Democratic centrism in action

So George Brandis is allegedly going to water down the promised nobbling of s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, after pressure from Liberal MPs sitting in traditional Labor seats trumped the whining of Andrew Bolt:

The Attorney-General was forced by the cabinet in March to soften his original plans amid a welter of protest from Coalition MPs in marginal electorates, some of whom represent large ethnic communities.

It sounds like nothing will happen at least until the budget falderol is resolved, and maybe not even then. Clive Palmer hasn't announced which way his party would vote, but it would be very easy for him to side with the little guy (e.g. the Jewish lobby) as part of his pants-seat-flying platform of populist opportunism.

The tears of the wingnuts on this are delightful. The IPA has no meaningful constituency, as such, whereas ethnic communities are well represented at grassroots level. I would imagine a lot of those marginal seats are in suburban Sydney where there are geographically dense enclaves of ethnic populations - Chinese, Jewish, Vietnamese, Lebanese et cetera - who would all be telling their newly minted MPs that s18C protects them from the depredations of white wingnut wannabe wideboys. The latter demographic, tiny as it is, is well represented at Catallaxy where they are getting to that endlessly enjoyable stage (for me) of morose nihilism. I just love it when they realise, periodically, that all hope is lost and the world won't conform to their wacky internal realities.

Commenter Viva sums up the cognitive dissonance of wingnuttery:

You won’t cut the guy any slack even though he has to operate in an environment which has been totally unforgiving from the get go. You refuse to even consider the problems associated with culture change and the need to compromise and take a longer view. Your prescriptions must be followed to the letter right here, right now. The world just doesn’t work like that. You are surely all old and enough and ugly enough to have learnt that by now. Why haven’t you?

This is the sort of thing you would never see in America these days, with the shocking gerrymander in place for Congress ensuring very few representatives are from ethnically or demographically diverse electorates. Such pressure from the grass roots on marginal MPs is a triumph for the Australian Electoral Commission and the system which empowers it to ensure diversity in electoral zoning.