Didn't I read somewhere that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel?

Left-handed kisses from the centrist-in-chief

And all your left-handed kisses
Were just prelude to another
Prelude to your backhanded love song, baby

You got me writing love songs

—Andrew Bird (with Fiona Apple)

Intro, verse, chorus, verse

Even allowing for the fact—universally acknowledged—that Anthony Albanese is the greatest political mind of his generation, I was a bit surprised to read that our recently reinstalled uber PM has a new slogan. Since when do we start electoral terms with catchphrases?

Cover to Vernon Lee’s The Ballet of the Nations (1915), illustrated by Maxwell Armfield — Source.

But there he was with Nine Media enunciating his new two-word slogan, “patriotic progressivism”. It’s the sort of thing that if Scott Morrison had said it—and boy, does it sound Morrisonesque—Labor supporters would cough up a lung scoffing at it. Let’s be honest.

I have nothing against being patriotic. The trouble is, the referent for the word is in the eye of the beholder, and thus anyone who deploys it in the political sphere is not appealing to some clearly established and agreed-upon concept but is setting out to constrain the definition within their own parameters. We need to be immediately suspicious.¹

When you then connect the concept of patriotism to the equally squishy concept of progressivism, you are doing the opposite of clarification.

Anyway, here is the PM trying to define something:

“We had progressive patriotism,” Albanese said of the Labor campaign message.

“We spoke about doing things the Australian way, not looking towards any other method or ideology from overseas.

“At a time where there’s conflict in the world, where people are often divided on the basis of race or religion, here in Australia, we can be a microcosm for the world.

“That says that we’re enriched by our diversity, that we have respect for people of different faith, that we try to bring people together, that we don’t bring turmoil overseas and play out that conflict here, either, and that’s really important.

“This is a project, if you like, that’s not just about strengthening Australia, but also being a symbol for the globe in how humanity can move forward.”

I don’t have a problem with any of this, really, and I think there is some value in setting out a national ethos in this vein, even if it is a bit bland. It is the kind of “unity in diversity” theme we’ve all heard before, but which is the necessary governing thought of a diverse nation. It is infinitely preferable to the divide-and-denigrate approach taken by Peter Dutton and the clown car of a party he used to lead.

But the commitment has be real, honoured in the most difficult corners of the national project, and not just injected as a narcotic when things get painful. The Albanese Government’s weak stand on the genocide in Gaza and their willingness to promote Israeli Government propaganda, to the extent of silencing and denigrating voices of opposition, is the sine qua non of everything wrong with a rhetoric of diversity that can’t actually deal with the diversity it seeks to celebrate.

A Palestinian girl looks at an image of herself from before the attacks on Gaza began. (Source)

As Ed Husic said forlornly when he was dumped from Cabinet, “You can’t celebrate diversity and then expect it to sit in the corner silent.”

Turns out, you can.

Labor’s embrace of AUKUS is another example of how “patriotic progressivism” can ignore criticism when it wants. Not only does the submarine defence project represent an immense allocation of resources that we-the-people were never really consulted on, representing a huge opportunity cost for progressive policy making, it ties us to a US Administration that is corrupt, dangerous, and openly fascist.

That doesn’t seem particularly patriotic or progressive to me.

Third verse

And then we were delivered the inevitable statement of contemporary neoliberalism, what we might call now, neolaborism. It is a further attempt at conflation, this time of what Labor once was with what it has become. The prime minister said:

“We see there is a role for the state in improving people’s lives, but we also very much believe in markets, and that markets are a democratic mechanism as well. I believe in the private sector being the key driver of growth, but the public sector should step in where there is market failure.”

This is the alchemy by which gold is turned into lead, the transformation of actual social democracy into “progressivism”. If Labor really believed the public sector should step in in cases of market failure, their government would be building houses right now. How much more failed can a market get than the Australian housing market?

If they believed in government intervention in failed markets, they would be nationalising our fossil fuel markets and not subsidising them.

But they don’t. What they actually believe in—their revealed preference over their stated preference—is a market-based economy and any progressivism they represent has to be shaped around that.

Labor’s promise to prioritise productivity in this term is another example. Pursued within the sort of neolaborist framework Albanese is outlining—the mythical idea that markets are “a democratic mechanism”—means that all they are likely to do is increase inequality. Absent strong countermeasures—serious tax reform, wage growth, and other mechanisms of redistribution—the productivity promise is an inadequate downpayment on actual progressivism, allowing all gains to go to company bottom lines rather than to the workers who achieved them.²

Middle eight

With his new slogan, Albanese is trying to define a new centre in our politics, but the concept of a political centre is always a sleight of hand. Since the 1980s, Australia’s political culture has shifted relentlessly to the right and the “centre” has inevitably shifted with it. Labor has been the vehicle of that.

But it actually is even more problematic than this, largely because of the changed media environment.

If we think of politics as mediated—that is, that our understanding of it is determined through the media we consume—then the concept of “a” centre is meaningless. At best there are nodes across an immense network and their influence grows and shrinks according to the attention that is paid to them. And if there is no centre, there is no centrism, except as the shakiest construct of those who still seek to impose their own views as the common view.

This is why we need to stop calling the mainstream media mainstream and maybe go with something like legacy. The so-called mainstream is like everyone else: in the words of the Australia Institute, bellowing from the sidelines. The media centre has not held and media anarchy has been loosed upon the earth.

