In this chapter we will chart Ireland’s treatment of the state, which can be broadly divided into three phases. In his first left-nationalist period, texts like Burn, The Glass Canoe and The Unknown Industrial Prisoner provide a potent aesthetic formulation of the role played by the Australian state in the construction and reproduction of abstract space. In the 1980s, however, there is a radical neoliberal shift, epitomised in Archimedes and the Seagle and Bloodfather. We see a new and powerful emphasis on the virtues of an individualistic and meritocratic democracy. In particular, Ireland drives a wedge between democracy and egalitarianism in the Australian context by alloying the former to a promise of national rebirth, synthesising the space of freedom with the space of the nation state. Ireland’s last texts, The Chosen, The World Repair Video Game and Time Capsule, mark his final, post-neoliberal authoritarian period. Ireland rearticulates the democracy and egalitarianism he had sundered in the neoliberal phase—the nation state remains the primary scale of political regulation, but one which is illiberal and exclusionary in the face of a hostile global order.