Can Australia’s political centre hold off the populist embers being set ablaze by Trump?

At midday on Monday in Washington DC, Donald J Trump will finish the oath of office committing to “preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States”. His political resurrection will be complete.

The paradox of his promise to defend the constitution will be starkly apparent.

At that moment, Trump will be standing in front of the US Capitol, the very same building to which, in 2021, he incited a violent mob, equipped with a gallows to hang the vice-president, urging them to “fight like hell”, and overturn a free and fair election.

Trump, in his open contempt for democratic convention, is unlike any politician ever seen in Australia.

He is not a popular figure in Australia. An Essential Poll before the US election found only 29% of Australians would vote for him as candidate for president.

But the man who will be president again taps into and exploits a deep vein of disaffection across the US, and a rising tide of populism around the world, one that is rising in Australia too.

Could a politician in his likeness, a Trumpian character, emerge in Australian politics, an iconoclast who defies convention and smashes those mores previously held to be unshakeable?

There is no Trump in Australian politics at present, argues Lachlan Harris, a former adviser to then prime minister Kevin Rudd, who is now serving as ambassador to the US. Rudd will be at Trump’s inauguration.

“I think Trump is genuinely trying to destroy democracy in America: he is trying to break the institutions of democracy, not just play hard-and-fast politics,” Harris says.

“We don’t have anybody like that in Australia, I don’t think that determination exists in the Australian polity.”

But it doesn’t mean one can’t, or won’t, emerge here, he says.

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The populist embers set ablaze by Trump in the US – and fanned by powerful acolytes like Elon Musk – burn here too. The rising cost of living and a growing inequality between the rich and the rest, now less a gap than a yawning, ever-widening chasm; disaffection over housing and opportunity, and government unwillingness or impotence to address it; a sense that the economic system is gamed against “ordinary voters”; all are sentiments common to both electorates.

Some Australian political debates feel almost directly transplanted from the US.

‘There is a perception, fairly or not, that Labor is confined to a maintenance project on the status quo,’ says Paul Strangio. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

State and territory governments have been elected on promises to be “tough on crime”, even vowing to sentence children to adult jail terms. Bills restricting abortion have been proposed, or put before state legislatures. Inflammatory, xenophobic rhetoric on migration has, and will, dominate debate in the lead-up to the federal election this year.

Culture wars against so-called elites – over the date of Australia Day, “wokeness”, the science of climate change – are proxies for the politics of disaffection.

Democracies are more fragile than they appear.

The institutions of democracy, with their grand titles and grand buildings, give the impression of inviolability. But America, with its January 6 riots, with continued vituperative attacks on political opponents, on government departments, on public servants, has revealed a previously hidden brittleness.

So it is with all. Democracies are built on convention, on people agreeing to the rules of the game, even if those rules are not written down. When a demagogue-cum-commander-in-chief insists he will be a dictator “on day one” alone, it is no harmless boast.

But the Australian experience, so far, has been that populism manifests not in a single behemoth, a dominant, celebrity personality like America’s Trump; nor in a single fixation, the solution of which is (falsely) promoted as panacea for all manner of ills, such as the UK’s Brexit.

Rather, Australia’s populism has seen a splintering of political loyalties. The old certainties of the two-party duopoly – with a minor role for the minor parties – has been steadily eroding for decades, and is now collapsing more rapidly. Parties, often eponymous – Hanson, Palmer, Katter – have emerged on the political right, harvesting a small but critical cohort of votes.

The leaders of major parties, more concerned with optics than outcomes, and unmoored from former ideological or demographic bases, have accelerated their own demise. Political leaders chosen for their catchphrases rather than their competence, marketability over morality, are acutely vulnerable to being abandoned by an electorate willing to look elsewhere.

Governing too, in the era of warp-speed social and traditional media cycles, has become harder, argues Paul Strangio, an emeritus professor of politics at Monash University.

“Building and sustaining a conversation with the electorate is so much more challenging,” he says. “The Albanese government is the latest victim of this difficulty, but its problem in cutting through to the electorate is also due to the fact that Labor’s incrementalist, nips-and-tucks approach to governing isn’t sufficiently registering in the lived experience of voters.

