Democratic political systems are structurally biased toward the short term, yet many of the most pressing challenges facing contemporary societies, such as climate change, demographic ageing, and technological disruption, unfold as slow-moving or "creeping" crises that demand sustained attention across electoral cycles. This paper offers a comparative analysis of political long-termism in Australia and the European Union, two governance systems that differ sharply in institutional architecture, political culture, and constitutional design, yet face similar pressures to embed long-term thinking into policy-making. Australia's federal system distributes responsibility for creeping crises between the Commonwealth and the states and territories, producing a governance model shaped by intergovernmental coordination and, at times, contestation. The European Union occupies a distinct institutional position that can shield long-term policy initiatives, such as the European Green Deal, from some of the domestic political pressures that constrain member states, while introducing its own challenges around legitimacy and implementation across diverse national contexts. Drawing on comparative case studies across policy domains including climate and energy policy, fiscal sustainability, and industrial strategy, this article examines the anticipatory institutions and mechanisms, from independent fiscal councils to strategic foresight units, that each system has developed to counteract short-termism. It identifies the conditions under which these mechanisms succeed or fail, and considers what each system can learn from the other's institutional experience. The analysis contributes to a growing body of scholarship on anticipatory governance by demonstrating how federal and supranational structures generate distinct opportunities and constraints for long-term policy-making, and by proposing a comparative framework for assessing institutional capacity for political long-termism that can be extended to other governance contexts.
