It was late 2013 and I was cooking up a storm in the kitchen of a couple of good friends. It was a spontaneous but reasonably regular thing we did – I lived alone and loved cooking, they lived just 15 minutes’ walk away and liked my company and my cooking. I didn’t always cook, sometimes I just brought along ingredients from my fridge to add to what was already being prepared and we would cook what’s in the fridge dinner together, and sometimes they would come to my house. The point was to connect, talk, discuss, laugh, listen and share good food. We were all community minded and politically engaged with shared interests and expertise across the arts, music, gardening, education, community cultural development and land care. We had all been connected in one way or another for well over a decade.
That year the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) had launched the Vote Compass in Australia, an online tool first developed in Canada that allows people to see how their personal views compare to the policies of the main political parties. After answering questions on a broad range of issues from tax and superannuation to asylum seekers and climate change, the tool presents your own position in relation to those of the political parties on a two-dimensional grid representing social and economic perspectives.
Imagining that my views would place me squarely in the socially progressive and economic left, I was surprised when my own Vote Compass results placed me only just left of centre, marginally left of the Labor Party. In the days that followed, I spent quite a bit of time thinking more deeply about the things that mattered to me. My result had been a surprise. I did the Compass again, wondering if I had misread the questions, or not properly pitched my answers. My result was the same. I was just left of centre. I had a revelation. I began imagining the idea of left versus right not as a straight line, where the ideas and principles get further away from each other the more hard-line one became, but as a circle. In other words, the extreme right and the extreme left end up in the same place. I began to imagine how the Vote Compass graph would look if this was recognised.
Sharing my theory over dinner I had my work cut out rationalising the idea. After all, we were all dedicated lefties and had a shared history of protest rallies, marches and community direct action – although I privately acknowledged my protest CV to be less impressive. I realised that I was really fearful that I might be accused of being a fence sitter. As if being too close to the centre was somehow non-committal. Soft. Not choosing a side.
During the discussion, it became important to develop a shared definition of extreme, which I posited could be characterised as the complete othering of people you considered as your opponents, which allowed you to use threatened or actual violence against them to win an argument. I reasoned that the further we move away from the centre, the more unwilling we become to listen to ideas that differ from or own, and this, together with a gradually increasing willingness to use violence was the point that brought the two lines of left and right together to form the circle.
I have since read that this is not a new idea, and that while some theorists speak of the circle as I had imagined, others speak of the movement of far-left adherents joining the far right, as diagonal thinking or Diagonalism.
I have always had a strong belief that we should speak up in the face of injustice, speak up on issues affecting the planet, vulnerable people and animals, and in this way it’s been easy to place myself on the political left – the progressives being those who look out for the vulnerable because of a belief that we are all in this together, that the suffering of some impacts us all and is therefore everyone’s responsibility to address. Since my late teens I have been to countless rallies and protest marches in support of the rights of refugees, Aboriginal people, women, workers, lesbians and gays, peace, the environment, chickens – precisely because I believe in the power of public displays of solidarity. It is unquestioningly powerful to take to the streets, to be surrounded by thousands of others and to share in the songs and chants and calls to action. And it feels good to literally stand up and be counted.
But what happens when we all go home.
What happens when we realise that the left / right divide sits always in opposition, completely unable to find common ground, arguing with increasingly murderous intent. Moving further away from each other. Until all is lost.
That’s what it feels like now. All over the world.
Except it’s not that simple. The idea of the left / right divide holds less potency when we start to notice the alliances between people who traditionally stood in opposition, now marching together. This tendency though, only seems to occur in one direction – from the left to the right. From belief in the project of collective social justice, to a focus on individual rights. This is exactly what started to publicly play out during and since the COVID pandemic, where anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protesters were coming from the far right and the far left. If your prime motivation is anti-system it’s easy to see how this happened – traditionally left wing, anti-establishment, anti-big corporate, anti-capitalist, making friends with right wing anti-government ‘freedom’ fighters, makes perfect sense.
Well, it makes perfect sense if your left-wing views are rooted in a desire for personal freedoms, rather than the desire to see social justice for everyone. Or to put it more simply, the further left or right you travel, the more it becomes about you and less about everyone else.
In the spring of 2014, I attended a lecture given by the former President of Ireland, Mary McAleese who spoke about the challenges of the Irish peace process. Fundamentally, her speech was about how to mitigate against hate, against violence, against the endless rhetoric that someone has to be a winner and someone else therefore the loser. She spoke at length about the dangers of nationalism through its insistence of sameness, of us and them, and the alternative of standing in each other’s shoes to create understanding and dispel ignorance. While she said a great deal, the underlying message of it all was this: call out bad behaviour and make partners of your enemies to forge friendship and create peace in the name of justice for all.
The lecture is available on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSJWinX78VU
Reflecting on all this now, in the face of what feels like an increasingly violent and polarised world, and closer to home in the face of close friends who previously claimed left-wing credentials but now parrot far-right conspiracies at best and hate at worst, I want to make claim to the centre. I want to dispel the myth that the centre is somehow all about compromise and therefore homogeneity. I want to argue the distinct difference between the words tolerate and accept – the former still others while the latter demands equality. I want to argue that the centre is actually about the acceptance of diversity, a willingness to be open and kind in the face of the significant negotiations necessary to live in harmony.
And with that I am also reimagining the political divide, again, not as a circle but as a sphere.
Here’s the metaphor. The sphere gets bigger the more violently opposed we become to each other, yelling and hurling violence across the divide, unable even to see each other’s faces. But the closer we come to the central core, the less able we are to view each other as enemy and the less willing we become to throw literal or metaphorical bombs in such close proximity.
At this core sits a willingness to hold each other in positive regard, to hold conversation, to look each other in the eyes, to speak more gently, to listen. To hear each other’s fears, and to help dispel them. To act, for good. To see the world in all its 360 degrees.
Dani Burbrook © 2026
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