“At a time when there is a deep wellspring of discontent with business-as-usual, there is a perception, fairly or not, that Labor is confined to a maintenance project on the status quo.”

There are structural reasons why Australia’s populist fever has been comparatively milder, why it has resisted its personification in a single demagogic figure.

Australia’s democratic institutions are more robust than in a country like the US.

An independent, national electoral authority (generally) escapes the hyper-partisan attacks of corruption and vote-rigging its equivalents in the US receive. Restrictions on political donations limit – however imperfectly – the distorting influence of money on elections. Australia’s judiciary is far less politicised than its American counterpart.

Compulsory voting, too, nudges political parties towards the invaluable centre ground of politics (where most of the voters are), argues Harris. The shoutiest invective to “get out the vote” (“red meat for the base” in its crudest iteration) is not nearly as effective as when people are compelled to attend a polling station by law.

And perhaps most fundamentally, a parliamentary system, where the people cast a ballot for a local representative, and elect a government, not a president is a bulwark against the hyper-individualism of America’s political system.

But there are cultural reasons too.

Scott Morrison imported elements of the Trumpite songbook – read the ‘Canberra bubble’ for the ‘Washington swamp’. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

“The charismatic, performative politics, the demagoguery that we associate with the populist leaders like Trump, that doesn’t wash in Australia,” Strangio argues. Scott Morrison, an admirer of Trump, imported elements of the Trumpite songbook: read the “Canberra bubble” for the “Washington swamp”.

“He also practised a performative politics in curating an image as an outsider to the system: the Cronulla Sharks barracking, curry cooking, daggy dad from the suburbs. But Australians quickly woke up to this contrivance, spotted elements of inauthenticity, and were repelled by it. It is a different climate here, with a different history, and a different political culture.”

But, Strangio says, a “conservative populism” has been an emerging feature of Australian politics since the era of John Howard, particularly since his seminal 2001 re-election.

Strangio argues it’s vital that the emerging strain of conservative populism in Australia is not only recognised, but understood.

“I think it’s important it’s not dismissed, that people don’t become sanctimonious towards or contemptuous of those who are voting for populist candidates, but seek to understand the mindset and circumstances that are driving it: to ask ‘what are the causes driving that grievance politics’?

“There is a template of how conservative populism works – for complex problems you offer simple solutions. It’s a black-and-white politics, devoid of nuance.

“We all probably know deep down that it’s not offering meaningful solutions. Yet it can be seductive in a disrupted and insecure world.”

‘I think we have to be very careful making that comparison. Peter Dutton is not Donald Trump,’ says Harris. Photograph: Diego Fedele/AAP

The “populist genie”, once out of the bottle, is difficult to moderate and to control, Strangio says.

“It tends to magnify over time, and I think the last 25 years bears that out, we’ve seen a ratcheting up. Peter Dutton is the face of a more aggressive conservative populism in Australian politics.

“The coming election is going to be an important litmus test of how well the centre is holding in Australia.”

At the same time, Strangio believes there is much that distinguishes Dutton from Trump. “There is no hint of demagoguery, he’s not charismatic, he’s not into performative politics, and in that sense he’s in the tradition of Howard’s ordinary populism.”

It’s a view that accords with that of a man who has watched Dutton, over years, from the opposite side of the treasury benches.

Dutton is not Trump-lite, Harris says. “And I think we have to be very careful making that comparison. Peter Dutton is not Donald Trump: I don’t support his positions, but he is not the same political character.”

But Australia can’t presume to be invulnerable to the emergence of a Trump-like figure, Harris says.

“Everybody needs to maintain a discipline about making the ‘Trumpian’ comparison, and only use that term when we are really serious about it, so if that character comes into Australian politics, all of us – from every side – drops a nuclear bomb on that political activity in Australia when it arrives: because it will.”

• Ben Doherty is a reporter for Guardian Australia and a former foreign correspondent