The News Sport Network reported perfection is what the Matildas needed to beat Japan to the Asian Cup trophy and they just couldn't deliver that on Saturday night.

But there is no shame in losing 0-1 to a better team.

A world-class team.

Matildas were in the battle from the start but Japan capitalised on the chances it created, while the Matildas squandered theirs.

Credit must be given to the Matildas who are the only team to pose a challenge to Japan this tournament.

It wasn't the fairytale ending the Matildas - who haven't won a tournament in 16 years, wanted - especially in front of 74,397 strong crowd at Accor Stadium.

It’s the third time Japan have beaten Australia 1-0 in an Asian Cup final — the first was in 2014 and the second in 2018.

Japan are a world class outfit - the goal scored by Maika Hamano from outside the box in the 17th minute proved that.

Matildas were in the contest though and limited Japan’s all-class lineup to just one goal.

A clever tactical change from Joe Montemurro had the Matildas midfield spread wide, stretching Japan and restricting their ability to effectively press the ball.

Matildas were able to use the space - especially down the wings - with Mary Fowler and Catlin Foord heavily involved.

As both coaches said before the match, finals are won in moments.

And the Matildas just didn't have that magic touch last night — perhaps they had used their luck allocation to get through their close encounters with South Korea and North Korea.

What sort of country lets its military run down to such a pathetic level?

A country that has no self-respect, a country that has given up defending itself, a country that allows Chinese fighter jets to aggress its military aircraft, and a Chinese warship to deploy sonar weapons to injure its navy divers. All without expelling a single Chinese diplomat. Just rude letters to Beijing for the amusement of the CCP.

Australians are dreaming if they think it’s a given that the US will steam to the rescue if China comes knocking.

An increasingly isolationist and inward-focused America is here to stay, and Donald Trump has already made it clear that his country has no patience for freeloaders.

President Trump has excoriated allies like Australia, Japan, Italy and Germany who refused to join his efforts to reopen the Hormuz Strait.

Some are countries that we've helped for many, many years, he said on Monday. We've protected them from horrible outside sources, and they weren't that enthusiastic. And the level of enthusiasm matters to me.

In fairness, why should American taxpayers sacrifice 3.5 per cent of GDP in military spending to defend Australia when Australia only spends 2 per cent of its GDP to defend itself?

Labor appears to have plenty of money for the NDIS welfare boondoggle currently soaking up marginally less taxpayer money than defence 𕱼 and growing at about 20 per cent a year.

Meanwhile, productivity growth in Australia has fallen to zero. What a disgrace.

Laziness and complacency have turned a land of legendary initiative and ingenuity into a gigantic, sunburnt sitting duck.

Australia has fought alongside the United States in almost every war since World War I. Now it can't manage a single warship to help its old ally in the Strait of Hormuz.

The enfeebled nature of Australia’s military today is an insult to past generations who gave their lives for our freedom.

This la la land attitude will lead Australia to a rude shock. Like Hemingway’s bankruptcy, a nation’s ruin happens gradually, then suddenly. Ed: Welcome back Miranda.

The gap between the magnificence of his life’s work and the bleakness of its ultimate conclusion measures what has been lost. Not just a towering philosopher, but a fundamental conviction: that reason and politics could work together.

Habermas was that faith’s last great defender. Its core was simple. Democracy does not just need its formal structures; it needs citizens who know how to argue.

Not shout, not posture but submit their views to the judgment of others and even change their minds. Habermas ∼ born with a cleft palate, acutely alive to the power and purpose of speech ∼ called this the force of the better argument and considered it the only legitimate basis of political power.

This was Western modernity’s great achievement: that when it is asked why?, authority must answer — with answers that withstand scrutiny. Authority could no longer rest on God or tradition. It could only rest on consent: reasoned, revisable, formed through public argument.

Robust democratic institutions are essential

Having grown up under Nazism, one question haunted him: When authority can always be challenged, what prevents societies from disintegrating into chaos or falling prey to those who promise to end the argument?

Robust democratic institutions were clearly essential. But also vital was what he called a public sphere. It had emerged in the coffee houses of 18th-century London and Paris, where citizens argued about politics free of court and church. Over two centuries it grew into a dense network of associations, newspapers and journals, radio and television: a whole civilisation of informed, contentious public life.

Now, he warned, that fabric was in tatters — the shared space in which citizens had learned to argue, to listen, to be surprised.

Old media, for all its faults, filtered. Editors decided what mattered. Reporters had to justify claims. Stories passed through people whose credibility depended on not being wrong. Then the internet created an enormous space in which those protections were absent.

