Trying to burst green-left bubble

As you peruse these words spare a thought for me, off on a perilous mission.

The real lesson of Scott Morrison’s election was how badly out of touch much of the media was with the public. Picture Kym Smith

As you peruse these words, dear reader, spare a thought for me, off on a perilous and selfless mission this very day to burst the Canberra bubble from within. Speaking at the Canberra Writers Festival I will be surrounded by a plethora of pundits, mostly bubble deniers, determined to correct the error of my ways.

A thousand metres above the suburbs, a million miles from their concerns, the rarefied preoccupations of the political/media class are bound to dominate — climate gestures, open borders, UN edicts and a general loathing for all things and players conservative. Scouring the festival program for moral support is a deflating task, plenty of familiar names and faces but nary a non-loather of conservatives among them.

It will be a fascinating exercise, entering the bubble, to see what they have learned. The political/media class all seemed to think Malcolm Turnbull was unassailable when all of last year the national energy guarantee and his self-imposed Newspoll albatross had him under threat. And when Scott Morrison assumed the leadership a year ago today, they wrote off the Coalition.

Why did they get it so wrong? Have they learned anything from a series of other collective misjudgments (overestimating Kevin Rudd, underestimating Tony Abbott, misjudging border protection, misjudging climate policy, underestimating Donald Trump and dismissing Brexit)?

If you are interested in the bubble effect and whether the nation’s capital can be out of touch with the mainstream, the Canberra Writers Festival program is not a bad starting point. Understandably, there is a heavy loading of political writers and commentators.

There are a handful of professionally objective centrists, such as David Speers and Chris Uhlmann. There are also a couple who might identify as anti-conservative, small-L liberals, such as my colleagues on this paper Peter van Onselen and Niki Savva.

Most of the rest are various shades of left — green left, hard left, soft left and so on. Many would dismiss as outdated what they would call the old paradigm of left versus right (a sure sign they are green left).

There are articulate polemicists such as David Marr, angry semi-retired conservative-bashers such as Paul Bongiorno, sanctimonious feminist warriors such as Jane Caro, jokey republicans such as Peter FitzSimons and garden variety green-left pontificators such as Katharine Murphy. Some, you will agree, are brilliant and worthy advocates; others will grate on you.

We all have our preferences. While I tend to spar with some, avoid others, know a bunch of them to be lovely people and consider still others as mates, their individual qualities are not the point.

What matters when it comes to the national debate is the sameness, the lack of diversity in ideologies and world views across this long list of contributors. Whether it is Laura Tingle, George Megalogenis, Emma Alberici, Malcolm Farr, Paul Daley, Karen Middleton or Sally Rugg, who will be making the argument in favour of cheaper power bills over climate gestures, or backing secure borders over UN appeasement, or advocating lower taxes rather than expansive government programs?

Who will argue that successive election results demonstrate the political/media class is obsessed with futile climate action in a way the electorate simply is not?

Who will suggest that mainstream Australians, including immigrants and their children, have a better understanding of the need for integrity in our immigration system than the political/media class?

If we were to be generous, we might assume the festival’s list of political speakers represents the views of the broad left, covering up to 48 per cent of the population if we use the two-party-preferred vote as a guide (in reality it probably speaks for a narrower cohort of green-left Guardian Australia readers and ABC stalwarts). Yet this is the prevailing tone of the program.

The other cohort of the electorate, the majority, those who favour the right of centre and were re-energised by a return to more conservative political values under Morrison, they seem to be reflected in the conversation by, well, by me — unless I’ve missed another. It is not easy to precisely delineate the political mainstream. But it certainly can’t be found in the spectrum between Caro and FitzSimons, or Megalogenis and Tingle. The mainstream, as we saw in May, is suburban and regional, aspirational and self-reliant, and resistant to the forces of the zeitgeist.

No doubt the festival program will prove very popular (except, perhaps, for my spots). This is the nation’s capital, after all, and it is a public service, university and media city that tends to have an outlook its residents would call progressive.

Just as I am not deriding the commentators, this is not a matter of bashing Canberra. Places have their political characters; the electoral maps tells us this. Wealthy areas are blue, poorer areas are red; Queensland lurches to the right, the mendicant states usually lean towards Labor; inner cities vote for green-left gestures and the suburbs vote for aspirational promises.

The bubble effect doesn’t harm those who live inside it unless it impairs their decisions or analysis. It matters only if it isolates commentators and practitioners from reality — and that seems to have been borne out.

Perhaps the critical question to this list of speakers must be whether they got the federal election wrong. Did they write off the Coalition in August last year, anytime afterwards, and on the eve of the election did they give Morrison any chance of winning? If they got the election wrong then the bubble effect must have been part of the problem.

As a right-of-centre commentator it always feels as if the ACT is enemy territory, even when the Coalition is in power. (It may feel especially bracing today after this column.) This year we are repeating an event where I discuss and debate national issues with my cousin, former Sydney Morning Herald national affairs editor and now Australian National University senior fellow Mark Kenny.

Mark is experienced, entertaining and erudite, and we get on well. But the point of the show is that we tend to see the world from differing perspectives (except for our allegiance to the Adelaide Crows). Dubbed Good Kenny/Bad Kenny it riffs off nicknames some press gallery journalists used for us back in the day and, if the audience at Old Parliament House last year was any guide, there isn’t much doubt who is the bad Kenny.

But robust and respectful disagreement from different perspectives should be what political debate is often about. It is how we test ideas and find common ground. And it is how we remain in touch with the views and values of others.

Much has been said and written about poor polling in the wake of the election, which is a bit of a cop-out given how close all the polls had it. The real lesson was how badly out of touch much of the media was with their audiences — with the public. Who in the vast empires of public broadcasting or the many arms of Nine Entertainment, other than Macquarie Radio, provided analysis that said the Coalition could or should win the election?

Writers festivals across the country, usually reliant on government funding, routinely provide unrepresentative programs where the green left dominates and the mainstream is ignored or demonised. There is a virtuous feedback loop of publicly funded promotion and affirmation for the green-left network.

We don’t pay our taxes for that and it doesn’t serve us well. Wouldn’t the programs be more entertaining and illuminating with a little more disagreement?

Canberra Writers Festival director Paul Donohoe says the program is “aimed squarely at our audience’s interests” under the theme Power, Politics and Passion. Sure, they like politics. And sure, their politics will lean largely to the green left.

But don’t they want to hear their ideas challenged? Don’t they want to try to understand why their compatriots chose to stick with a Coalition government rather than switch to Labor?

There is great resistance to the bubble terminology in Canberra, of course, which might tend to confirm its existence. This weekend they will sell books, feed egos, demonise conservatives and signal their virtue on climate, refugees, anti-Trumpism and redis­tributive economics. They will fall about the place agreeing with each other. But unless they are prepared to burst that bubble, have their views challenged, understand the priorities of the suburbs and the regions, and add to their insider knowledge, they won’t change their assessments of the national and global debates.

In which case they may get the next election wrong, too.