Terry Barnes recently claimed (Hounding Abbott, 28 February) that a pack of ‘Jokers to the Right’ commentators think ‘it’s more important to correct [Team Abbott’s] errors than actually to win the match’. I take it as a compliment to be labelled a Joker to the Right, and all the more so when I’m lumped in with people of the calibre of Janet Albrechtsen, Andrew Bolt, Peter Costello and Jeff Kennett. So I’m not responding here due to some über-sensitivity to being called names. Heck, I’m a right-wing guy who works in an Australian university. If I didn’t half like being called names I’d have quit a long time ago. A few lukewarm pleas for right-wingers to stop ‘wailing’ by Mr Barnes wouldn’t even get him tenure at an Aussie uni, nor for that matter would it win him a job with the ABC.

Nor is it all that clear who else Barnes is lumping into this group of Jokers to the Right. Is he including Peter van Onselen? It’s not clear, but let’s be honest. I know right wing jokers, and PVO is not one of them. Nor is Niki Sava.

Yet that is all just definitional foreplay in a way. Here’s the gist of my differences with Barnes. Take some group of ‘conservative journos and commentators’ and assume we are now agreed that they are conservative with a worldview broadly sympathetic to stopping the boats, scrapping the carbon tax, reducing the size of government and getting rid of 18C. If you’re in this camp, what do you do if you think the Abbott government has erred on 18C and has been basically incoherent with its budget?

Barnes’s position is that as good right of centre team players you pull your punches, never ‘forgetting [that] the only place for ideological purity is perpetual Opposition’. You stop wailing and realise that the alternative, Mr. Turnbull, would be worse. Now as it happens I agree that Turnbull would be worse; I’ve said so often and loudly. But that aside, my view is that Barnes’s ‘Pull Your Punches’ position is wrong-headed, counter-productive in the long term, and based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the roles of commentators and actual politicians.

Why do people read or listen to those who are paid to comment on politics? Is it because such readers want to hear party political cheerleaders trot out the party line? Or is it to hear a particular writer’s sometimes idiosyncratic views?

It’s pretty obviously the latter. Commentators owe a duty to their readers to give their honest take on what is happening. No one expects all or even most readers always to agree with each of those positions. But the ‘don’t indulge in ideological purity’ caveat from Barnes is akin to counselling us Jokers to ‘just give the party line dude’. Down that path lies boring journalism, insipidness and ultimately the engendering of a pretty thoroughgoing distrust of what commentators say.

Certainly the Mark Steyns and Charles Krauthammers of the world think they are there to give their unvarnished opinions. Sure, politicians are different. Sometimes they do have to tow the party line, and we know that. Which means that there should be, and are, different standards for politicians and commentators.

At the end of his diatribe against us Jokers Barnes gives himself an out: ‘Constructive criticism of Abbott on policy and governance is one thing: but pointlessly devouring one’s own is absolutely another’. Really? And who, Herr Barnes, gets to determine which is which? Who will be the arbiter of what counts as constructive? You? I certainly think that all of my criticisms of the Abbott government have been constructive. I venture to say that the Bolts and Albrechtsens do too.

Come off it. This caveat is useless; weasel words at the end of a bad argument. If you judge this issue solely from the point of view of what makes a good journalist or commentator then it seems to me Barnes hasn’t got a leg to stand on. Unless you’re working for Pravda, or possibly ‘our’ ABC, no good or even barely competent political commentator tailors her opinions to what she (with or without a phone call to Barnes) thinks best helps her preferred party. Do that and your newspaper will soon fail. Ask Fairfax.

Yet here’s the kicker. Even if we throw out all concerns for what makes good and interesting journalism, for doing what a commentator is paid to do, and look only at the narrow party political interest of the Abbott government, I still think that Barnes is wrong. A political party does better in the long term when it gets to hear the honest opinions of its normal supporters as well as of its usual foes.

In fact this is what lies at the heart of liberalism, and John Stuart Mill’s defence of free speech. Let everyone speak and in the resulting crucible of competing ideas we all will benefit, as the stronger over time beat out the weaker. This Abbott government in my view made the wrong ‘Captain’s Pick’ on hate speech. Prime Minister Harper in Canada made the opposite one, faced down all the usual victims’ brigades, and repealed their 18C equivalent. Not a single ‘world will end’ prediction of the bleating anti-free speech brigade up there in Canada has come to pass. And Harper invigorated his core supporters.

Abbott’s pick was a stupid one not just on the basis of principle but on political grounds too. I doubt more than a handful of the ‘keep 18C’ brigade will vote for Abbott. Ever. No matter what.

Meanwhile what has stirred Abbott’s recent bounce in the polls? It’s the fact that he’s started to listen to his core, whose views he wouldn’t even fully know if the Barnes ‘pull your punches’ motto were to prevail. Now I have no idea if this ‘return to your principles’ approach will continue through the Budget. But I certainly intend to continue calling it as I see it. I’m hoping this government can set out a ‘less spending’ program, and so completely ditch idiocies such as more childcare spending (hint: cut the gross over-regulation here) and forking out new money on the medical research special interest lobbies while not succumbing to Labor demands to raise, raise, raise more revenue. You know: NO TAX INCREASES JOE, FULL STOP!

If the Abbott government does deliver on these fronts, terrific. I’ll be one of the first to say so. Just as I will if I think it has caved in. And you’ll have reason to believe me. Yet what grounds are there for believing Barnes and those whose opinions are tailored to helping Team Abbott ‘win the match’?