‘Elections are won from the centre!’ – it’s a shibboleth of 20^th century policy-makers. And yet those same policy-makers now wring their hands at the rise of what they call, in their desperation, populist parties. There are two possible reasons for this phenomenon. Perhaps the electorate is becoming radically and unprecedentedly divided, in a way that invalidates the shibboleth. Alternatively, the shibboleth is still valid, but the ruling elites no longer have an accurate view of where the centre lies.

Adamant in their belief in ‘centrism’, the legacy parties cling tenaciously to that clutch of policies that commands bipartisan support, in the belief that this must mean they are ‘centrist’ policies, as the electorate sees them.

But are they, really? Isn’t it possible that ‘elections are won from the centre’ remains as true as it ever was, but that the governing class has misled itself as to the true location of that centre? That its notion of ‘centre’, and that of the electorate have drifted apart, and now stand at fatal distance from one another?

For much of the 20^th century, the doctrine of centrism paid modest, but steady dividends, like a large, well-managed corporation selling a well-established range of products, run by people who see no reason to indulge in risky innovation. Electors, that doctrine implies, are repelled by battles over radically different political visions. They are united, it assumes, by a desire for similar social outcomes (the ‘centre’), and divided only in their opinions of the best way to achieve them. And to be sure, there’s plenty of evidence that voters, if asked the right questions in the right way, will appear to express a repugnance for the adversarial nature of parliamentary discourse. (I say ‘appear’, because of course when the same voters are asked about policy issues about which they feel strongly, they are liable to drop their objections, and suddenly become ardent advocates of combative politics.)

Nonetheless, the creed that political parties should keep out of their manifestos the views of their more controversial members has governed the electoral strategies of Australia’s major parties at least since 1945 and, aided by a compulsory vote and a preferential voting system, has rewarded us with an enviable degree of political stability. So much so that gazing through the Overton window has become a governing principle of policy-makers.

So, what’s going on? Why do the traditional incumbents seem powerless to stem the loss of their electors to a party run by a woman with carroty hair, who had to have the meaning of the word ‘xenophobia’ explained to her?

Well, the trouble with sticking to the middle of the road is that it can all too easily turn to reflex bipartisanship, and thence to ideological indolence, conditions that are not readily externally distinguishable. Our parliamentary democracy works because people offer to represent us, claiming they know better than the rest of us. That’s actually what we want them to do. Crucially, though, they subject that claim regularly to public judgement. Once they stop doing that, things start to go wrong. Politicians are not quite like the people they represent – a fact that the wise among them acknowledge. Like visits to the oncologist, politicians need the judgement of their electors to remind them of their needs and wishes – or, if you like, to remind them where the centre really lies, as opposed to where fashionable opinion thinks it lies.

Risk-averse attempts to second-guess the electorate without actually consulting it at the ballot box can become habit-forming. The temptation is greatest where the issue is one that has consequences so remote that error is unlikely to be punished. Remote in time, as with climate change, or in location, as with immigration, whose effects are generally felt far from where either the politicians who make the relevant policy, or that part of the electorate to which they want to pander, actually live. And the temptation is particularly great with issues that command bien pensant social approval, promising their subscribers a sense of moral superiority. Prominent among these have been climate and immigration, but with the additions more recently of the weird belief that a bloke wearing a frock can be a woman, and that the British Empire was a wholly evil institution whose cultural legatees are indelibly tainted by that evil.

On a range of such issues, a culture of bipartisanship has taken hold, giving rise to what many refer to as the Uniparty. What they mean is that a great deal of highly consequential law has been made without their being given any opportunity to express their approval, or otherwise, at the ballot box. None of the parties with a realistic prospect of governing appears to offer to address grievances they have long held. Worse still, the Uniparty has concluded that even discussing the merits of these sacred cows is to be suppressed. That this angers voters is fairly widely appreciated, even if it is poorly understood. But equally damaging is that the governing class, by depriving its own political compass of the regular calibration which elections furnish, can – and I would argue has – come to an entirely mistaken view as to what really constitutes the political centre.

Donald Trump is a deeply unattractive individual who owes his election to large numbers of votes from people who don’t love him, but are even more repelled by the alternatives they have been offered. Repugnant though I find his personality, I have to give him credit for killing America’s Uniparty, by rolling back its sacred cows. America is a special case, for reasons I don’t have space to discuss here. But an important lesson from his presidency is that a candidate can win by attracting sufficient votes from people who don’t share all his vision, indeed who may be repelled by some of what he proposes, simply because on the key issues that concern them, he offers a credible promise to gratify them.

Elsewhere in the ‘democrosphere’, though, the UK’s Conservative Party is led by a woman who clearly gets the message, and is steadily, and courageously, purging her party of its false centrists. Rather more dramatically, Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen has well and truly stolen the ‘populists’ anti-immigration lunch, banning face covering, forcibly dismantling the Muslim ghettoes that have formed in Denmark’s cities, drastically tightening Denmark’s hitherto liberal asylum policy, and requiring immigrants to learn Danish.

So successful have these policies been that the ‘Danish model’ is being quietly adopted by countries like Sweden and Germany which have experienced their own ‘populist’ insurgence. Regrettably, Frederiksen’s forthright and common-sense approach to immigration seems, unlike Kemi Badenoch’s, not to extend to climate policy, but her success in the immigration field reminds us that there are rich rewards to be had from defying conventional wisdom.

Looking at the present political scene, I see little evidence here in Australia that the legacy parties are yet willing to learn the lesson that the polling they bemoan ought to be teaching them. They’d better start, because Pauline’s coming for them. There is, indeed, an election to be won from the centre, but you must first determine where that centre really is.