Politics has become too polarised; politicians no longer know how to compromise. It's a perspective regularly articulated by Canberra insiders — most recently, by Anthony Albanese in an interview with the Guardian. Liberal Senate president Scott Ryan made the same point a few months earlier, bemoaning the inability of leaders to meet each other in the middle.
Indeed, you can find variants of the complaint just about everywhere, with politicians and pundits lamenting the breakdown of civility and decrying the unnecessarily combative atmosphere. But the ubiquity of the argument — that repeated insistence of an unprecedented gulf separating the parties today — becomes quite strange as soon as you think about history.
The ALP emerged from the Great Strikes of the 1890s, disputes that, at various points, seemed likely to be resolved by gunfire. That connection between the Labor Party and the workers' movement meant that when, in 1904, Chris Watson formed the first national labour government anywhere in the world, the Sydney Morning Herald told its readers that he should be immediately removed, later describing his administration as a 'scratch team of untried extremists'.
Throughout most of the 20th century, organised workers identified with Labor and respectable society backed its opponents, a relationship that gave political polarisation (by today's standards, at least) almost institutional stability.
After the Second World War, the prospect of an ongoing Labor administration spurred the creation of a secret rightwing army known as The Association, which came close to deploying during the coal dispute of 1949. Throughout the fifties, Bob Menzies painted Labor as a front for subversion — even, at one point, threatening Labor MPs with legal sanction as he sought to ban the communist party.
The election of Whitlam in 1972 — and his dismissal in 1975 — split the nation between those who saw Labor as conducting long-overdue reforms and those for whom Gough represented a crazed socialist parvenu, rightly undone by the Queen's loyal representative.
Bob Hawke's victory in 1983 on a platform of social harmony — and his subsequent embrace of policies we'd now call neoliberal — played an important part in destroying the perceived distinction between Labor and Liberal. Nevertheless, the ongoing significance of the trade unions, even under the Accord, maintained a level of polarisation between the parties. You only have to think of the 2009 election, in which the anti-Workchoices mobilisation known as Your Rights at Work helped bring down John Howard and