Finding Common Ground in a Culture War

In Australia today, every major debate risks collapsing into a culture war. Migration, housing, health funding, military spending, climate policy — the script is written before the conversation begins, and most of us end up playing our assigned part. The mind lines up its response, not because the argument has been weighed fairly, but because we think we already know where it’s going. That instinct has been rehearsed for years.

Politics has become theatre. Headlines are cut to provoke. Parliamentary question time has been reduced to a contest, where a winning performance eclipses the work of problem solving. Behind the curtain, the politicians, media outlets, and lobbyists know that conflict is the surest way to keep attention. Outrage also generates loyalty, and shields decision-makers from scrutiny. The effect settles as a background hum of public life: always defending ideological ground, bracing for a hit from the “other side.” Over time, disagreement hardens into identity, and identity replaces the kind of conversation that might get us somewhere.

Take migration, for instance — a topic where these dynamics play out vividly. For someone on the left, a phrase like “migration puts pressure on housing” often sounds like the first step toward closing borders. For someone on the right, “migration is important” can sound like the start of a speech that ignores real concerns about jobs, infrastructure, or housing shortages. In these moments, substance disappears. The words stop being ideas to examine and instead serve as a signpost for which team the speaker belongs to.

But if you look past our very human desire to belong to something bigger than ourselves. Beneath the slogans, there are places where our priorities overlap. Many issues hold more than one truth: Migration can drive economic growth, foster cultural exchange and offer refuge from conflict. It can also increase housing demand, and when governments allow investment to lag behind population growth, market pressures rise. Seeing both realities opens space for holistic solutions.

And that’s the area that the engineers of division would rather keep closed. Because once you notice the overlap, once you pause long enough to wonder why the same problems remain, you start to ask different questions: Who benefits from the stalemate? And what might happen if we stopped following the rules of a game designed to keep us divided?

How Culture Wars Hijack Our Brains

The machinery runs on autopilot now. Stories are framed to stir anger before they invite reflection. News cycles are built around conflict because conflict pays. Online, algorithms take your biases and dive you in deeper, slipping in provocations designed to pull you back each time you think of looking away. The cycle acts like a treadmill: the faster you run, the more it reinforces itself, and stepping off feels harder than keeping pace.

Psychological research explains that once political identity fuses with personal identity, disagreement is felt as threat. Studies in Political Behavior and the American Journal of Political Science show people are more likely to accept misinformation that flatters their side and reject accurate information that contradicts it^1,2. What looks like stubbornness is closer to self-preservation — the instinct to defend the people and stories you trust. In that environment, loyalty begins to matter more than accuracy.

The result is a public square that bends toward conflict at the expense of substance. Compromise is painted as betrayal, opponents treated as enemies, and real solutions delayed for another cycle. Governments can leave housing shortages or hospital waitlists unresolved, so long as the quarrel continues to fill the air. Media companies make their money from the quarrel; corporations and lobbyists profit from the cover it provides.

What remains is not only a louder politics but a thinner one. Curiosity fades and deliberation turns into a performance.

Both Things Can Be True

The trouble with culture-war framing is that it demands simple answers where complexity is unavoidable. Migration is a case in point. On one hand, decades of economic research show that migration tends to benefit national economies³’⁴. Migrants often fill labour shortages, contribute entrepreneurial energy, and help balance ageing populations. On the other hand, when governments fail to invest in infrastructure and housing, rapid population growth can exacerbate pressures.

In Australia, The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council’s 2025 report found that only 177,000 new dwellings were completed in 2024, well below the 223,000 needed to meet demand, leaving a shortfall of more than 46,000 in a single year. Looking further ahead, the Council projects that over the Housing Accord period to 2029, net new supply will fall 262,000 dwellings below the government’s target, even after record public investment. Treasury’s budget analysis reinforces the picture: despite billions in new housing commitments, vacancy rates remain near record lows, and affordability has deteriorated to the point where it now takes 11.4 years for the average household to save a deposit^5,6.

Seen together, these figures point to a policy failure, not a demographic one. Migration enriches the economy, strengthens communities, and often provides sanctuary to people fleeing conflict. But without parallel investment in housing and infrastructure, growth exposes weak planning systems and political choices tilted toward developers. The Scandinavian experience is telling: Sweden has long sustained relatively high humanitarian intake while investing heavily in housing and integration programs. The tensions are real, but the pressure is not inevitable. It reflects decisions about taxation, public spending, and whether governments reinvest the dividends of growth into systems that support everyone⁷.

