Today, in the Sydney Morning Herald appeared a story headlined: Can the Greens muster a left-wing counter to One Nation? This MP thinks so

“Sue Higginson has been a lawyer and an environmental campaigner, and now she wants to lead the Greens in NSW into a new era by launching a populist left-wing alternative to the surging One Nation vote.”

and

“She said the margin of her victory was licence to take the Greens into an election she described as ‘a choice between the billionaire-backed politics of hate and division and the politics of love, hope and justice and our vision to make people’s lives cheaper, fairer and easier’.”

This fulfilled all my worst fears of the consequences of the rise of the equally fundamentalist One Nation.

Neither of these parties and their methodologies is healthy for Australian democracy. Both in their own way represent the end point of liberal democracy – where a superfluity of ‘over tolerance’ leads to a ‘zero tolerance’ reaction.

Both are taking advantage of the ever present dilemma of liberal democracy – wishing to allow all to participate and to express their views – but not being able to be certain at what point some forms of participation step outside liberal democratic norms and which expressions of views are not acceptable in a liberal democratic society.

Both One Nation, or, should I say, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (to be clear, this is an authoritarian structure with a President for Life, no attempt at the niceties of liberal democracy here) and The Greens (who tend to be equally selective in their application of the rights of individuals when it comes to bullying in their own ranks) feed from the same cesspit of disgruntlement, disassociation, cynicism, and a brutal wish to exclude all opinions other than their own. Both regard any opposition as equivalent to heresy. To them, issues, even complex ones, are never shades of grey – they are all binary propositions – you either agree or you disagree. No room for compromise – ‘our way or the highway’, ‘if you are not with us, you are against us’.

There has always been a need to determine a final position on issues in our political system, but, in the past, even acknowledging periods of febrile madness, this has generally been achieved through a process of reasoned discussion with a variety of views being entertained. This has generally been achieved without the need to descend to personal vilification and the total exclusion of all with whom one does not agree. Not any longer.

Social media bears a great deal of responsibility for this but social media is also just reflecting society and the direction in which society is headed. Organisations such as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and The Greens play upon this, to society’s disadvantage. They make an art form of appealing to our basest instincts. Emotion replacing reason. Even their names reflect this. ‘One Nation’. ‘The Greens’. In each case a bagful of issues summed up in just two words which apparently mean everything but actually mean nothing.

Neither party has a terribly comprehensive set of policies and those policies which they do have, once analysed, are generally unworkable in the real world. However, those same ‘policies’ are excellent for exciting emotion and generating social media clicks – which appear to be the principal objectives of both parties. In other words, stirring up trouble to attract attention. All care, zero responsibility.

Neither of these parties should have the capacity to determine government, let alone form it. Both represent an existential threat to the continuance of our hard fought for liberal democracy, itself a fragile experiment in the history of the world.

It is my hope that the majority of the population will eventually see these parties for the empty shells which they are and instead opt for candidates with proven skills, a comprehensive set of well-thought through and achievable policies and who put reason ahead of raw emotion. We cannot let the perpetrators of the Age of Unreason prevail.