Federal Election 2022 - Australia Votes

French President Emmanuel Macron debated the contender for his job, Marine Le Pen, on French television this week. For three hours.

There were many matters of substance to discuss: significantly at an international level, the future role of France within the European Union at the very time when the EU's potential role as a major security bloc — as opposed to an economic one — has been revived, and is being debated, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

There were questions too about the links to Russia, and specifically Vladimir Putin, of the far-right wing Le Pen (who has significantly softened her public positions to become a more acceptable candidate for the nation's top job).

There was lots more domestic discussion which Australians would recognise: cost of living pressures, healthcare, pensions, COVID, taxes, immigration and climate change.

Australians would have also recognised how the debate was fought and assessed in terms of what it told voters about the personalities of the two leaders.

Three hours! That is hard core for even the greatest of Australian political junkies.

But there were significant policy differences to discuss for the Republic by the two rivals. And at a such a critical moment in European history, there are significant ramifications for France — and the world, really — in the outcome of Sunday's presidential election.

By contrast, it is hard not to wonder what on earth our leaders would talk about amongst themselves for three hours when, in the interests of winning the election, their policies contain barely a ripple of easily identifiable ideological or practical difference.

Despite the frenzied reduction of so much political commentary and social media engagements to descriptions of "lefties" and "right wing nut jobs", it's pretty hard to see any real distinction between our major parties these days.

Just over 10 years ago, an emotional Anthony Albanese called a Saturday press conference to declare that he would be voting against his prime minister, Julia Gillard, in what was to prove an unsuccessful challenge by Kevin Rudd.

His vote, he said, was a final act of dissent from the way Rudd had been torn down by forces within Labor in 2010. "Labor is the party of fairness," Albanese said. "It was not fair. It was wrong."

And now, in 2012, he had told Gillard what he was going to do and why, and offered his resignation as Leader of the House.

Watching his party tear itself to pieces over leadership was a cause of great distress to Albanese, he said.

"I like fighting Tories," he said. "That's what I do. That's what I do."

We talk often of the disappearing differences between the major political parties. But maybe not so much about the disappearing political tribes. There's lots of talk about factions and branch stacking and machine operators. But not so much about the people who identify with either major party.

The internal fissure created in the NSW Liberal Party — first over pre-selections and then over the PM's selection of Katherine Deves in Warringah — has a feeling of death throes of a political idea about it.

Liberals will tell you they no longer recognise their party in what has been happening in NSW. Equally, a Labor Party built on workplaces and unions and an idea feels like it has long disappeared.

Indeed, it is perplexing when people of either political persuasion say to you, "I have always voted Liberal" or "I have always voted Labor", when neither party extols or represents the ideas they championed 40, 30, 20 or even 10 years ago.

It's not exactly clear whether there are any ideas of substance either side feels like fighting for.

Both sides want to capture some nondescript centre. The Liberals feel the breeze at the margin from populists and agrarian socialists, while Labor doesn't want to be seen to be not just "green", but not "left" (whatever that means in this day and age).

In the absence of substantive policy debates, we see dog whistling about transgender people in sports, as a modern version of John Howard's claims of the 1980s and 1990s about how people resented "political correctness".

In Howard's era, the political correctness was often about race and immigration. That's harder these days when you are chasing the multicultural vote. And instead, we now face a conversation about a confected gender issue which the PM says reflects the fact that "a lot of Australians" feel they have to "walk around on eggshells" in the office or their community and "feel that they just can't, you know, be themselves".

Solomon Islands, meanwhile, has become a proxy for some defence machismo.

By Friday, the government was attempting to use the island state's decision to sign a security pact with China to suggest a divide with Labor on China: that is, Labor is soft on China while the Coalition shows a machismo, and effective deterrence stance, towards it.

This was supposed to neatly sidestep the question of how, given said machismo, Australia is confronting the spectre of China establishing a military presence just 2,000 kilometres away from our east coast.

Asked on Friday what he would do, if he was re-elected, to prevent China "getting a stranglehold in our region", the PM replied: "I'm going to keep doing what we are doing."

Apparently, that has been working as well as can be expected given China isn't a liberal democracy, and something about how it's wrong to think Australia could have stopped this.

Questions about when we first "knew" about this deal are a bit off the pace. You can be confident we eavesdrop on most of what is going on in Solomon Islands, and have done for years, so the question really is just why our response — not just in the past few months but the past couple of years — has been so ineffective.

Yes, the internal politics in Solomon Islands are complicated. Yes, it is a sovereign nation. But why is that not just the Americans, but now the Japanese, believe it is important to send very high-level delegations to Honiara but we don't?

How socially progressive or conservative are you? Find out which side of the political spectrum you stand on.

In the meantime, it is just election fodder being used to try to deflect attention from the government and on to the Labor Party. No wonder independent candidates with a few specific policy issues on their agenda can make a mark.

In such times, perhaps the most interesting thing to emerge from our own leaders debate this week wasn't what leaders said, but what a room full of uncommitted voters were asking about.

They didn't want to know about trans people in sports or, for that matter, China or the Solomon Islands. They wanted to know what the two parties were doing about housing affordability, and nurses in aged care, and the NDIS, and electric batteries and vehicles, and what plans there were for dealing with disasters, and funding recovery from them, in the future.

In other words, they just wanted governments to do things. And to do them competently.

Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.

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