What does it mean to be populist? Labor has perhaps surprisingly set the economic terms of the election, and it is evident in some components of the Coalition budget released this week.
It belies the initial response from the federal government and some pundits, which has been to bill the Shorten agenda as populism.
It's an interesting charge. An April poll found that a majority of voters regard Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull as out of touch with ordinary people. Reinforcing that contrast — Labor as in touch with the masses — would only put the Liberals at a disadvantage.
The reality of course is that no two popular things are alike. The cruel components of our immigration detention system are there because most Australians want them there, both parties would argue. Yet they have put off legalising same-sex marriage even though it has significant support, poll after poll.
Such inconsistency suggests that other things are at play. Political cowardice, perhaps, or the sort of intellectual timidity that takes dissent as a prompt for moral detours.
In democracies, public sentiment is meant to be taken seriously. Describing something as populist is a refusal to engage with the sentiment, including its source and complications, usually because we find it so disagreeable.
The subtext is: people are wrong about the things they care about. They are not being rational or realistic. It is a brave thing to say these days about support for a royal commission into banks, softening public attitudes toward detention-bound children, or fait accompli around climate change responses.
The problem with dismissing policy as populist is that the whole point of elections is to be popular. But it also keeps discourse superficial and polarised — policies reduced to public mood rings, which change colour according to temperature.
"People don't tend to make up their anxieties. For those on the bottom rung, the lack of change keeps memory long. They see collusion everywhere against them."
It keeps politicians from engaging honestly with other imperatives; such as whether unpopular decisions carry much greater legal and ethical weight than the alternative. What damage could have been averted, for example, if our leaders had chosen 15 years ago to respond to the material insecurities that keep Australians hostile toward asylum seekers? What if they had dug deeper, reached higher? Justin Trudeau, in the way he has reset Canadian immigration policy, suggests that they could have.
In other words, populism without leadership is just opportunism,