The rule of law did not collapse in a single dramatic moment. It thinned over decades, the mortar between its stones quietly leaching away while the facade still photographed well. Statutes stayed on the books. Courts kept their robes and rituals. Agencies continued issuing press releases about equal justice. What changed was the relationship between the written rules and the actual distribution of force, property, and liberty. The law stopped functioning primarily as a constraint on power and began operating as an instrument of it.
This erosion was visible long before 2020. The administrative state had already grown dense enough that ordinary citizens could not navigate its requirements without specialised help, turning compliance itself into a privilege of the well-resourced. Selective enforcement was already practiced: some classes of defendants faced aggressive pursuit while others received quiet forbearance. Executive orders and emergency declarations had already begun to substitute for legislation. Judicial interpretations occasionally discovered new authorities or rights that earlier generations of readers had somehow missed. Each of these developments could be defended in isolation as pragmatic or temporary. Together they formed a pattern in which formal legality increasingly served as theatre while outcomes were shaped by political alignment, institutional self-interest, and the quiet calculation of who could be made to bear costs without effective resistance.
Then came 2020. The COVID emergency supplied the accelerant. Governments around the world, including Australia, invoked emergency powers on a scale and duration that would have been politically impossible in ordinary times. Businesses were ordered closed, movement restricted, schools shuttered, and medical decisions heavily directed through decrees whose scientific and legal foundations were contested from the start. Enforcement was uneven. Some gatherings were dispersed while others of similar size, Leftist, were protected. Certain industries received exemptions or subsidies; others were left to absorb the losses. Mandates were imposed, then adjusted, then quietly walked back, often without clear accounting for the collateral damage to livelihoods, education, and public trust. The message absorbed by many observers was that the normal constraints on state action could be set aside when the authorities judged the stakes high enough, and that the same rules need not apply with equal force to every group.
The 2020 election and its aftermath compounded the acceleration. Contested procedures, last-minute rule changes in key jurisdictions, the suppression of certain stories by major platforms and media outlets, and the subsequent legal challenges produced a cascade of decisions that left large segments of the population convinced the process had been managed rather than neutrally administered. Courts largely declined to examine the underlying claims on their merits, citing standing, timing, or mootness. In the years that followed, the contrast in prosecutorial energy became impossible to ignore for those watching closely: aggressive pursuit of some political figures and January 6 participants alongside comparatively restrained treatment of other instances of political violence or process irregularities. Intelligence and law-enforcement agencies that had once been expected to remain neutral were drawn into public narratives about domestic threats in ways that tracked partisan fault lines. The cumulative effect was not the formal abolition of legal norms but their visible instrumentalisation. Rules that still constrained the ordinary citizen appeared optional for those with the right institutional affiliations or the right political protection.
Once a critical mass of people concludes that the system is no longer reciprocal, that compliance is for those who lack the power to exempt themselves, the social foundations of the rule of law begin to dissolve. Productive people reduce their exposure. Cooperation becomes conditional. Trust in institutions that once claimed to stand above faction continues to drain. Historical parallels are imperfect but instructive: republics that gradually normalised emergency measures, selective prosecution, and the fusion of party and state rarely recovered the earlier equilibrium through ordinary electoral correction alone. The Australian version has proceeded under the continuing language of constitutional fidelity, which makes the transformation harder to name and therefore harder to reverse.
The result is not yet open lawlessness. It is something more subtle and more durable: a two-tier arrangement in which the forms of legality persist while their binding force becomes contingent. The marble still looks solid from a distance. Up close, the honeycombing is evident. Recognition of that condition does not require despair, but it does require abandoning the comforting assumption that the old remedies, another election, another round of appointments, another set of reforms, will automatically restore what has been hollowed out. The rule of law fails most completely not when it is openly repudiated, but when it is retained as rhetoric while its substance is reserved for the connected and denied to everyone else. That is the trajectory that long preceded 2020 and that the events of that year and its election made impossible to ignore.