Ever since the industrial age spawned unions and their political arm, centre-left parties have understood that gaining power required them to park radicalism to avoid frightening voters.

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This reality may have dampened dreams of an egalitarian paradise, but progressives learned to live with it. Perhaps too well.

In common with its international counterparts, the Australian Labor Party has treated the electorate as instinctively conservative, suspicious of change, and easily spooked.

Some scholars, such as Rob Manwaring, have characterised this self-editing as "thin labourism" through which the operating scope of policies and foundational values is constrained.

Spectacular instances of (mis)adventurism have validated this acceptance of electoral inertia. It became a truism - even within Labor - that Gough Whitlam's big-swinging government (1972-75) "tried to do too much and did it too quickly".

A similarly reductive wisdom was therefore close at hand to explain Bill Shorten's traumatic failure to convert solid public enthusiasm for Labor in 2019 into an election victory when proposing a modest shift of the tax burden from workers to assets and discretionary trusts.

Scarring setbacks such as these have curtailed the modern Labor Party in profound ways.

Since Whitlam, Labor governments had tended to be radical mainly in the other direction - floating the dollar and deregulating the banking sector, selling off state-owned instrumentalities, removing trade protections.

There is a particular piquancy in the fact that the short story of Shorten Labor became the long-form blueprint for an emboldened Labor renaissance less than a decade later.

What had changed? Crucially, Labor is now in office - and with a thumping majority. But the balance of voter expectations has also flipped from fear of change to........

© The Examiner