Paris attacks: progressives’ threadbare philosophy torn apart

Even before the carnage in Paris, the quest for a binding, universal agreement on climate change had become irrelevant to all but a tiny few.

Malcolm Turnbull’s attendance at the Paris climate change conference next month will be a matter of supreme indifference to most Australians since the popular panic is over.

In the aftermath of the Copenhagen summit, the environment was second only to the economy in a poll of issues that most concerned voters, conducted for the 2010 Scanlon Social Cohesion Survey.

This year it barely scraped into the top five. Only 6.9 per cent think climate change is the biggest problem facing Australia.

The most striking change is the rise in anxiety about national ­security and terrorism.

Last year fewer than one in 100 people considered terrorism the greatest threat to Australia. This year it was one in 10, coming third after the economy and social ­issues.

And the Scanlon poll was conducted before the murder of NSW police accountant Curtis Cheng and the slaughter in Paris. Yesterday’s Newspoll shows concern is growing. A terrorist attack in Australia seems likely, very ­likely or inevitable to 76 per cent of voters.

Yet Newspoll hints at a widening cultural divide on national ­security. Greens voters are much less likely to see terrorism as a threat and are overwhelmingly opposed to committing ground troops to fight Islamic State.

This year’s Scanlon survey shows a marked difference in priorities between Greens voters and the rest. The economy is a second-order issue — only 18 per cent of Greens consider it the most ­important problem facing the country.

The environment, unsurprisingly, tops their list at 29 per cent. Next comes the quality of government (13.9 per cent), poor treatment of asylum-seekers (6.9 per cent) and social issues (5.6 per cent). Terrorism and national ­security fail to make the cut. Greens attitudes serve as a proxy for the world view of a larger progressive cohort of tertiary-edu­cated professionals who occupy influential positions in cultural institutions, the legal profession, the public service and, increasingly, the corporate sector.

Their dominance in the media explains the inordinate concern about racism, sexism, renewable energy, same-sex marriage and other issues that tend to dominate discussion while the rest of us are thinking about something entirely different.

There are two parallel national conversations. And even when they discuss the same topic it is on different terms.

The framing of the debate on the economy betrays the prejudices of the cultural insiders. Fiscal management is about revenue, not spending, and can be easily fixed by taxing Google and the superannuation savings of the rich, and so on. Any thought that national ­security may bring the two conversations together has been dispelled in the past 12 months. Within hours of the start of the Lindt cafe siege last December reporters and commentators offered two very different interpretations.

The black flags with Arabic text and the religious affiliation of the gunman strongly suggested this was Islamist-inspired terrorism.

Yet more than 30 hours after the siege began, ABC PM presenter David Mark was still agonising about something that seemed ­obvious.

“What are we to call this?” he pondered. “Was this an act of terrorism or was this just the act of a disgruntled and bitter man?”

The reaction to Paris suggests the progressive-leaning media class is still struggling to come to terms with the rise of Islamist ideology and the terrible forces it has released.

Much of the condemnation of the Paris attacks was weighted with cautious qualification; we must not fall into the trap of demonising Islam; beware of selective outrage; the West cannot dismiss its own guilt.

The timing of the Grand Mufti’s diagnosis of the causes of radicalisation — racism, Islamophobia, foreign policy and military intervention — may have been clumsy, but he was expressing a common view within the media and political class. Four years ago, for example, then attorney-general, Labor’s Robert McClelland, claimed “a range of personal experiences … make young people more vulnerable to extremist messages, for example: discrimination, prejudice and marginalisation, ­social isolation, and worries about employment and educational ­opportunities”.

The London Independent’s correspondent Victoria Richards ­appeared less concerned about the Grand Mufti’s statement than its coverage in The Daily Telegraph, which adopted the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” triptych. “It’s considered extremely poor taste to depict anyone of Asian, ­African or Middle Eastern origin in poses usually reserved for monkeys,” Richards lectured. “People have duly taken to Twitter to brand the image ‘alienating’, ‘irresponsible’ and even tantamount to ‘inciting terrorism’.”

Clearly the nation is not of one mind, making the challenge of responding to the Islamist threat considerably harder.

One side longs for a tough and uncompromising response in word and deed; the other demands equivocation and soul-searching. One side wants us to go to war; the other urges us to ponder the root causes of Islamism before we leap in to fight it.

Like so much else in today’s polarised, morally charged political debate, the two positions cannot be reconciled. A leader who tries to straddle both sides of the philosophical fault line is on a hiding to nothing. Sooner rather than later, leaders must decide which side of history they are on.

The tragedy in Paris has made that decision much easier. The progressive narrative is looking more threadbare by the day.

Barely a year ago the progres­sive commentariat was convinced Tony Abbott’s government was manipulating the terrorist threat for its own political gain. The ABC’s Jonathan Green accused Abbott of a strategy “not that far removed from the original tactic of the likes of the Islamic State: using fear to overwhelm your enemies and cement the loyalty of your friends”.

Green’s hyperbole looks ridiculous. Abbott’s early recognition of the Islamist threat appears ­prudent.

Some have speculated that the ascendancy of Turnbull will lead to a change in direction on nat­ional security by the Coalition government.

Once again, they are badly misreading the times.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.