I really don't give a damn about Britain.

It's of minor importance to Australia, worth only a couple of percentage points of our exports. If the Poms want to shoot themselves in their economic foot by withdrawing from a powerful trade bloc, I don't care.

But I do care about the isolationist small-mindedness that seems to have driven the Brexit vote; the shrinking vision, the reduced hearts and minds of what was once a rather grand outward-looking nation. The danger, as many have commented, is that it gives heart to similar xenophobic, anti-globalisation types.

The same populist forces that swung the British public - that demonise migrants and, especially, refugees, that push a myth of a smaller, protectionist future being better – are at work here and more broadly in the world. That's a worry.

Many of the protagonists know no better. They are people with minds closed to the reality of the world being made a better place by maximising engagement, by welcoming differences and enlargement. There are others, the worst of them, happy to exploit ignorance for their short-term advantage. It sells newspapers. It can win an election. It can give an aspirant power.

The ignorant still view the interactions of nations as zero-sum games. They don't grasp that globalisation is a win-win process, that the sum of our individual nations is indeed greater than the parts. They are blind to the lessons of post-WW2 Europe and the post-Cold War world as greater internationalism was embraced across trade and human movement.

The lack of confidence in a nation's ability to absorb migrants, to compete in a wider world, is a little sad. In the end, that's what Brexit was really about.

There are people in most countries that feel that way. Weak leadership either feeds on or gives in to their fears. Strong leadership resists the ignorance and actually leads rather than follows the fear-mongering minority. Domestically, there is a duty to educate Australians about the massive rise in living standards we have achieved through embracing globalisation and migration.

The world's markets are suffering a knee-jerk reaction to the UK's vote to be smaller. The actual decision doesn't matter much to the rest of us, as long as the knee-jerk itself doesn't upset fundamentals.

When the immediate shock passes, it will take some years for the UK to extract itself from the European community. The Scots and even the Northern Irish might reconsider their positions and the UK could further shrink. Doesn't matter to me if what was once a global power becomes a less relevant little island off the coast of Europe.

But this caving in to populism in having such a dangerous plebiscite, this lack of leadership, should be a warning to others not to let the lies and myths of the xenophobes and small-world types go unchallenged. The steps backward to a greater degree of tribalism, of embellishing nationalism, can be a siren song for the power-hungry.

Samuel Johnson said it first: Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.