There is a word that gets used a lot in political commentary right now - realignment - and like most words deployed too frequently, even by me, it is beginning to lose its edge. That would be a mistake. What is happening across western democracies is not a normal cyclical correction. It is not voters punishing an incumbent before resetting. It is something structurally different, and the pace of it is unlike anything the post-war order has produced.

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The last time politics moved this fast, this violently, the 1930s remade the ideological map of the developed world in under a decade. Parties that had governed for generations collapsed. New formations, some democratic, some emphatically not, rose to fill the void.

What connected the leaders who survived and flourished in that moment was not policy sophistication or administrative competence. It was combatancy. The willingness to name an enemy, offer a cause, and fight for it without apology.

We have spent 80 years constructing a political culture that was, in many ways, a deliberate response to that era. The long settled period from 1945 to the COVID-19 pandemic produced institutions designed to smooth edges, build consensus, and reward management over confrontation. It produced a leadership culture that prized the ability to govern from the centre, to absorb competing interests, to project calm. That culture served a purpose. For a long time, it worked.

It is now a liability.

Voters across the democratic world are not, in the main, looking for administrators. They are looking for combatants. Not performers, that distinction matters, but genuine fighters who are visibly willing to absorb hostility in defence of a position, who can prosecute an argument rather than triangulate around it, and who treat politics as something worth fighting over. The managers and the consensus-seekers are being punished not simply because their specific policies are wrong, but because they are seen as the custodians of an economic policy framework that has produced a generation of declining living standards, entrenched asset inequality, and structured financial stress. Their competence is not in question. Their loyalty is and voters have concluded it is not to them.

Within the Australian centre-right, almost nobody has grasped this. The Coalition's default mode remains transactional and managerial, calibrated for an electorate that no longer exists in the proportions that made that approach viable. The party's instinct, when confronted with the rise of One Nation and the structural haemorrhage of its base to harder-edged alternatives, has been to offer policy mimicry rather than authentic contest. That doesn't work. Voters who want combatancy can spot an imitation of it immediately.

There are exceptions. Matt Canavan and Andrew Hastie are both, in different registers, genuine articles. Hastie is prepared to name the economic villains of deindustrialisation, the financialisation of the economy, the managed decline of industrial communities, in a way that most of his colleagues find professionally uncomfortable. Canavan in many ways is similar. Both possess something rare in contemporary centre-right politics, the capacity to hold ground under pressure, to absorb the social cost of being ideologically legible.

In 2026, that quality may be the only thing that matters on the right. One Nation is not winning votes simply because of its policy positions. It is winning them because it offers an emotional register, grievance dignified, enemies named, cause prosecuted, that the Coalition has systematically abandoned. The party that can match that register authentically, rather than simulate it awkwardly, will determine the medium-term shape of the Australian right.

But to analyse this purely as a right-wing phenomenon is to miss half the story, and arguably the more consequential half.

The same forces........

© Canberra Times