Political conviction comes apart at the seams
Nick Efstathiadis

By ABC's Jonathan Green

Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott in a 'selfie' with forum audience member Photo: The desire to appeal to those undecided voters of marginal Australia has reshaped our politics. (AAP: Lukas Coch)

Why is Labor advocating cruelty to asylum seekers? Why is the Coalition trying to featherbed parental leave? In the battle for the centre, ideology is all too quickly put to the side, writes Jonathan Green.

It's not for all of us.

There are 42 of a possible 150 electorates in the country held by margins of less than 5 per cent. It's for them.

Let's refine that further. There are 20 electorates in the country held by Labor or independents with a margin of 5 per cent or less. It's for them. It's all about them, this entire panoply.

The 5 per cent is a bit arbitrary, and quite probably a little low, but you get the point: politics is a game played at and for the margins and the marginals.

What's in it for the rest of us exactly? What return do we get for our engagement, conviction and concern?

Come Saturday most of us will just add our votes to well-established and largely unchanging piles, an empty ritual for that majority of us whose entrenched loyalties can be assumed and taken for granted.

That's one element of the sad hollowness of Australian politics; that awkward sense of emptiness that feeds that broad sense of disengagement that has been the subtext, not just of this election season but of the past several years in public life.

But there's more to it than the simple fact that most of us are simply disenfranchised by the obsessive - and all but exclusive - targeting of marginal electorates. More to it than the system's instinct to preference the voters who form the pivots of power over the vast bulk whose votes tip into the deep foundations of our long-standing political divide.

More significant has been the continuing refinement of professional political craft to enhance and manipulate this effect through the continual sharpening of its processes and tools. The result: a narrowing of an increasingly effective political gaze.

The desire to appeal to those undecided voters of marginal Australia has reshaped our politics. It has dragged the points of political and policy contest to the centre, blurring the distinctions between the opposing political forces.

It is no coincidence that in this counterintuitive 2013 campaign we see the Labor party running hard on institutionalised cruelty to asylum seekers and the Coalition on the featherbedding of parental leave. It is clear that both parties aim to make their appeal as broad as possible, a strategy guided by the fact that their pitch is to voters whose minds could yet be made up in either direction, voters who are by definition of the centre.

Which is not to say that our rival parties make permanent camp in that congenial ideological centre. Both cling to their root beliefs: conservatives to a steady doctrine of small government, free markets, individualism, lean budgets and hostility to the distorting evil of organised labour; the Labor party to big government, the redistribution of wealth, and a core belief in the protective social merit of unionisation.

But these are the ideological shells both parties leave behind when they move to that central gutter of Australian politics, the narrow stream in which the modern general election is fought.

The candidates are not armed with the time-worn shibboleths of their party's ideological core: this is a contest between individuals, the leaders, decked out in the anodyne indistinguishability of the presidential campaign. It is a test of personality. Of character.

The ideologically driven vision for the country that both sides truly represent is not forgotten, it's simply put to one side for the duration, filed under "potentially polarising" and pointedly ignored.

It's an approach that suits both the on-message, tight control of professional politics and also the politics as entertainment focus of the populist mass media, a media whose preference will always be for personality over policy detail, for gaffes and gotchas over reason and informed argument.

But somewhere deep down we the people sense the deception inherent in all of this, the hollowness of that contest for the middle ground between champions of two sides whose true core of belief and support lives closer to either extremity than might be palatable to the voters who decide.

It's the inherent disengaging tension in our politics: that at some fundamental point between the bland professional contest and its underlying core of masked conviction, we can see that in some profoundly troubling way, that it's all little better than a lie.

Jonathan Green is the presenter of Sunday Extra on Radio National and a former editor of The Drum. View his full profile here.

More on politics:

Political conviction comes apart at the seams - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

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