Anonymity compounded the damage. It gave voice to those the gatekeepers had shut out. But it also dissolved the oldest constraint on public speech: the knowledge that you would be held to account. Mask the speaker’s identity and every inhibition against bad faith, abuse and sheer fantasy goes with it. Even free speech’s staunchest defenders ∼ Milton, Defoe and Mill ∼ feared it rendered freedom of expression unsustainable: but the internet made it ubiquitous.

Unchallenging conversations

The result is not a richer conversation but the dissolution of the conditions for any conversation at all.

Crucial in that dissolution are the echo chambers Ô less because their inhabitants see more of what they already believe than because they stop encountering views that genuinely surprise or radically challenge them. Without real otherness, there is no real argument, only endless amplification of entrenched beliefs. The shared world that democratic discourse requires shatters into hermetic fragments.

This, Habermas suggested, is not solely, or even mainly, a failure of technology. It is a failure of character. Democracy calls for a particular kind of person: one a vigorous public sphere historically helped nurture.

The thinkers Habermas grew up with ∼ Adorno and Horkheimer, steeped in Freud ∼ had made this central to their project. Democratic citizenship requires psychological maturity: citizens strong enough in ego to renounce the fantasy of omnipotence, to tolerate uncertainty, to engage with genuine otherness without falling into projection or rage — or turning to violence.

The culture of the 1960s set out to overthrow the disciplines that sustained that maturity ethic. What replaced them was not liberation. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had described how the ego is first constituted through a mirror ∼ through identification with its own image ∼ and how the movement from that imaginary self-absorption to genuine engagement with others is never fully secure. What the 1960s unleashed was a reversion to the permanently adolescent self, craving recognition rather than truth, for whom life is a theatre and to live is to be applauded.

The reflection of itself

Social media’s echo chamber universalised that condition and gave it political form. Surrounded only by reflections of itself, the self no longer encounters the otherness that alone can discipline its demands, train its impulses and instil what Tocqueville called democracy’s habits of the heart. Without them, what follows is antinomianism: the narcissistic refusal of any authority that does not mirror the untamed self’s own convictions. The psychological conditions for submitting to the force of the better argument are no longer being reproduced.

The result is what we see on our streets, in universities and cultural institutions: the neo-idiocy of the highly instructed but semi-educated Adorno had diagnosed in 1967. And it is what Habermas sensed returning, with a vengeance, after October 7, 2023, when he condemned the wave of antisemitism he regarded as a sure sign of democratic collapse.

Worse still, philosophy itself was providing neo-idiocy with a fraudulent conceptual justification. Postmodernism was, for Habermas, nihilism’s latest incarnation. His answer to it was communicative reason: the proposition that it is analytically and practically impossible to make sense of knowledge without reference to an objective world, against which claims to truth can be co-operatively and rigorously tested.

Abandon those suppositions and you destroy the conditions for rational criticism. Terrifyingly, it reminded Habermas of Heidegger and his acolytes, who had lent their talent to Germany’s descent into the abyss — which is why he attacked postmodernism with such vehemence that Derrida accused him of adopting a warrior tone. Post-modernism’s epigones, and we have many, he dismissed as wanting the glory of intellect without its hard labour.

Laws not the answer

Habermas offered no truly credible solutions. He believed regulation could force platforms to change.

But you cannot pass a law restoring people’s willingness to be wrong. Nor can you fine your way to intellectual seriousness. And regulation cannot recreate what has been lost: the patience to follow a complex argument, the basic trust that the other side is not simply your enemy.

From birth to death, Habermas was a man of the left. More often than not, I found his politics wrongheaded. But there is a world of difference between disagreeing with a thinker and watching his tradition die. His vast erudition, the astonishing breadth, depth and subtlety of his arguments, his insistence on taking every objection seriously — these were the fruits of a left formed by centuries of the Western intellectual tradition. We have to stand by our traditions, he insisted, if we do not want to disavow ourselves.

Look at what has replaced it. Derrida was personally harmless, his weapons footnotes and impenetrable jargon. Those Habermas called red fascists are not: contemptuous of argument, quick to reach for intimidation, egged on by postmodern academics who preach rather than teach.

With Habermas, a whole culture of the serious left draws to a close. Those of us who spent decades grappling with it are the losers too. The greatest curse, Mill warned, is stupid opponents: ones who never force you to sharpen your wits. Habermas, ever faithful to Kant’s motto ∼ Dare to Know! ∼ always did. May he rest in peace.