The Long March So Far Left That There is a Danger of Falling Off the World!

There is a comforting explanation for Australia's increasingly bitter culture wars. The country became more progressive, its institutions naturally followed, and a noisy minority on the Right simply refused to accept social change. There is another explanation. The institutions moved faster than the people.

That is the provocative thesis advanced in The Australian (link below): over several decades many of the institutions that once regarded themselves as politically neutral gradually absorbed the language, assumptions and priorities of the progressive Left. Universities led the movement, but elements of the bureaucracy, cultural organisations, professional bodies, public broadcasting and corporate Australia followed.

The important point is not that Australia became a socialist country. It plainly did not. Nor does the argument require believing in some secret meeting at which vice-chancellors, bureaucrats and corporate executives agreed upon a common ideology.

Institutional change rarely happens like that. It happens through recruitment, professional incentives, changing moral fashions and the gradual redefinition of what a respectable person is permitted to believe.

Consider the university. The old university was hardly conservative in the ordinary political sense. Academics have leaned Left for generations. But an older liberal ideal nevertheless insisted that the university existed partly to accommodate disagreement. The eccentric Marxist, traditional conservative, Catholic philosopher, radical feminist and free-market economist could theoretically occupy offices along the same corridor because the institution was not supposed to settle political questions before scholarship began.

Something changed. Universities increasingly began taking institutional positions on matters that extended well beyond teaching and research. Diversity, equity and inclusion structures proliferated. Indigenous recognition became embedded in university strategies and official language. Climate commitments became institutional objectives. Gender and identity acquired administrative as well as academic dimensions. "Decolonisation" moved from a specialised theoretical concept into the vocabulary of faculties, libraries and curricula.

One can support every one of these developments (I don't of course), and still recognise their political direction. They did not emerge from the conservative side of Australian politics. That point matters because the usual response: "but these things are simply decent," actually demonstrates the mechanism. Once a contested political proposition is reclassified as a basic moral obligation, disagreement with it ceases to be treated as an alternative political position. It becomes evidence of ignorance, prejudice or extremism. Politics disappears because one side's politics has become institutional morality.

The public service presents a more complicated case. Australian public servants remain legally bound by requirements of impartiality, and it would be absurd to describe hundreds of thousands of employees as belonging to one ideological camp. Nevertheless, bureaucracies operate within professional cultures, and those cultures have changed along with the universities from which many of their employees come.

The language of inclusion, diversity, equity, cultural safety, sustainability and identity has travelled remarkably easily from university departments into government departments, professional organisations and corporations.

Again, the issue is not whether these objectives are inherently wicked. Many originated in attempts to solve genuine problems. The interesting question is why one particular collection of political and cultural concerns acquired such institutional authority while competing concerns did not.

There are few corporate departments devoted to preserving traditional family formation. Universities rarely publish strategic plans promising greater intellectual representation for social conservatives. Government agencies do not generally announce programs designed to strengthen Australian nationalism. Professional organisations seldom require employees to demonstrate their commitment to classical liberalism.

Yet progressive concepts can become part of the official institutional furniture without even being recognised as political. That asymmetry is the substance of the argument.

The ABC provides another illustration, although the question of bias there has been fought over for decades. The significant development is not necessarily that every journalist votes the same way, there is no evidence for such a caricature, but that the boundaries of respectable opinion can become narrower than the range of opinion among the population paying for the institution.

The same phenomenon occurs in commercial organisations. Large corporations that once tried desperately to avoid political controversy discovered environmental, social and governance policies, reconciliation plans, diversity programs and corporate participation in cultural debates.

The 2023 Voice referendum provided an unusually revealing experiment. Large parts of corporate, university, cultural and professional Australia supported the Yes campaign. Yet the proposal was defeated nationally by 60.06 per cent to 39.94 per cent, with every state voting No. Whatever one's view of the referendum itself, the result exposed a substantial gap between elite institutional enthusiasm and the electorate. That gap is more important than any individual issue.

Australia remains a country in which the political centre matters enormously. Research around the 2025 election found comparatively little evidence that Australians had developed the intense partisan hostility seen in the United States. Compulsory voting, preferential voting and strong electoral institutions continue to pull Australian politics towards the centre. That makes the institutional shift more interesting, not less.

