UTOPIAN IDEALS ARE ordinarily more ambitious, and romantic, than the desire to see a constitutional system functioning as it should. The latter sounds more like a defence of the status quo than a reimagining of political possibility.

Anyone who lived through 2020 in Australia, however, might beg to differ. The year during which the world seemed to fall off its axis saw numerous examples of apparent confusion on the part of Australian political actors about what our constitutional systems actually demand of them, and of head-scratching bewilderment among the rest of us about how this could be so.