Politics, then, is suffering the same fate as, say, the music industry. The idea that a band like The Beatles or an individual like Frank Sinatra could be so dominant, so ubiquitous, that even people who didn’t care about them knew their songs and were steeped in their mythologies is a thing of the past. Such ubiquity was the result of a centralised music business and a centralised media built around radio airplay and genuinely mass television like the Ed Sullivan show.

Now, a billion-dollar artist like Taylor Swift can have the success she has had while a significant majority of people still can’t hum a single tune or wouldn’t know who her boyfriend was. Is. Whatever. I used to do charts for the local radio stations in Canberra because I was buyer for the biggest music shop in town, and I can tell you those charts were almost entirely based on the figures our store provided (and we weren’t beyond manipulating them to our advantage: boosting a single because we were stuck with stock, in order to game its chart position in the hope of shifting extra copies). I’m sure the same was true for every other jurisdiction in the country, if not the world.

Such charts are now meaningless and that sort of central control is dispersed across a billion billion streams. Ask yourself if you’ve heard of Morgan Wallen.

What matters in the contemporary, decentralised media space is attention, and by the time of the 2025 election campaign, Peter Dutton had ours. The trouble is, he turned out to be the ultimate anti-product and capturing all that attention did him more harm than good.

Streem Data provided a chart the other day that tied seats in the current parliament to media coverage and came up with a result that in its way illustrates how specific media coverage is no longer influential or particularly tied to political outcomes. The inverse may even be true.

Voters—in ways that are genuinely mysterious, despite what any politico tells you—came to their own decisions about the election, bound as they were by preferential and compulsory voting. In a modern media sense, the cut-through candidate was Peter Dutton, and the more people saw of him, the less they liked him, and it blotted out every other metric.

The audience is king and only they will tell you what’s what.

Dutton was an example of what Redbridge analyst, Alex Fein calls the “informational aggregate”: Whereas no single media outlet can affect voter intentions on an issue-by-issue basis, some matters do gain cross-media ballast and manage to “cut through”.

Dutton was that issue writ large in 2025.

All the mainstream coverage did was feed through into a network effect across all media and it delivered the monster Dutton as something to be avoided at all costs. And the audience—the voters—did the rest.

I don’t mean to suggest that this development is a bad thing, but it is a change. It is only a bad thing when we insist on living in the old paradigm or keep trying to impose the old paradigm on the new. And in a sense, that’s what Albanese is trying to do with “patriotic progressivism”. It is an old-media approach, less a solution than an emulsion that will separate out into its constituent components the moment you stop agitating.

My point—in this context of national slogans—is that the communication and information environment in which we all operate no longer allows us to paint out the bits that don’t quite fit. Dissenters and the others marginalised within the big picture no longer just disappear into the background impasto, smoothed over with the palate blade of a mainstream media, reduced to mere texture in the bigger picture.

The media environment allows even the marginalised their own framing, their own self-portraits, and they hang in the same gallery, even if it is a room at the back away from the main entrance.

“Patriotic progressivism” is just another palate blade deployed to smooth things over, but you can’t use a palate blade on an electronic screen. Eventually, you have to deal with the losers in the housing market. You have to deal with Gaza. You have to deal with inequality.

You have to deal.

Final versus, chorus and outro

Patriotic progressivism, then, is just old-fashioned centrism, the eternal attempt to rhetorically square social and political circles that can’t actually be squared. All governments have to deal with such matters, but it is much harder to do in the communication environment within which all now operate. It also points to the basic problem of a right-of-centre government, the sort of neolaborist government that Albanese leads—one that believes that markets are democratic ffs—trying to pass itself off as left-of-centre by deploying the term progressivism.

Albanese’s use of these terms, individually and in tandem, bears out what I was saying the other day about the election outcome, that in many ways it represents the triumph of the neoliberal strategy Hawke and Keating put in train back in the 1980s. The clearest statement of that was Albanese comment in the same interview that “our destiny [is] to try to be the natural party of government.”

Destiny? Seriously?

Heads up: there is no “natural party of government” in a progressive, patriotic nation of genuine diversity. No single party can be a perpetual vehicle for such representation. Democracy isn’t about naturalising a single party but of allowing the people to govern themselves as they see fit with different vehicles at different times.

This is especially true in Australia today, where, despite Labor’s whopping seats-majority in the new parliament, the electorate still showed a growing trend away from parties more generally. Independents came within fractions of a percent in around a dozen seats, while we had the largest number of three-cornered contests ever. The Greens gained the balance of power in the Senate, despite losing seats in the House. The primary vote for independents and minor parties exceeded the primary vote of the Liberal-National Party Coalition, a coalition the “mainstream” media still insist on calling a “major” party.

Labor speaking of being the “natural party of government”, one steeped in “patriotic progressivism”, is nothing more than an old-politics, old-media attempt to maintain a status quo that no longer reflects the society it seeks to represent and that a growing number of people just don’t want.

Left-handed kisses from the centrist-in-chief can’t hide that fact.

1. The whole point of Samuel Johnson’s original comment—from which I took the title of this piece—was a critique of disingenuous patriotic appeals rather than a complete rejection of national pride.

2. Andrew Leigh is at least acknowledging the problem, so kudos.