Its landslide in South Australia suggests Labor is building a new political Centre and pushing the divisive politics of grievance to the fringes, writes Michael Thorn.
Since the late 18th Century, politics has been framed as a contest between Left and the Right. This metaphor derives from the French Revolution, where legislators of the then National Assembly aligned with revolutionary change sat themselves on the left of the hall, and defenders of monarchy and other forms of essential hierarchical tradition sat on the right.
Over time, the seating arrangement of the fledgling first French Republic coalesced into a way of global thinking: politics as a line, an argument and then a counterargument, with a central point acting as a balancing point between each. Left, Right, and a presumed sensible and chewy political Centre, when required.
It is a tidy concept. It is also incredibly misleading — especially these days.
The Left/Right framing carries with it a kind of dialectic promise: that politics is a functional contest between opposing positions, where public life advances and flourishes via this binary clash. But politics rarely behaves that neatly, especially these days.
In practice, the model often disguises far messier realities of operation — fragmentation, drift, managerialism, spectacle and system stress. That is especially obvious in an era of serial economic crises, where an old confidence in stable political coordination has been steadily eroded this century.
Locally, South Australia is the latest confirmation of this trajectory. Last weekend, Labor won the SA election comfortably, the Liberals suffering a dramatic collapse, and One Nation surging into territory that used to belong to the mainstream Australian Right. Late polling was pointing to this, further polling indicating a similar emerging pattern at a Federal level.
This is not just an electoral swing though. It is a structural shift in political terrain.
To be clear, this is not an attempt to prosecute a new grand theory, nor to push a remastered "Third Way", or wave the flag for Albo, Gough Whitlam, Kevin '07, or some other revived Labor catechism. The point is simpler: the terrain is shifting, and the old Left/Right/nougat Centre story no longer describes it particularly well.
What South Australia suggests is that the Australian Labor Party is no longer merely competing for the Centre. It is increasingly defining it.
The political Centre is not neutral. It is not simply a positive midpoint between Left and Right, and it is certainly not a form of confectionary. It is a political construction: a place where legitimacy is asserted, and where policies are framed as responsible, reasonable and "normal". When a party can consistently occupy that space, it does not just “win the middle”. It sets the terms for public debate.
As Australia’s oldest political party, this has been the ALP’s long-term project. In more recent times, if 1998 can still be considered to be recent, former ALP Leader Mark Latham wrote Civilising Global Capital, pitched as a renewal of Labor’s social democratic program within a globalised economy. And even more recently, Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers has used the language of “values-based capitalism”, arguing for an economy and civil institutions strengthening society and democracy, and not just the markets. Different moments, but similar instinct: capitalism is not to be surpassed, but managed, shaped and stabilised.
The irony is obvious. Latham, himself has since become a creature of the populist Right — what the ABC later called a “former federal Labor leader-turned-One Nation firebrand”. And now even too much of a firebrand for One Nation to hold, it seems.
But the irony proves the point. The old Labor instinct here was never revolutionary; it was protective. It was about building enough social and institutional buffering so Australian politics would not simply rot into base forms of grievance, fragmentation and reaction.
And that helps explain the present. Mainstream political forces are grappling with the pressures of late capitalism — cost-of-living strain, energy volatility, declining trust and a fundamentally insecure political economy. The difference is that Labor’s strategy has been about managing capital in ways presenting as stable and legitimate, even when they are ultimately cautious, beige and often far from transformative. The Liberals, by contrast, have been pulled apart between corporate orthodoxy and populist reaction. One Nation offers sharper emotional clarity. But the ALP provides the promise of enduring governance.
So, what looks like a “new” political Centre is really an older Labor project encountering weaker resistance. But you don’t get a three-winged bird. And people now don’t seem to be confident in the standard two-winged model.
What you get is a reshaping political terrain, where one force defines the centre while its opponents oscillate and wail around it.
The real question now is not whether the old Left/Right map can be restored to some intellectual legitimacy. It is about identifying what is emerging in the new terrain. Is there room here for genuine political alternatives — or are we simply waiting for populism to catch up and the contest persists? The latter is boring.
Michael Thorn is a long-time worker within the community services sector, a unionist, and aspiring activist writer.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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