There's a growing weariness among voters, a disenchantment, and they want to be convinced politicians have ideas worth fighting for

Look at any major opinion poll right now and the safest conclusion you can make and assert is alienation and disaffection is rife.



A growing proportion of voters seem to be looking for alternatives to the Liberal and Labor parties in response to a perceived gap between “the goings on” in Canberra and what voters are actually interested in. Alienation is an entirely logical response to the specific events of the past few years – Labor’s appallingly self-indulgent civil war while in office, and Tony Abbott’s appallingly cynical start as prime minister.

Scott Steel, who studies the attitudes of Queensland voters regularly as part of his pollster duties for Together Union, says disenchantment is even higher than some of the specific poll measures suggest. He told me recently the “best-of-a-bad-bunch”-style answers from voters in his surveys end up being consistently about 60% of the population.

Obviously one of the beneficiaries thus far of this “pox on all your houses” atmosphere to date has been the mining plutocrat, Clive Palmer. Given Scott has watched Palmer’s entry into politics from the beginning, at close range, I asked him to tell me what we know of voters who have defected to the PUP. His answers suggest the major parties are quite vulnerable to political incursions that are organised, and can present as credible.

“About two thirds of Palmer voters in Queensland are ex-Coalition voters. They're more male than female, more older than younger. They believe that the role of government should be pretty much what the broader country believes it should be – so these voters aren't particularly more libertarian or more statist than the broader population,” he said.

“Palmer votes come from across the income spectrum, as well as across the political attachment spectrum – so they're quite different as a group to other parties that have made insurgencies into the conservative vote before, such as One Nation. Palmer's voters follow news and current affairs as much as any random group of voters do. He also gets disproportionately larger amounts of support from people that grew up in a working-class background, regardless of where those people may sit on the socioeconomic spectrum today.”

Of course Palmer isn’t the only moving part to watch when we consider how politics responds to the challenge of being seen to have failed the voters.

The more fascinating dynamic, in truth, is how the major parties will respond to the enervating conditions.

These past few weeks in Canberra we’ve seen some interesting efforts at boundary riding within the Coalition. First of all we had the effort by Malcolm Turnbull to point out that the government should actually set its own policy agenda, not automatically dance to the tune of an idiosyncratic populist on the one hand (radio demagogue Alan Jones) or a idiosyncratic libertarian (News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt). At least part of the Turnbull fan dance was about pointing out the Coalition had a broad centrist constituency, and would be wise to remember that fact.

That display was followed up by dissent on a couple of policy issues by South Australian Liberal senator Cory Bernardi and Queensland’s Ian Macdonald. The specifics of the dissent on the debt tax and on paid parental leave were well covered, so I don’t think we need to retrace that ground in this Dispatch.

I actually want to make a broader point making sense of the recent bouts of studied independence – and that is that the times suit boundary riding, and boundary riders. The conditions suit protagonists who want to protect their personal political brands, and if that involves contrasting their gestures of independence with the mute soldiering of their colleagues then so be it.

Major party politicians face a choice: stay within the disciplined party structure and risk being tarred with the pervasive and corrosive “out of touch, out of ideas” brush, or break with that framework in order to make direct appeals to the voters. Speaking your mind in the current environment is less a gesture of theatrical ill discipline, and more a downpayment on longevity.

Authenticity, given there is so little of it on display in intra-day politics, is currency, and styling yourself at odds with Canberra’s “business as usual” is also currency. It’s the logical response to the evidence: if the voters are fatigued with the deficiencies of professional politics, then politics will evolve to attempt to secure a new compact with voters. Politicians who put themselves outside the robotic talking points framework, who are seen to exercise the conscience, who are seen to break the rules, who pride themselves on representing a constituency with whom they are aligned, will prosper in an environment of institutional weariness.

It’s happening elsewhere as well. While Bernardi was making a moment of standing up for the Coalition’s low tax/small government/socially conservative/libertarian constituency, a fellow traveller across the Pacific was making a similar pitch.

Rand Paul, the Republican senator from Kentucky (a conservative libertarian attempting to ride the rips of a fractured Republican party as a potential presidential hopeful in 2016), made a speech in which he styled himself aggressively at odds with institutional Washington: “I can tell you without exaggeration that I've met the enemy, and the enemy is too often us.” He suggested business as usual in Washington created conditions where politicians became “distant and distanced from their constituents”.

Politics desperately needs more dissent to convince the public that there are ideas worth having, and values worth fighting for, to exhibit that public policy isn’t just a stitch-up by the self-interested that happens at a remove from the community.

But it is a difficult conundrum for Australian politics. Much of the progress in public policy terms over the past three decades is a function of the discipline of major party politics and the nimbleness of the Australian parliament to be able to respond to events.

Yet for all that demonstrable progress, there's a rather large gulf between what voters want and expect and what parliament delivers. Not an easy problem for leaders to confront, or to solve.