According to the elite members of the Australian press gallery, any politician who isn't from a major party is a pet to be managed by the grown-ups, writes Tim Dunlop.

Guy Rundle's Quarterly Essay, Clivosaurus, is ostensibly about Clive Palmer, but it actually deals with something more fundamental than the pros and cons of PUP.

At its heart, it is a discussion of the press gallery and the narrow lens through which they interpret federal politics. It is a discussion of how we the people are fundamentally short-changed by a media who too often let their unexamined prejudices of what constitutes "good governance" colour the way they report the federal parliament.

Rundle argues that press gallery journalists have a basic distrust of small parties and independents. He notes that Palmer is not the first to be at the receiving end of their ire, suggesting, "The political media displayed the same irritation with him as they had displayed towards the Democrats and then the Greens." (To which we could easily add the names of Oakeshott and Windsor.)

This blinkered view comes about because the media generally, and the gallery in particular, are part of what Rundle calls the Australian political caste, an almost priest-like formation that is part of the "the elite separation of political participants from the general public [that] has become so marked as to constitute a historical breach".

He notes that, "At its best, the Australian parliamentary press gallery applies a forensic attention to daily politics that is unparalleled in the English-speaking world."

But, he adds, the gallery has also "overwhelmingly ... absorbed the dominant ideology of eternal Australian politics, which is that politics is not politics - the clash of interests, ideas and belief systems - but policy."

Policy, in turn, actually has a very specific meaning:

By policy they mean the steady and further neoliberalisation of economy, state and society. The political question then becomes one of quantity: how fast should this go, and how much in the way of "social market"-style checks and balances should be put in place for those blindsided by the process.

On this understanding, political players outside the two major parties are interlopers: amateurs who don't understand "policy"; Kardashians blundering their way into a Royal garden party.

Rundle provides plenty of examples of this sort of reporting, but you don't have to look too far to find others. For instance, Annabel Crabb, just last week, got her condescension on, comparing the crossbenchers to "bunnies in a basket".

In other words, the non-majors are pets that have to be managed by the grown-ups.

Elsewhere, Laura Tingle channelled the basic contempt in which the minors and independents are held by the political caste in a piece entitled, "Global triumph conceals a house of disorder".

The article included this revealing backhander:

It says something about our politics that Jacqui Lambie and Ricky Muir are now part of the Coalition of Common Sense that is actually (on this occasion at least) making more sense than the government.

Just let your mind slide through the layers of that.

Yes, Tingle is criticising the Government, but her point of reference for senselessness is two independents. How bad have things got, she frets, when the government has fallen to their level?

Rundle's essay suggests we should look at all this through different eyes.

What if instead of applying the caste logic of "good policy", we looked at what is happening in Parliament - particularly the ongoing bargaining in the Senate - as simply democracy as it is meant to be practiced?

Again, for Rundle, Palmer is emblematic. The galley and the political caste generally see the Clivosaurus as flakey, inconsistent, and self-serving, but this is nothing more than him "being judged by a standard ... harsher than that applied to others".

As Rundle notes:

It was, after all, the Abbott government that had been utterly inconsistent, which is to say lying, in bringing down a budget with a raft of measures it had ruled out in the preceding election campaign. [But when] the PUP and other parties scrambled to find a response to these surprise measures, [it was] they [who] were accused of making it up on the fly.

What's more, the response Palmer (and others amongst the non-majors) are trying to cobble together is more in keeping with what we might call traditional Australian centrism than the radical, tea-party-like agenda of the Abbott Government:

[T]he politics of Clive Palmer, whatever personal vendettas and agendas may be being exercised through them, are exactly what they claim to be: a mildly centre-right politics, grounded in Australian Catholic traditions and social movement doctrine, and tracing their lineage back to the party whose name he wanted to adopt, the United Australia Party. The policies that Palmer urges now - which oppose harsh budgeting that targets the poor, which see the state, capital and labour as engaged in a triple partnership, which reflect a belief that further privatisations would be a betrayal of our common holdings, and take a Keynesian and demand-driven attitude to deficit and public debt - these are nothing other than the centre-right politics that determined the position of the non-Labor parties from the formation of the UAP in 1931, and carried right through, including into much of the Howard/Costello era.

Seen in this light, Palmer and the other small parties and independents are less interlopers than a particular version of the popular will trying to immunise itself against the extremism of a government - one supported by significant sections of the political caste - that is attempting to reshape institutions many see as the pillars of a free and healthy society: everything from ready access to education, to universal health care, and even a functional ABC.

Don't get me wrong: Rundle is far from some uncritical fan of Palmer, and he is even less enamoured of the "sclerotic" electoral system that brought him to power.

But he does recognise that business-as-usual politics - the game of clones played by the political caste, where everyone adheres to a narrow vision of governance as "policy" - is ultimately more damaging to democracy than the "turbulence" caused when a few amateurs question the elite consensus.

It was, after all, that consensus, that caste mentality, that allowed Abbott to slip into power with his inconsistencies unexamined, and that arguably emboldened him to break promise after promise once he was safely in power.

The bottom line is, no matter what you think of Palmer and co, they are ultimately not a problem in themselves, but a symptom of a deeper democratic malaise. As a nation, the sooner we - and the political caste - start talking about those underlying problems, the better.

Tim Dunlop is the author of The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience. He writes regularly for a number of publications. You can follow him on Twitter. View his full profile here.