If the population itself had moved uniformly Left, progressive institutional change would merely reflect democratic change. But Australia contains large numbers of people whose attitudes remain mixed. A person can favour Medicare and lower immigration, support gay marriage and oppose gender quotas, want action on climate change and dislike political correctness, favour workers' rights and believe Australia should celebrate rather than apologise for its history. Real people are ideologically untidy. Institutions are increasingly less so.

There are now measurable signs of an institutional divide. ANU research published in 2025 found striking differences in confidence according to political orientation. Among respondents identifying on the Left, 58.8 per cent expressed confidence in the public service, compared with 44.5 per cent on the Right. Confidence in the federal government was 50.7 per cent among those on the Left and 34.6 per cent among those on the Right. Trust in the judiciary showed another substantial divide.

Those figures do not prove that the institutions themselves are Left-wing. A conservative can distrust a perfectly neutral institution, just as a progressive can distrust one. But they are consistent with something politically important: different sections of the population increasingly experience the same institutions differently.

Universities illustrate the problem particularly well. ANU research released in April 2026 found that 62.1 per cent of Australians still had quite a lot or a great deal of confidence in universities. That is hardly evidence of universal public hostility. But confidence has been falling. In 2019 the equivalent figure was 78.9 per cent. Something is being lost.

The broader political mood points in the same direction. Research released in September found Australians increasingly frustrated that major decisions are made without sufficient public involvement. The Centre for Policy Development's 2026 survey reported a growing disconnect between citizens and political institutions, even while Australians continued to support democracy and expected government to play an active role.

This is where the institutional-Left thesis becomes more interesting than the familiar complaint about wokeness. The real problem is representation. Democracy operates through elections, but modern societies are governed by far more than parliaments. Universities determine which ideas receive prestige. Public broadcasters influence the boundaries of mainstream discussion. Courts interpret laws. Bureaucracies transform legislation into administrative practice. Professional bodies determine standards of acceptable conduct. Corporations influence workplace culture.

None of these institutions needs to rig an election to exercise enormous cultural power. And when the worldview prevailing inside those institutions diverges sufficiently from the worldview outside them, democratic resentment becomes almost inevitable.

That resentment is easily misunderstood. When voters turn towards populist or nationalist parties, commentators frequently begin by examining what has gone wrong with the voters. Perhaps they have been misled by social media. Perhaps misinformation has radicalised them. Perhaps economic insecurity has made them susceptible to extremism. But there is another question worth asking: what if some voters correctly perceive that institutions which claim to speak for everybody increasingly speak in a political language they do not share?

The rise of One Nation is relevant here, although it cannot be reduced to a single cause. ANU research in 2026 found its support was not merely a temporary response to cost-of-living pressures. Researchers identified a combination of financial stress, pessimism, scepticism about government capacity and populist attitudes.

That should matter to institutional Australia. Populism grows particularly well when people conclude that the institutions standing between themselves and political power no longer regard their concerns as legitimate. The answer is not to move every institution to the Right. That would merely reproduce the same problem in reverse. The answer is to rediscover institutional pluralism.

Universities should contain progressives and conservatives, nationalists and internationalists, believers and atheists, socialists and free-marketeers, not because all ideas are equally persuasive, but because intellectual institutions become intellectually weak when their basic assumptions cease to encounter serious opposition.

Public broadcasters should regard half the population disagreeing with their cultural assumptions as a journalistic challenge rather than a sociological pathology. Public servants should be able to administer the policies of governments of either political complexion without needing to reinvent their professional identities. Professional organisations should be cautious about transforming contested political causes into tests of professional virtue. Corporations might even rediscover the revolutionary principle that selling a good product and treating employees decently is a respectable contribution to civilisation.

That is ultimately what the argument about Australia's institutional movement to the Left is really about. It is not primarily an argument about whether Left or Right possesses the correct politics. It is about what happens when institutions cease to recognise their politics as politics. Once a particular worldview becomes embedded deeply enough, its assumptions become invisible to the people holding them. Their opponents possess an ideology; they possess expertise. Their opponents engage in culture wars; they defend standards. Their opponents politicise institutions; they merely express institutional values.

And eventually the people outside notice. The Australian electorate has not simply followed its institutions wherever they have gone. It remains contradictory, pragmatic, frequently centrist and increasingly sceptical of those claiming to speak on its behalf. The institutions moved. Much of Australia did not. The widening space between them will turn out to be one of the defining political facts of the coming decade.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/our-institutions-moved-left-and-left-the-nation-behind/news-story/db055b3318f7567d1254889896f2afea