And\u00a0in their urgent need to try to understand the factors which have so suddenly changed the course of these deeply entrenched policy\u00a0and philosophical\u00a0norms, political analysts have suddenly been giving a lot of attention to what is known as the Overton Window theory.<\/p>\n
The key point about this theory\u00a0\u2013 developed in the early 1990s by American political scientist Joseph P Overton \u2013 is that it helps explain how, what seemed\u00a0entrenched, accepted policies and ideas, could\u00a0suddenly face challenge and change from what had previously appeared to be\u00a0radical and unacceptable\u00a0alternatives.<\/p>\n
Overton argues that politicians and policy makers are often caught unaware of \u2013 or unwilling to acknowledge \u2013 the effects on community attitudes of social change affecting their lives.<\/p>\n
The first to tune into community discontent with these changes are populists who tap into and exploit and challenge the failure of the \u201celite\u201d to respond to this discontent.<\/p>\n
For politicians and policy makers dedicated to maintaining course on what they had regarded as inviolable fundamentals, the willingness of the community to embrace what had previously seemed\u00a0unacceptable alternatives is a deep\u00a0conundrum. For those who believe that the community is wrong, and that it has to be persuaded to reject the unacceptable extreme, the challenge is to shift the \u201cwindow\u201d\u00a0back\u00a0to the acceptable middle.<\/p>\n
This captures neatly the story of\u00a0Brexit.<\/p>\n
But the Overton Window is moving throughout the democratic world.<\/p>\n
And there is a clear case study to be found in Australia.<\/p>\n
The \u201cWindow\u201d moved nearly two\u00a0decades\u00a0ago in Australia on the issue of immigration and border protection \u2013 and has never moved back.<\/p>\n
In the mid-1990s, an endorsed candidate for the governing, conservative Liberal-National Party coalition was dis-endorsed on the eve of a general election for making anti-immigration\u00a0based\u00a0racist statements. The candidate, Pauline Hanson, subsequently established her own political party, One Nation, which took policy positions to the right of the mainstream.<\/p>\n
One Nation\u00a0was xenophobic,\u00a0opposed Asian immigration to Australia (arguing Australia was being \u201cswamped by Asians\u201d) and\u00a0argued for a return to a nostalgic view of a \u201cwhite Australia\u201d in which Australian industry was protected from imports and \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d was rolled back.<\/p>\n
Significantly, the conservative prime minister at the time, John Howard,\u00a0initially\u00a0declined to confront Hanson\u2019s views, arguing that what she was saying reflected the views of many Australians.<\/p>\n
In doing so, he allowed the Overton Window to shift sharply to the right, a shift that allowed him to adopt hardline policies on border control and refugees when the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq resulted in a sharp rise in the numbers of \u201cboat people\u201d arriving on Australian shores.\u00a0Those harsh policies are still the backbone of Australian border control, despite international condemnation.<\/p>\n
Howard\u2019s conservatives\u00a0\u201charvested\u201d the One Nation vote\u00a0base and the party\u2019s support faded, while Howard went on to a near record four successive terms in office.<\/p>\n
But in the recent Australian election, One Nation had\u00a0a resurgence driven by anti-globalisation sentiment, rejection of the science of global warming, spiced up with a new target identified by Hanson.\u00a0 She\u00a0argued that Australia\u00a0should stop Muslim immigration because it\u00a0was being \u201cswamped by Muslims\u201d, a claim the mainstream political parties reject, both because the facts don\u2019t support One Nation\u2019s claims\u00a0and because of the dangerous divisions\u00a0that would be exacerbated by targeting Australian Muslims. But Hanson\u2019s party still managed to win four seats in the Senate,\u00a0giving it casting-vote power over\u00a0government legislation. The latest polls show support for One Nation\u00a0rising.<\/p>\n
While anti-immigration and hostility towards refugees was the force that shifted the Overton Window to the right, the result has been a shift to the right more broadly \u2013 just as is now occurring in many other countries.<\/p>\n
That shift will surely accelerate if Donald Trump wins\u00a0the US Presidency.<\/p>\n
But even if he doesn\u2019t,\u00a0the shift in Europe seems to have a\u00a0momentum that challenges the fundamental, underlying principles on which the European project was based.<\/p>\n
How to bring the affairs of western democracies back to re-embrace the values that guided them to relative peace and prosperity for more than seven decades, how to bring the Overton Window back from the right to the\u00a0centre\u00a0\u2013 is the leadership challenge of our times.<\/p>\n
By Geoff Kitney<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0Other articles associated with today’s editorial:-<\/p>\n For more information on migration statistics in Australia:-<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The major political parties in Western democracies are scrambling to attempt to understand and respond to what appears to be a spreading revolution against mainstream conventional\u00a0political thinking on many of today\u2019s big…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":775,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,117],"tags":[17,56,18,23],"class_list":["post-720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-beyond-brexit","category-trade-europe-and-global-economy","tag-australia","tag-kitney","tag-opinion","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chief-exec.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chief-exec.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chief-exec.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chief-exec.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chief-exec.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=720"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/chief-exec.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":810,"href":"https:\/\/chief-exec.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720\/revisions\/810"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chief-exec.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chief-exec.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chief-exec.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chief-exec.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n![\"kitney-vb1\"](\"http:\/\/chief-exec.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Kitney-VB1-300x133.jpg\")
<\/p>\nEditorial: Should they stay or should they\u00a0 go?<\/a><\/h4>\n
The political logic of a hard Brexit<\/a> by Jacek Rostowski<\/h4>\n
The Game of Brexit<\/a> by John Egan<\/h4>\n
Brexiters wrong: Australia has high immigration<\/a> by Geoff Kitney<\/h4>\n