Among the many conceits of political discourse are the words used to explain outcomes as if they are temporary aberrations.

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Familiar terms like "pendulum", "two-party preferred" and "swing", capture the drama of election night, but they also carry within them an underlying sense of continuity.

The electoral cycle is a self-reinforcing concept in which new phenomena are shoe-horned into a longer-run pattern that emphasises stability.

Could the pendulum swing too far to the right, or could shrillness and volatility become the norm? It is never asked.

We assume instead that Australian voters coalesce in the rational middle ground, and will return there after this little tantrum.

But what if the longer-term pattern has already ended? Would we know what to look for and how to weigh the evidence in real time? Or would we stay trapped in the arrogant assumption that our "two-party system" in which the major parties call themselves "institutions", will always prevail?

The idea that normal transmission will be resumed shortly is seductive, yet modern Australian history has many examples of political parties which burned bright for a while but then just burned out.

Recall the United Australia Party, or more recently the hyper-rationalist Australian Democrats which went from influential to unsubstantial.

The major parties are barely major if measured in first-preference vote-share.

There is a palpable sense that Australia might be on the cusp of a serious political fracture.

The starkest signs are showing up most conclusively on the political right - accelerated, bizarrely, by the dogmatic refusal of the Liberal Party to embrace what its educated urban base wants: fiscal discipline balanced by enlightened social and environmental liberalism.

The result of this stubbornness has been disastrous. Basically, the people who might once have constituted the progressive wing of John Howard's "broad church" now take their communion outside the party but, crucially, inside the Parliament. Worse, they do so in the blue-ribbon sinecures of former Liberal PMs and treasurers.

I was (re)struck by the gravity of this when reading a piece by the academic Gwenda Tavan.

Writing as part of a commendable series in The Conversation about PMs and their defining policies, Tavan explained that Malcolm Fraser had "shared [Gough] Whitlam's belief that cultural pluralism was an asset to be fostered in the pursuit of social cohesion and equity".

Fraser, she observed, was "an economic dry and a social liberal who supported mass immigration".

My first thought? The Liberal Party of 2026 has drifted an awful long way from the show that made such a person its leader.

But so, too, have the possibilities of political bipartisanship, along with a large chunk of an increasingly polarised electorate.

This occasioned a second realisation. Simply by posting Tavan's essay on ex-Twitter, it became clear that anything "perceived" as supportive of immigration and multiculturalism is freshly incendiary.

Partly, this is a symptom of a politically deracinated voter who is both unfamiliar with the concept of alternative views and utterly hostile to them. Such a reader/viewer cannot separate the hosting of a debate, from the act of taking sides. Simply, the former is the latter.

Goodbye journalism, and goodbye rational pluralism with it.

Now, let's be clear. Anxiety about foreign hordes is nothing new, even in Australia, a land colonised by, well, foreign hordes.

This debate, however, has become newly salient and electorally supercharged.

This is not to imply that Fraser's stand in the 1970s took no political courage. On the contrary, his policy goals were first articulated from the relative weakness of opposition and in the long shadow of the racist White Australia Policy. That was the kind of Australia it was.

Even more impressive, Fraser's progressive stance flew straight into an economic storm significantly more severe than our current one.

As the UNSW economist David Lee wrote of the period: "Australia, along with most other western countries, experienced 'stagflation', a period of low growth, high unemployment and inflation.

"Fuel prices jumped by 25 per cent and inflation peaked at nearly 18 per cent. Later in the decade, the rate of inflation still hovered over 8 per cent. At the same time, the rate of unemployment, about 2 per cent in the early 1970s, doubled by the mid-1970s and peaked at over 10 per cent in the early 1980s."

It was a tough time to be generous - or perhaps even principled.

Yet through a level of consensus across the main parties, Australia's migration intake remained solid and largely uncontroversial.

It is now immigration itself - branded "mass migration" by its vocal critics - that is being targeted across growing sections of the electorate. Migrants are being blamed directly for declining living standards, congestion, a housing crisis, and cracks in our social cohesion.

Donald Trump's war of choice against Iran has made this worse, but the underlying conditions for voter disenchantment long predate the American's reckless miscalculations.

This political environment explains the burgeoning popularity of a long-dormant grievance party, One Nation. And its rise, in turn, explains why the Liberal Party and its junior coalition partner, the Nationals, are madly chasing votes being lost over immigration.

How does this end for the Liberal Party and indeed for our progressive liberal democracy? Perhaps it already has.

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There is a palpable sense that we might be on the cusp of a serious political fracture

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