In the Middle of Nowhere

How centrism lost its purpose and opened the door to the extremes.

Photo by Gerda

There’s a tautness running through public life right now, a brooding stillness before something breaks, the hum of restraint threaded through conversation, policy, and press alike.

Too many have stopped believing their voice matters; disagreement feels futile, expression careful, as the middle strains to hold. In Australia, the conversation narrows as the media consolidates and the middle ground hardens into habit. Two companies, News Corp Australia and Nine Entertainment, shape most of what we read, hear, and see. Politics hums at their frequency; cautious, self‑protective, afraid of risk; it bends to appease the landscape shaped by these giants and, in reaction, shrinks toward the centre in all its timidity. It leaves a politcal landscape wide-open for exploitation from the extremities.

Our national broadcaster cowers in the bluster of these forces too.

We once prided ourselves on a healthy scepticism, on dissent as a kind of civic muscle that kept power in check and each of us honest. But that scepticism hasn’t faded; it’s mutated. What was once a guardrail against arrogance has become a weapon sharpened by anger and mistrust. Conspiracy and suspicion have filled the space where dialogue used to live, turning argument into accusation. Politics from the centre seems ill‑equipped to meet this sharper, more menacing form of doubt; it offers reason to those who no longer believe in reason, and calm to those who see calm as cowardice.

Abroad, the warnings are clear enough. In the United States, democracy strains under the weight of its own divisions. The assault on truth has become an assault on the idea of common purpose itself. Voting rights are being eroded; science and medicine dismissed as ideology; journalists branded as enemies. Independent media is under siege, while the loudest platforms amplify outrage and grievance. The civic space shrinks, dissent is treated as disloyalty, and satire, once democracy’s pressure valve, has become an act of defiance, the last line of opposition. When truth becomes conditional, democracy becomes fragile; and when those who question are made to disappear, the centre begins to hollow from within.

In the aftermath of crisis, whether attacks on democracy, the acts of white supremacists, or the delusions of “Sovereign Citizens”, the columns arrive thick with symmetry and smugness. Each side weighed, each outrage neatly offset.

The centrist’s, usually conservatives that have somehow found themselves with a progressive audience descence upon us where instinct for balance has curdled into theatre, a ritual of superiority masquerading as wisdom. Now more than ever, two‑sideism serves no one; it flatters the writer while failing the reader, offering the illusion of fairness in place of moral clarity. The faux‑centrist voice comforts only itself, perched above the wreckage, mistaking commentary for conscience and veiled neutrality for truth.

But the story of centrism is not just political or for the chattering classes, it cuts right though society. Apathy grows when people can no longer see themselves reflected in their own democracy—when the faces of leadership, the language of institutions, and the rhythms of decision‑making feel distant and unfamiliar. It’s cultural and economic too. A generation priced out of housing, locked into precarious work, and watching opportunity contract, has little reason to believe in the promises of moderation. When life itself becomes unstable, calls for balance sound hollow.

The centre does not erode in mere theory; it erodes in rent increases, insecure shifts, and dreams deferred. Structural inequality feeds cynicism; cynicism breeds apathy; and apathy is the cold but fertile soil in which extremism grows.

Centrism today is less a philosophy than a posture; a cultivated calm that mistakes detachment for wisdom. It smooths over the fractures of public life with talk of balance and decency, as though tone could replace conviction. It asks us to stay reasonable while the ground gives way beneath us. Yet as The Guardian’s reporting on the rise of One Nation reminds us, the middle ground cannot hold if it refuses to stand for something; detachment does not steady democracy, it weakens it.

Across Australia and across the globe, disillusioned voters are drawn to movements that promise certainty, however cruel. One Nation’s surge reflects not only frustration with the major parties but the vacuum left where a sense of belonging once lived. The middle has become a waiting room, not a meeting ground; a place of disillusionment and drift. The institutions that keep us steady, like compulsory voting, become both our protection and our constraint; they anchor us, yet they also dull the appetite for risk. In that vacuum, extremists offer clarity, however false and belonging, however brittle.

Compulsory voting remains one of Australia’s quiet defences against that drift, a civic ritual that insists on participation. It ensures the country is governed from the centre, by the broad consensus of its people. This protects us from the fever of demagogues like a Trump, a Farage, and most of their pale imitators. But it also dulls the edges of ambition. When leadership and commentary are forever calibrated to the middle, vision and risk fall out of the equation.

It is engagement, not apathy, that keeps the centre intact; yet participation alone cannot substitute for imagination. When every citizen must take part, politics belongs to the public, not the fringe—but it also risks settling into a managed calm, a governance of maintenance rather than momentum.

Photo by Kiros Amin

That calm, however, is deceptive. Beneath it, new currents are forming. Australia’s intelligence agencies warn that this drift into violent ideology is no longer theoretical. ASIO’s 2025 threat assessment describes nationalist and racist violent extremism as “mainstreaming” through online spaces and public demonstrations. Ideologically motivated violent extremism now makes up roughly a quarter of its counter‑terrorism caseload; the median age of those under investigation has fallen to fifteen. This is what happens when people, young and not so young, no longer have line of sight to a future they trust, it becomes an invitation to movements that don’t trust anyone or anything only the purity of their own dogma. The fatigue that opened the door to resentment in the United States is stirring here too; when the centre hesitates, the fringes march forward to claim certainty.

A pedestrian government, paired with the Liberal Party’s uncertainty about what it stands for, has left space for Hanson’s movement to double its support. As the centre congratulates itself for its composure, insisting that “both sides” temper their tone, it is blind to the real threat and clears the way for those who thrive on noise. What once passed for fairness now looks like timidity; what was once caution now borders on complicity.

Centrism, which once meant deliberation and care, the weighing of truths in good faith, risks becoming surrender: a polite refusal to confront what is plainly before us. It comforts itself with the illusion that reason alone will prevail, that democracy is self‑healing. How can it be in a post reason era?

Let’s be clear, when it comes to fostering or attacking democracy; there is no centre. You are either for or against. When it comes to racial hatred or cosmopolitan society where people from all backgrounds are given the opportunity to flourish, there is no centre. You’re either for and against. When it come to LGBTIQA+ rights, you are either for or against. When it comes to genoncide there is no two sides. And yet the center shrieks at the very thought of taking a position on genocide!! This is not the time to shriek.

You either believe in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or you don’t. The knowing looks from the centre left and the centre right, don’t cut it in 2025. Tokenism dosesn’t cut it. We’re at a defining moment. Act accordingly.

In this country, we have a notionally centre‑left government with a commanding majority at a time when democracy and community safety are under threat from the far right. With an abundance of political capital at its disposal, there is an opportunity to set an example for the world, a demonstration that moderation can still lead with purpose and vision, but it requires energy; not just effieceny.

To do so, the government and parties like it, must break free of its own inertia, resist the gravitational pull of caution, and remind the public that democracy, fragile as it may be, is still worth believing in. It must make people feel, once again, that government of the people, by the people and for the people is still worth a punt. Innit?