Politics

A curious pattern has emerged from the shambles of the leadership challenge. The strongmen of the cabal that pulled Turnbull down want the party to cave on at least three issues where the old prime minister had shown modest courage: global warming, Catholic schools and Pauline Hanson. The rhetoric of the plotters was all about strength and determination, but by now it’s becoming clear the real point of getting rid of Turnbull was to wave white flags.

Previously, dumping prime ministers was not done lightly or indeed regularly. But the precedent has been well and truly set, as the musical chairs of the past decade attest. And this despite what is clearly a costly move for the government party. The so called “transactional costs” include loss of credibility in the entire political class.

Jacinta Price is useful to politicians. She legitimises racist views by speaking them against her own people. When she walks through Alice Springs and Tennant Creek with the prime minister, she waves a flag for the increasingly normal brand of race politics coming from Canberra.

But let’s not celebrate too hard. It was “important always to call out racism”, Malcolm Turnbull told us. Those are words to live by, but they are certainly not words our prime minister lives by. This points to another problem. We are only able to see the danger posed by such views because we have lived through such horrors before. Even then we will not acknowledge the dangerous parallels with historical prejudice until the speaker helpfully labels them for us. So, what about a disaster we have not yet lived through?

There is no separating racism from the rest of Australian society. Exasperated as white people may be to hear about race, again, your frustration pales next to those forced to live it and fight it. As Labor MP Anne Aly tearfully admitted this week, we are tired of fighting. Tired of claiming our humanity. Tired of waiting for white people to change. Tired of reminding you of our worth. Tired of wondering what is wrong with you and why you still make excuses for this on your watch.

Like Donald Trump’s presidential victory, the appearance of far-right nationalist Blair Cottrell on Sky News cannot be excused by reference to recent events. It wasn’t the dumb mistake of a producer, nor was it unique to Sky. The expansion of what is considered acceptable to broadcast in this country did not begin this week. The middle ground may be where it has always been but the edges have been getting further out for years now. It’s the political equivalent of urban sprawl.

Turnbull vowed to look “very seriously and thoughtfully and humbly” at the results. Bill Shorten explicitly said “we hear you” to those who voted for third parties, and has spent the days since the vote repeating a version of this mea culpa: “We understand that you are over politicians just fighting each other.” Both are right to be concerned. But the need to win over voters who are turned off by major-party politics is a greater problem for Turnbull, for a simple reason: he is in government. Incumbency was once a great advantage. But the mood of the electorate, encouraged by a faster, louder media cycle, is for protest. The raison d’etre of an opposition is to protest: the times suit opposition leaders.

Abandoning any political principle that had once been his ticket to ride, Turnbull now makes only a show of leadership. He’s the mayor of a Potemkin village. Behind the facade there is nothing. His impulses are Trump-lite: a reverence for the banks and the big end of town; a blind belief in neoliberal, trickle-down economics even as it is daily more discredited; a disdain for the disabled and disadvantaged, immigrants and refugees – anyone who does not fit the Darwinian conservative matrix. He has evidently abandoned any attempt to rein back the quasi-fascist ambitions of Benito and his furious construction of a security superstate to monitor us all.

This was not just negative campaigning as it is usually understood – attacking your opponent rather than focusing on your own strengths. Instead, each side put its case in terms of what couldn’t be done if the other side got its way. On company tax cuts, a Liberal source told Tillett, ‘If you don’t have a strong economy, you can’t afford to fund hospitals.’ On the same topic, a Labor source said: ‘When you tell people you can’t give any more money to health care because it is going to the banks, that goes down badly.’ This campaign is literally twice as negative as usual.

Early in his prime ministership, approval numbers rocketing, he would have imagined himself breaking the mould, a new type of leader. But like most political leaders, over time Turnbull has, wisely if not admirably, accepted the narrowness of his immediate task. His job is not to outdo great leaders of yesteryear. His job is to beat Bill Shorten. If that involves making political hay out of immigration, Turnbull is prepared to do it.