Looking forward, though, we have to be able to ask more of a government than simply "not that", and we haven't got long to get our bids in before the new clean slate gets scribbled over.

As a minimum, we want a government whose instincts are sound. Cruelty should be seen as a bug, not a feature. That's not a high bar, but we've had a long streak of Australian governments noisily not caring about the goody-goody soft girly community things of this world, and we need to get some things clear from the outset. The bottom line is common decency.

At the moment the government is concerned with fulfilling the list of promises it took to the election - making a difference, yes, but not the kind that actually involves dramatic and systemic change for every portfolio. It's already being jostled out of that course by events (the politician's worst enemy), but it's yet to show any commitment to addressing the elephants in the room (remember when there was just one?).

I know that governments have to compromise with vested interests, and guard against bad actors, and take electoral realities into account. I'm not asking for a fully consistent philosophical position across all its actions. I just want to know where my government's starting from, and what it sees as its part of the process. I need to know what values it's prepared to fight for.

The values that power the community sector are a good place to start:

The trouble with those values is that nobody in politics is going to disagree with them, provided that values aren't expected to influence what they actually do. It's always possible to find an argument for saying "Yes, I'll do the right thing - but not this exact time." Political constraints - voting the bastards out - just aren't quick or accurate enough to move the needle in particular cases.

If we are to trust the government we must know that it wants what's best for us rather than what's best for it, and between climate change, healthcare funding and public education there are enough ways for it to demonstrate good intentions. The government needs to get into character.

I'm tired of settling for the lesser of two evils. I want to reach for the ideal. I want to appeal to the kind of motivation that the community sector relies on and political science has more or less written out of the record. I want (following the lead of New Zealand economist Girol Karacaoglu) a government that acts as if it loves us.

Without that vision, without the kind of commitment that powers a mother to lift a car off her child, I can't see any government successfully meeting the challenges of bringing Australia through the global environmental, economic and social polycrisis in one piece.