With the Coalition self-destructing, there’s little pressure on Labor. It’s starting to show

There are three dominant facts about the Australian political scene right now.

The first is that, gradually perhaps, something dangerous is developing. At the last election, the Australian Federal Police told a Senate inquiry last week, threats to candidates rose by 17 per cent; also, neo-Nazis were moving more strongly into the political arena.

Since the election, several polls have found One Nation doubling its support. The most worrying analysis I’ve seen came from ANU political lecturer Dr Jill Sheppard, who told The Guardian “it feels like the conversation that we were having 20 or 30 years ago about the Greens”. And in fact this masthead’s Resolve poll recently had One Nation outpolling the Greens.

Meanwhile, different polls have also found immigration to be rising as an issue among voters – and, as James Campbell reported, more voters now blame immigration or population growth for housing problems than any other cause.

The second thing to note about politics right now is that the Coalition seems utterly determined to prove it is completely removed from the concerns of voters.

It is going about this in two ways – firstly by getting lost in abstractions. What are the chances ordinary Australians understand what is going on within the Coalition right now on climate?

The second thing to note about politics right now is that the Coalition seems utterly determined to prove it is completely removed from the concerns of voters.

On Thursday, the Australian Financial Review reported that some on the right of the Coalition want its policy to not even mention “net zero” any more; some moderates, meanwhile, want to keep talking about “net zero” but “change it from being a target to an aspiration”. On Friday, the Liberals held a meeting which reached some fairly vague conclusions. On Saturday, the Nationals’ ordinary members voted to abandon net zero, and on Sunday, Nationals leader David Littleproud confirmed this for the parliamentary party. We wait to see where the Liberals will land.

There is something real going on underneath all this, on an issue that matters – but the overall impression is of a policy debate conducted by way of obscure language games, in which using or avoiding particular phrases is the most important task, as a way of indicating you are in one group or another. It feels less about policy and more about political tribalism.

Something similar seemed to be going on with Sussan Ley’s attack on Anthony Albanese’s Joy Division T-shirt. The attack was incomprehensible to all those Australians who had never heard of the band, and even more incomprehensible to those who had. Above all, it was silly. But it served as a nod to Sky News, which is where the matter was raised first. This, it seems, is how the Coalition presently operates, from the leader on down: as a complicated series of signals about who agrees with whom.

The other current Coalition habit is to talk about concrete things voters can understand – but with facts that don’t bear much relation to reality. This was the case with the very poor decision of MPs, including Barnaby Joyce and Andrew Hastie, to drag a dignified parliamentary discussion on a good law providing parental leave to those who have lost babies into an ugly discussion of whether the tiny number of women who have late-term abortions (overwhelmingly for medical reasons) should receive the payment.

The same went for Jacinta Price’s decision a couple of months ago to claim Labor was bringing in Indian migrants because that community was likely to vote for Labor. Again, the claim was simultaneously ugly and divorced from reality.

Finally, we come to the government and the last of the three dominant facts about Australian politics. Last week, Australia got a bad inflation report. Prices were rising faster than expected. It wasn’t a disastrous figure – just a sign things were not quite going as smoothly as expected, which is of a piece with the performance of the Albanese government since its re-election (six months ago today).

Lists are tedious, so let’s do this quickly. In those six months, we’ve seen a large backdown on superannuation changes. Another backdown on home care packages. A productivity summit for which expectations were raised sky-high before being pulled back down. Anthony Albanese conceding his home deposit guarantee would raise prices (if only a little). A decision to remove procedural fairness for some asylum seekers being deported. Confusion over the government’s position on Makarrata. Weakening of freedom of information laws.

You can argue the toss over some of these. But overall the sense is of a government that – outside of foreign affairs – has not really found its second-term footing.

This brings us to the largest parliamentary debate right now – on Labor’s new environment laws. Asked on Sunday what would constitute “unacceptable” environmental harm under the laws, Environment Minister Murray Watt said his examples were “if someone wanted to mine Uluru, build on the Great Barrier Reef, or drive a species to extinction”.

This must have sounded like an unimpeachable argument: who could disagree with laws like that? Instead, the examples emphasised the smallness of Labor’s ambition. This was all it could promise to stop? Mining Uluru and building on the Reef? Of course, Labor’s ambition might be more than this. But how would we know when this is the strongest argument it is willing to make, so afraid is it of upsetting miners and builders?

Our current political contest is too often between a government unwilling to make real arguments and an opposition determined to argue matters obscure or confected. The result is a kind of fogginess in public debate. There are many reasons for the rise of immigration concerns and the far right; blaming the major parties alone is too easy. Still, in such an environment, it is unsurprising that simplistic arguments about immigration cut through. After all, voters aren’t being given much in the way of clarity or direction by their “parties of government” right now.

Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

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