn't pass three-month budgets. The gap between institutional assumptions and institutional reality bankrupted companies that should have survived.
Second: Which of your strategic assumptions rely on Australian exceptionalism?
Geographic isolation protecting you from regional conflict. Resource wealth generating revenue regardless of global competition. Multicultural harmony maintaining social licence. Federal system balancing state and national interests. Democratic processes delivering legitimate, stable government.
Rank these by "how confident are you this remains true in 2030" versus "how badly does your strategy break if it doesn't." Because every single one of these could reverse faster than your strategic planning cycle. France's exceptionalism, its cultural prestige, social solidarity, republican universalism, European leadership, collapsed in a decade. Why assume Australia's is more durable?
Third: What institutional capacity are you actively building versus simply extracting?
This is the hard one. Are we investing in democratic institutions (professional public service, independent oversight, functional federalism, informed citizenship) or are we treating them as infinite resources to be minimised, optimised, and extracted for efficiency?
When we lobby for regulatory simplification, are we building better regulation or just reducing institutional capacity to regulate? When we demand federal-state coordination, are we helping build coordination mechanisms or just complaining they don't work? When we criticise public service inefficiency, are we supporting civil service reform or just accelerating the erosion of institutional capability?
France's business elite spent decades optimising around dysfunctional institutions rather than investing in institutional renewal. Then they discovered that institutions optimised for dysfunction tend to get more dysfunctional. The extraction mindset (minimise costs, maximise short-term returns) works until the system you're extracting from loses the capacity to regenerate.
The great illusion of political rhetoric is that naming problems constitutes addressing them. The great truth these speeches reveal is that functioning democracies require not just leaders who can speak well, but institutions that work regardless of who's speaking.
Macron speaks for 1,300+ words because France's institutions demand constant explanation. Albanese speaks for 200 words because Australia's institutions don't. Yet.
The question for 2026 is whether Australian leaders, in government, business, civil society, recognise that "yet" while there's still time to do something about it.
Seven years from first cracks to structural failure. France's timeline. Could be ours.
Happy New Year!
