The challenge for the opposition has never been harder: here's why

Australia seems to becoming a one-party state, not like dictatorships elsewhere where all critics are suppressed, but where the very united Albanese Labor Party is so electorally ascendant, so dominant in setting the agenda, and so effective in occupying our key institutions, that there is now no effective functioning opposition.

All the electorate has left, and all the Albanese government has to face, is the disintegrating Liberals, the regionally limited Nationals and their various abandoning slivers, and the fragmented, often incoherent, and unpredictable minor parties and independents - in other words, not much.

Labor's recent election win showed that a party that is united, has clear goals, a commitment to achieve them, the strategies to implement them, and most importantly in a modern democracy, the personnel with the skills to present them, can change a nation's agenda.

And Labor has.

Their "mobilisation of bias", a term coined by American political scientist E.E. Schattschneider, now determines "what gets talked about and what gets ignored" and "what the game is about" and "who can get into the game" and thus who wins office.

As a result, the political environment has changed. Albanese's and Chalmers' political narratives have redefined the political agenda to be in tune with Labor's ideological objectives, institutions re-missioned to support and implement their agenda, and language, community values and myths, all manipulated to control the public discourse.

As a result, all this has rendered the previous criteria for judging "good" policy redundant and sidelined not just its political opponents, but all those who disagree. What policies we ought to follow, we no longer even discuss let alone strive to achieve. What concerns we should have, we now ignore.

Consequently, politics is no longer the "good fight" to convince the electorate by evidence and debate, about what must be done, but now is just about winning regardless of the policy consequences.

The real game in modern politics is not between competing party policy election promises or leaders, but the grounds on which the political game will be played, and that game has now been set by Labor that frames the debates and sets the criteria for political success.

The non-Labor parties have never really understood the game hence their surprise at their current situation.

Over the years their compromises caused them to surrender issue after issue to their opponents. They have let the other side determine the grounds on which debates occur.

In addition, they have been gradually disestablished from our key institutions - the media, the universities, the legal profession, schools, community and cultural groups and even the corporate sector and now, in opposition, have no networks or allies on whom to call for support and hence no influence on the issues to be discussed.