Mark Kenny | A lack of social-moral unity was Scott Morrison's jam. What's Anthony Albanese's excuse?

The tendency is to gradually normalise threats even where materially, they remain constant.

These last few years have taught us this. We are now in the early stages of a new wave of COVID-19 - the deadly pathogen we once dreaded and first knew as the "novel Coronavirus".

Only, it doesn't seem so novel anymore, nor particularly worrisome.

Indeed, numbers for COVID infections, hospitalisations, and deaths that might have alarmed us just 12 months ago, now struggle to make the news, much less score a mention around the (frequently) unmasked water-cooler.

Ask yourself this - how many deaths have there been from COVID worldwide? It's a simple global number. Three million, four? The answer is 6.62 million.

More worrying (or is it less?) is that the fourth wave currently underway in Australia is coming fast with cases threatening to overwhelm hospitals, possibly close off some aged-care facilities, and ruin Christmas (again) for families and businesses.

Experts say hospitalisations might crest in mid-to-late December - around the same time as supplementary federal COVID funding for hospitals expires, ruled no longer affordable. Que?

In NSW last week there were 39 COVID fatalities, and as many on ventilators or other ICU treatment.

Victoria's death toll that week was higher still at 46.

On flights recently, I was one of just a handful wearing a mask - a simple non-intrusive measure which not only protects the wearer but declaims a consideration for others by not simply assuming their spotless immunity. Nor their level of COVID anxiety.

Yet we seem to have stopped caring. Surely the whole point of "learning to live with COVID" is to not die from COVID? Nor get seriously ill, or wreck the Christmases of exhausted healthcare workers and their loved ones?

Still though, we see no substantial public relations campaigns to drive home this community-mindedness, this basic consideration for others. The absence of such social-moral unity was a core failing of the pointless Morrison government. What's Labor's excuse?

Over this year, other risks, some dodged, underplayed or ignored, have also shifted. Like the return of aggressive authoritarianism.

Russia's unconscionable invasion of neighbouring Ukraine had long been signalled - yet the democratic West had arrogantly concluded there would be no consequence from openly flirting with (possibly) extending NATO membership to a country on Russia's border.

Vladimir Putin's illegal invasion, which had already been likened to the Cuban Missile Crisis, last week stepped even closer to that horrendous moment 60 years ago when the world had held its collective breath, the prospect of thermonuclear conflagration, very real.

It followed just hours after Ukraine's President, Volodymyr Zelensky visited the freshly liberated city of Kherson and observed triumphantly that this was the "beginning of the end" of the war against Russia. An enraged Putin fusillades of missile attacks deep into Western Ukraine.

The targets were often electricity infrastructure, the destruction of which could bring Ukraine's besieged citizens to their knees as winter tightens its icy grip.

But war is inevitably chaotic. Just as JFK had wanted to avoid any Russian ground fire on low-level photographic reconnaissance aircraft America sent over Cuba, Joe Biden rushed to cast doubt on Zelensky's claim that a deadly missile strike in Poland came from Russia.

Poland is a NATO member, and only months ago, Biden had warned the Russian despot that America and its allies were fully prepared to "defend every single inch of NATO territory" if attacked. "Mr. Putin, don't misunderstand what I'm saying," the US President reiterated, "every inch."

In 1962, the Kennedy administration needed evidence of Russian nukes being positioned and potentially fuelled but was desperate to avoid US planes attracting ground fire while getting that evidence - such were the unthinkable consequences of American planes coming under direct Russian assault.

In Poland, Biden too, moved quickly to establish that the missile strike in Poland was not Russian but more likely an errant Ukrainian air-defence missile. Biden knew that if it were Russian, it would have required a NATO response. Zelensky knew it too.

While still dealing with the aftermath of the old Cold War, the new one with China is another area where the balance between a medium-term risk of war and some level of engaged and peaceful co- existence shifted last week.

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Or appeared to shift, anyway.

On the surface, President Xi Jinping relented in his six-year stand-off, holding his first face-to-face talks with Biden, and first bilateral talks in years with Australia, Canada, and others.

Some say the rapprochement has been driven by domestic politico-economic pressures arising from among other things, Beijing's heavy-handed economy-killing zero-COVID policies. Others suggest it reflects a recognition by Xi that China had simply too many spats running simultaneously.

Few however, believe that the threat of an expansive, militarily capable China intent on becoming the world's number one power, has ameliorated.

Neither should they. In the days before his G20 charm offensive, Xi was striking an altogether different tone reminding his troops about the "harm offensive" to come, telling his People's Liberation Army to "focus all its energy on fighting".

Warning of dangerous storms ahead, he told the PLA to "comprehensively strengthen military training in preparation for war".

"Focus all energy on fighting, work hard on fighting and improve [your] capability to win," he reportedly said.

Some risks, like climate change, just keep getting bigger.