The Limits of Agreement

Agreement across political lines is often treated as the highest prize in public life. But agreement is only ever a starting point. Consider housing again. From conservative think tanks to progressive activists, there is now widespread recognition that Australia faces a severe affordability crisis. That consensus is important, but it does not build a single home. Real change comes from diagnosing causes: a tax system rewarding property speculation, decades of neglect in public housing, and planning rules that support developer profit over public need^8,9.

The same dynamic plays out elsewhere. Health and education are acknowledged as underfunded, yet reform stalls at the point of raising revenue. Few politicians want to be seen increasing taxation of corporate profits or high incomes, even when the evidence is clear. Climate change provides another case study: for more than a decade, leaders claim to support stronger action. Meanwhile, emissions targets are diluted and subsidies for fossil fuels are quietly extended.

Agreement lends legitimacy, but on its own it’s little more than window dressing. History shows what happens next: once problems are named, vested interests move quickly to redraw the boundaries of what is “politically realistic.” Agreement can even function as a kind of anaesthetic, numbing the public into believing progress is being made when the underlying systems remain flawed. Consensus gives you the starting line. It says nothing about who will reach the finish. As Yascha Mounk has argued, we are less and less effective at translation public views into public policy.

The Progressive Edge of Clear Thinking

Clear thinking doesn’t always sit halfway between opposing views. Follow the evidence far enough and it often points toward ambitious, redistributive reform. Consider corporate taxation: in 2020–21, more than one in three large companies in Australia paid no tax despite pulling in hundreds of billions in revenue¹⁰. That outcome isn’t an accounting accident. It’s the intended result of policy settings shaped by lobbying and political choices.

Other countries show different paths. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund — built by taxing resource profits and holding them in public trust — now finances major public spending across health, education, and infrastructure. In the Gulf states, governments such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have channelled oil and gas rents into housing, energy subsidies, and large-scale infrastructure, dramatically expanding public capacity. And closer to home, Medicare remains proof that universal programs can not only function but become deeply popular once established¹¹.

The barrier such reforms face is rarely evidence. It’s the threat they pose to those who profit most from the current rules. That is where clarity matters: data by itself will not move entrenched interests. The goal is not to split the difference between left and right but to pursue fairness, even if that unsettles the comfortable consensus.

Building the Common Ground Project

So where does that leave us? With a chance to rebuild common ground as something solid enough to stand on. The overlaps are obvious: housing people can actually afford, hospitals and clinics that function, schools that deliver, wages that keep pace with costs, and scrutiny of why billions flow into defence while regional health services are left behind.

The challenge is stepping outside the team sport of politics and beginning from those overlaps. That means asking sharper questions: Who benefits when culture wars dominate the headlines, and who carries the cost of delay? It also demands that we turn agreement into pressure. It means organising until shared concerns become unavoidable, and demanding that governments act on the levers already in reach: closing corporate tax loopholes, lifting public housing investment, and redirecting subsidies from fossil fuels into health and education. Common ground only matters if we use it to force the decisions that build something better.

Sam Williams

Further Reading

• Mounk, Y. (2019). The People vs. Democracy. Harvard University Press – READ THIS!
• Klein, N. (2023). Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Allen Lane – READ THIS!
• Australia Institute (2023). Gas super-profits tax report.
• Grattan Institute (2023). Housing affordability: The next big reform challenge.

References

1. Taber, C. S., & Lodge, M. (2006). Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political beliefs. American Journal of Political Science, 50(3), 755–769. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2006.00214.x
2. Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2010). When corrections fail: The persistence of political misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32(2), 303–330. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2
3. Peri, G. (2012). The effect of immigration on productivity: Evidence from U.S. states. Review of Economics and Statistics, 94(1), 348–358. https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00137
4. OECD. (2014). Is migration good for the economy? OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/5jxx56d73521-en
5. National Housing Supply and Affordability Council (NHSAC). (2025). State of the Housing System 2025. Australian Government. Retrieved from https://nhsac.gov.au/news/release-state-housing-system-report-2025
6. Hanrahan, J. (2024, May 15). Federal budget housing crisis in 10 graphs. ABC News. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-15/federal-budget-housing-crisis-in-10-graphs/103847336
7. Borevi, K. (2014). Multiculturalism and welfare state integration: Swedish model path dependency. Ethnicities, 14(1), 86–109. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796813498059
8. Yates, J. (2011). Housing in Australia in the 2000s: On the agenda too late? Australian Economic Review, 44(3), 237–247. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8462.2011.00641.x
9. Pawson, H., Milligan, V., & Yates, J. (2020). Housing policy in Australia: A case for system reform. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2780-3
10. Australian Taxation Office. (2022). Corporate tax transparency report 2020–21. https://shorturl.at/4Y7qz
11. Hall, J. (2015). Australian health care — The challenge of reform in a fragmented system. New England Journal of Medicine, 373, 493–497. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26244304/