Australia has a new centre.

If any policy finds itself between Labor and One Nation, it’s now considered “the middle ground”.

That should be alarming for a number of reasons, not least because it doesn’t consider what is good policy, just what is allegedly in-between what the mainstream media considers the two extremes.

This then creates the strange circumstance where the Coalition is lauded for creating a “sensible” migration policy, even as it is unable to reconcile what is considered the two biggest frictions – the economy with the cuts.

So the Coalition has “done its homework”, according to many in the mainstream, in creating this policy – even as it’s reported, in the very next breath, that the Coalition is still unable to make both business and those who have fallen for the “migration is bad” line happy.

In the mainstream world, this is a win. In fact, journalists are often told that if both sides of politics are angry at you, then you have done your job. 

Less considered is that, just because it falls in the middle of two policies that doesn’t make it good policy. Or indeed, that it solves any issue. Or that the policies it falls between are good policies. 

That is because it’s not about the policy – it’s about winning the day. Or the hour, or just the morning headlines.

Famed late Australian cartoonist Jon Kudelka described it as E3 on his rusted on bingo tea towel – “the centre, all the way over here on the right”.

Photo: The Kudelka Shop

This is how we can have a migration “debate” without considering what is the problem we are actually solving –  is it tangible or just a political narrative issue?

And if it’s just a political narrative that’s using a favourite scapegoat as cover for the actual failures – successive government planning failures and the inconvenient fact that Australia does not have a population plan or any idea of how big a population it can sustain. 

Our migration program is largely demand driven and easily demonised whenever it is politically convenient. 

This does not mean the responses are good policy, or even good for people, but they do tend to be good for politicians. 

What is more revealing about the response to the Coalition’s latest migration brain fart is where it is being placed in the Australian Overton window.

Named for the man who best vocalised the concept, Joseph Overton, the Overton window sets the boundaries for acceptable public political discourse. 

You have what is considered radical for either end of the spectrum at the extremes and then the sensible discourse in the middle.

Australia’s media has made the shift that Labor is at one end of that discourse and One Nation is at the other – which makes anything in the middle, the acceptable centre. 

That the Coalition often apes, or goes further than, One Nation, and that Labor chooses to make deals with the Coalition more often then not to pass legislation is not considered. 

What is the middle is sensible and, therefore, right.

This is not new – it has ever been thus and it’s in all areas of Australian political life. 

The most recent Chief of Army Symposium has the VEEP-approved theme of “hardwired for adaption”, which carries the same intellectual rigour of the oxymoronic “continuity and change”. 

That the window is narrow and set by preconceived ideas doesn’t matter. What matters is what is considered in the centre.

It’s one of the reasons why Australia’s political “debates” are so cooked. And why so many people are taken aback at court decisions made outside public opinion, when they fall in areas often considered “radical” by the mainstream.

The surprise around the High Court ruling in favour of a Hunter Valley residents’ group, which had been fighting to stop an expanded mining project on the basis of its ‘downstream’ emissions (the emissions from when the exported product is burnt) was obvious.

Australians have been told for years that their nation wasn’t responsible for greenhouse gases from its exported fossil fuels. Now the High Court has ruled that planning authorities and governments can’t ignore the emissions further down the chain. 

What has been considered radical is now legal precedent. That won’t change how its covered, but it does show the limits of these conversations and how often facts sit outside of them. 

That’s not a radical observation – just a factual one.