With all political eyes on the ‘centre’, irrelevancy is the result

The market and financial traders are fairly confident the RBA will raise interest rates again at its meeting on Tuesday, meaning workers are about to be hit with higher mortgage payments on top of the rising cost of living.

Raising housing costs for working Australians will do absolutely nothing to lower fuel costs. But the Reserve Bank has one tool, so it deploys it at everything, even when the inflation is caused by supply issues, not demand.

It is also a board that seems particularly captured by what the market thinks. And if the market thinks there should be more interest rate hikes – and the corresponding increases in unemployment that follow – then that’s what the market will get.

This follows what monthly inflation figures revealed last week was a 30 per cent increase in fuel costs, and all the increases that come with that.

Inflation prices are already baked in to most everyday goods – there is no return to pre-inflation prices – so people’s dollars are worth even less.

On top of that, we have a government cutting services – like the NDIS (which is being rewarded as “economic bravery”) – while increasing spending in defence, while ruling out an export tax on existing gas contracts as “not the right time”.

That’s been well prosecuted. But it is worth looking at what the research shows this attitude from “centre-left” parties – which continue to make workers pay for corporate and political greed – is doing to democratic parties.

In short, the rush to the “centre” wherever that is these days, is sending more voters to the right.

Why? Well as Tarik Abou-Chadi from the Progressive Politics Research Network put it, while borrowing from Jean-Marie Le Pen “why would voters choose the copy when they can have the original?”.

One of its focuses was on the effect of tighter immigration policies on radical right-wing electoral support. What happened? Voters weren’t calmed by the idea that a mainstream party might adopt ideas from the radical right while still being “sensible”.

Instead, the “centrist” adoption of radical right policies just sent more people to the radical right. It turns out that if you normalise and legitimise the policies of the fringes, you contribute to their adoption and ultimate success. Why go for the middle party when you can jump straight to the source?

Among the findings:

“Crucially, however, we find that accommodative policy shifts tend to do more good than harm to the radical right. The effect on gross radical right gains is pronouncedly positive, statistically significant, and clearly outweighs the effect on the increase in losses in terms of magnitude. Even though the overall net effect is statistically indistinguishable from zero, the findings thus show that rightward shifts on immigration result in significantly greater gains for [radical right-wing parties] and suggest that mainstream parties that move toward the radical right’s core issue positions risk losing more voters to the radical right than they win in return.”

It says a lot about the right-wing capture of democracies (media included, although we just dress it up as centrism) that trying to run on left-wing policies is seen as nonsensical – even as they know that normalising and legitimising right-wing policies such as austerity came from repeated exposure, not natural selection.

Watching the decline of social democrats in Europe shows how this has all played out. The centre-left has become the centre-right and, in pivoting, has become largely irrelevant.

Labor in Australia is not there yet, but that is largely because its traditional opposition has been reduced to cartoonish villains, destroyed by its own success.

Nationals leader Matt Canavan told The Australian Financial Review recently that his party was “on the beaches of Dunkirk – it’s an existential issue, and the only thing to do is what Churchill did. You’ve got to give your blood, your sweat, your tears and fight”.

Well, Dunkirk was a retreat, not a battle. And in his speech on Dunkirk, Churchill himself said “wars are not won by evacuations”.

But that is exactly what both major parties of our mainstream politics have done. Evacuated the principles they might once have fought to uphold for the hollow victory of appealing to a “centre” that keeps shifting ever further in the wrong direction, while those who can least afford it keep paying the price.