The prime minister’s bid to claim the “sensible centre” for the Liberal party last week was more than an attempt to assert the Menzian moral ground in the internecine war that is fracturing his government.
It was also an articulation of Malcolm Turnbull’s moderate breed of politics in the face of the rise of populism to the left and the right of politics globally.
The accepted wisdom of the times is that we are entering a period of political instability, of disrupters like Trump and Sanders, of nationalist isolationism in trade and security, in the embrace of the political outsider.
If the fringes are in fashion, then centrism is the equivalent of a slicked down hair with a part. But as these populist experiments mature into real experiences of unstructured power, the lustre of the outsider may be beginning to fade.
As this week’s Essential report suggests, the public is surprisingly receptive to this message from the political centre.
We think our political parties have become too ideological; we don’t buy into notions of “left and right”; we say we want them to meet in the centre; we would consider voting for a new centrist party if they don’t.
But there are contradictions here as well. Despite our reservations on ideology, just as many of us think the current political parties – with the help of the minors – are already representing the interests of Australians.
Embedded in these results is also a clear message to our parties to work together for the national good.
This can be read as a warning to the Coalition not to reject the bipartisan opportunity that is Finkel and perhaps also a repudiation of Labor’s refusal to take the win on Gonski.
Another reading of the findings is that they are tacit endorsement of the current leaders of both major parties who, despite their at-times bitter rhetoric, both sit closer to the centre than the fringe of their political traditions.
Turnbull is routinely attacked by conservative commentators for being too progressive while Shorten, from the moderate right of the ALP, struggles to convince progressives he is the real deal.
So, at a time when the populists at the fringes demand to tear the system down, Australian political centre is clinging on, albeit by its fingertips on the right.
This centrism is also reinforced by a separate Essential report question where we are asked to rate various world leaders.
It’s the centrists like Canada’s Justin Trudeau, Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron that we say we admire. As to the extremes, we can’t see much difference between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, but neither rocks our world. (In a local context, both Turnbull and Shorten sit between Macron and Theresa May in favourability, and both closer to Putin in the disapprovals.)
While the responses suggest thirst for moderation, I don’t read these results as an endorsement of politics as usual.
We know the public wants action from government on the issues that impact them: from energy prices to housing, from delivering marriage equality to supporting industry. People want government that can work sensibly to intervene when needed.
But what these results also show is that we are not up for the extremists who would simply tear things apart, be it trashing climate science or beating up unions or politicising national security and immigration.
And that’s where Turnbull’s London sentiments comes undone – because within a few days, he was back home throwing red meat to his Queensland base by singing the praises of coal in an attempt to keep his own job safe.
Deep down I’m sure the PM can see his own future: forced by his base to roll his own energy minister on a Clean Energy Target and driven to the election as the champion of the Coal Club, even as the public embraces renewables like never before.
The sad truth is the centrism that Malcolm Turnbull so craves cannot be delivered by a government he leads. Too many in his party have fought too many culture wars and successfully deployed too many political wedges on their opponents to see the value in laying down their arms.
