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Often we talk of hard power, the use of military and economic might to coerce other countries. Frequently we hear of soft power, the term introduced into the lexicon by the late Harvard professor Joseph Nye to describe how nations can use cultural capital and subtler forms of persuasion to accrue global influence. In the AI age, we are going to be exposed more to “sharp power”, when authoritarian regimes use information manipulation and political interference to poison the civic well of democratic rivals.
But, readers, I want to have a stab at fresh coinage, and talk of “formative power”, and in particular Australia’s unusually strong influence over the global young.
A frivolous example, as the new Netflix documentary Kylie reminds us, is the so-called “Neighbours effect” in Britain. The dominance of an Australian soapie led to a dialectical shift. Many of those who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s started ending sentences with an upward inflection, and using Australianisms such as “no worries” and “mate”. I am a walking, talking case study. Long before I felt the sand of Bondi between my toes, there were colleagues who thought I was antipodean, partly because, like so many of my student cohort, I was a two-Neighbours-a-day guy at college.
Confessedly, I never intended to speak like an Australian, but I did want to write like one. The first adult book I ever bought was a collection of TV reviews penned by Clive James for The Observer. Like others in my generation of journalists, I yearned to mimic his wordplay in the hope of one day composing a sentence maybe half as good as his famed description of Arnold Schwarzenegger as resembling a “brown condom full of walnuts”. I was not alone. As the British comedy writer Charlie Brooker noted when Clive James was in his twilight: “Every TV column I ever wrote consists of me trying and failing to write anything as explosively funny as that.” The “kid from Kogarah” effect speaks again of Australia’s formative power.
So, too, does the last British prime minister to win back-to-back elections. Tony Blair spent a portion of his childhood growing up in Adelaide, where his father was a university lecturer. His time there had lasting impact. “Australia may not be in my blood,” said Blair when he addressed the federal parliament in March 2006, “but it surely is in my spirit.” It also shaped his politics: “I wrote a speech once about how Britain had to become a ‘young country’ again, and it was Australia I had in mind … We share an outlook to life … We are both confident, outward bound, and ‘up for it’ type of nations.”
At Oxford, Blair gravitated towards a bunch of Aussies who included the future Labor leader Kim Beazley and future West Australian premier Geoff Gallop. Blair has even been described as Britain’s first Australian prime minister.
Nor is he an outlier. The former Conservative prime minister David Cameron, when asked whether he preferred Coronation Street or EastEnders, happily admitted he was actually a Ramsay Street fanboy. For an Oxford-educated old Etonian, professing love for an Australian soap opera was a way of demonstrating he was a British everyman.
In children’s entertainment, Australia has become a superpower. By the turn of the century, The Wiggles were storming the US market. By 2005, the group had sold more than 12 million DVDs in the US alone and had a global franchise that penetrated both the Mandarin- and Spanish-speaking markets. “The Wiggles may seem like the best preschool teachers in the world,” noted a fawning profile in The New York Times. It was even thought “Wiggle Time” might be contributing to an emerging problem: the scourge of screen addiction.
On that front, the Albanese government’s social media ban for under-16s fits within the rubric of Australian formative power, as other countries embrace the same online prohibition. Already, France, Portugal and Malaysia have followed suit.
Now, of course, it is Bluey wielding formidable formative power. The everyday life of a suburban family of blue heelers in Brisbane – from backyard cricket to allegations of flatulence litigated in a mock family trial – has captivated audiences in 60 countries. On Disney+, Bluey has become the most-streamed show of any genre. A blue cattle dog has become “the country’s most important cultural export,” according to The Financial Times, which also observed “rarely has a show that is so unapologetically Australian captivated worldwide audiences”.
The point, surely, is amply made. But we have not yet even discussed the formative power amassed from educating so many overseas students, 550,000 of whom enrolled at Australian universities in January. Presidents of Singapore. East Timor’s president, José Ramos-Horta. At one point, half the Indonesian cabinet. All are alumni of Australian universities. In 2020, 10 per cent of international tertiary students studied in Australian academia, two-fifths of whom came from China and India. Nor is it solely in our neighbourhood that the overseas student dividend yields benefits. DFAT reckons international education is “a key element” in many of Australia’s bilateral relationships in Latin America.
Formative power ebbs and flows. Right now it may be diminishing. There was a 7.7 per cent decline in overseas students in the year up to February 2026, compared with the previous 12 months. So perhaps a future attorney-general of Fiji has slipped through the net, or a prospective chief minister of Andhra Pradesh.
Neighbours has also now been twice cancelled, initially in 2022 by Channel 5 in Britain, then again by Amazon last year. The first time, The Times columnist Caitlin Moran reckoned its demise signalled a broader cancellation from the UK’s Generation Z of the land Down Under: “that place,” as she put it, “with all the dead reefs and offshore refugee internment camps, where the entire country often turns into one big barbecue”. The surge of One Nation, and heightened political hostility to immigrants, is hardly likely to increase our international attractiveness.
At least Bluey still stands tall. The country’s most recognisable brand ambassador. The loveable promulgator of this country’s most appealing personality traits. That animated avatar of Australia’s formative power.
Nick Bryant is the presenter of Saturday Extra on ABC Radio National and the author of the Substack History Never Ended.
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Nick Bryant is a former BBC correspondent and the author of The Forever War, America’s Unending Conflict With Itself.From our partners
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