Paul Keating “insists he does not want to enter current political controversies”, reported the Australian Financial Review a fortnight ago. Still, you had to squint to avoid seeing at least some comment on current politics in his headline opinion: “The country is so timid. To come of age, Australia has to have a new and altogether different idea of itself.

“There is no premium on self-capacity, self-assurance, or belief in our ability to divine our own way forward. Our circumstance is a sad indictment of our lack of pride and wilful incapacity to do anything material to head down a new pathway.”

Illustration: Jim PavlidisCredit:

Keating was certainly not talking about something of such piddling consequence as the byelection in Dunkley on Saturday. But consider, for a moment, the major issues this byelection was being fought on. From Labor’s side, a set of tax cuts, inherited from the Coalition and reworked to be a lot fairer (while still giving rich people quite a bit of money back). On the Liberals’ side, a nasty campaign built on fear of refugees.

The first thing to say about these twin themes is that they are, when all is said and done, fairly trivial. Tax and fairness are important – but income tax cuts, by their nature, are not lasting reforms. On the let’s-be-scared-of-detainees-released-by-the-High-Court side, we are talking about a small cohort, who could only ever be responsible for a minute proportion of the crime committed in this country. These are not matters on which national politics should be decided.

The more important thing to note is how old all this feels. To some extent that’s just politics: the hip pocket will always be an issue, as will fear of difference, and it is naive to hope otherwise. Still, we should at least pause to wonder whether one reason these topics have dominated public discussion of Dunkley is that the major parties have yet to offer much more to fill the space – leaving the vacuum to be filled by fear and greed, those old reliables.

Which brings us to another former prime minister – no stranger to those trusty electoral weapons – who leaned further than Keating into explicit political advice. In an interview with this masthead before his final speech to parliament, Scott Morrison said “the maths is obvious”. To win government, or at least to win majority government, the Coalition had to win back seats from the so-called teal independents.

Theoretically, the Coalition could win government without those seats. Other opposition leaders – Howard, Rudd, Abbott and Beazley – have won comparable numbers from the other major party before. Still, Morrison knows something about winning elections. Practically speaking, in the current landscape, he’s right.

This is interesting because, last week, after one of the ex-detainees released by the High Court was arrested, deputy opposition leader Sussan Ley tweeted, “If you live in Frankston and you’ve got a problem with Victorian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor. If you do not want to see Australian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor.”