Let's agree to disagree, OK?

I disagreed with Peter Dutton on a wide range of important issues, but my god, I’m glad he was there.

Whatever the qualities of the man, I revere the office, even as the argy-bargy begins for his replacement. Being leader of the Opposition is a position that’s absolutely central to the Australian constitutional system but never really gets the recognition it deserves.

Anything that attaches parties to actual real-world commitments is a good idea, and that’s what political leaders do. They have to face the media, and when they’re asked questions they have to say something.

The function of leader of the Opposition is brought out most clearly by looking at states that don’t have one. More specifically, the USA is currently disassembling itself into a chaotic autocracy largely because it doesn’t have any equivalent.

When an American political party is out of office, it’s leaderless – there’s no single voice, no definitive source of policy. The leader of the Congress, or the leader in the Senate, has no say outside the building. The party secretariat is little more than a mailbox.

Here, candidates and parliamentarians are expected to have opinions consistent with those of the leader; there, it’s pretty well open slather.

Here, a leader who loses an election generally steps down; in America they don’t have to, because losing candidates dissolve into mist and blow away as soon as they concede. When there’s no primary-selected candidate, which is 3½ years out of four, nobody can commit a party to policies, and as a result the Democratic party right now doesn’t really have any.

And when the Republicans were out of government, under Biden, they made full use of this. They allowed every section of the party to put forward its own ideas. If anybody disagreed with an idea then they’d be told that it wasn’t binding; if anybody liked it, vote for us!

The party was impossible to pin down, or to be held to any past position. It was just the vibe. And that vibe was best described by the Bible’s rebels, the anti-King-Saul Adullamites – “everyone who was in distress, and everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was bitter in soul” (1 Samuel 22:2). 

It may sound inconsistent to say that Democrats suffer from not having a policy centre and Republicans benefit from it, but it’s accurate. If you want to improve the world, you need policies: if you’re happy with the world getting worse so long as other people suffer more than you do, you can get by on emoticons.

A lot of Australians backed the Teals because we wanted them to push the major parties away from their stick-in-the mud risk-averse positions, and that’s a working strategy – but it does mean that in a hung parliament there are no real guarantees that a party is going to be able to deliver the policies they took to the election, and so does provide them with an excuse for taking necessary but unpopular decisions or (depending on your point of view) reneging on their promises.

Admittedly, parties, and their leaders, do obscure, and conceal, and deceive, about what they’re going to do if they get in, but most of the time it’s easy enough to see through their evasions. Those Australians who favour Dutton’s nuclear plans don’t do so because they’ve been convinced by his arguments but because they’re climate denialists too. The words may be noncommittal, but the music comes through clearly.

Still, it’s hard to see that we could do without sincerity entirely. We may be about to find out; attaching party leaders to party policies may be another casualty of Trumpist politics. It’s hard to see what the point of having a policy at all is in a shame-free environment like Mar-a-Largo, where the only manifesto is fanatical support of whatever the King tweeted last.

I don’t think Australia is at that stage yet. We do expect politicians to colour inside the lines. When Abbott said he wouldn’t cut ABC funding and then cut ABC funding, the electorate didn’t like it (who could really like a misogynist) despite that being (a) the least of his attacks on his obsessions and (b) so unbelievable as to be self-cancelling.

There’s a fine line between stretching the truth and taking us for mugs, and the job of a leader is to identify that line and straddle it.

Being leader of the Opposition may be the most thankless task in Australian politics, and nobody taking on the job wants to have it for long. They deserve our thanks.

Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps the country's 600,000 not-for-profits.