When Peta Credlin rebuked Barnaby Joyce this week, insisting he had thrown away his last chance to shape a party of government, something clicked for me. It was not her criticism itself. It was what it revealed.

Across the establishment Right, from Sky News Australia to the commentary pages of The Australian, Joyce’s move into One Nation has been treated as irrational, self-destructive, and even tragic.

This consensus only proves how far the political class has drifted from the Australians they claim to understand.

They still imagine that power lives inside the Liberal Party. The public does not.

What the commentators are missing is simple. Barnaby Joyce did not walk away from influence. He walked towards the people who feel they have none left. The political establishment calls this populism. Ordinary Australians call it representation.

A decade ago, there was still a broad middle ground between these worlds. That middle ground has been swallowed by cultural change and political denial. The centre the Liberals talk about with such confidence is no longer a stable point. It has become a soft progressive space shaped by the assumptions of inner-city professional classes. Conservatives did not abandon the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party moved to a cultural position where conservatives no longer recognised themselves.

This drift has a political origin that the establishment Right still refuses to name.

Which brings us to former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. His ascension did more than install a leader with progressive instincts. It altered the Coalition’s cultural metabolism.

Under Turnbull, the party’s internal hierarchy, donors, advisers, NGOs, and the Canberra set, became more influential than the members who staffed booths and built the party’s base. Identity politics crept into institutions. Border debates were softened. Cultural confidence was replaced with technocratic condescension. The party began treating social cohesion as an afterthought rather than a national asset.

Turnbull did not invent this shift. He legitimised it. He taught the Liberal Party to speak a language its own supporters did not share. Even after he left, the vocabulary he embedded remained. Managerial liberalism. Symbolic politics. Moral gestures in place of cultural judgment. That legacy has now separated the party from the instincts of the people it once understood.

This pattern is not unique. The Labor Party abandoned its working-class foundations decades ago when Gough Whitlam shifted the party’s centre of gravity from the material interests of ordinary workers to the cultural priorities of the emerging professional class. Labor kept its name but changed its base. The people who once saw Labor as their natural home were gradually cast as unfashionable or morally suspect.

One Nation’s rise did not come from extremism. It came from the simple fact that millions of Australians discovered that neither major party spoke for their economic security, their cultural instincts, or the stability of the communities they lived in.

The Nationals now face their own reckoning. David Littleproud is widely respected, but he was presented with a moment that required a harder break from the Canberra consensus. He chose caution. The regions did not. The Nationals risk following the Liberals into the same political cul-de-sac, speaking politely to a constituency that no longer feels served by their politeness. Whatever one thinks of Barnaby Joyce, he sensed something real. The old Coalition compact no longer speaks for the cultural instincts of its base. That base is moving, and it will not be talked back into line by appeals to stability alone.

This is why the reaction to Joyce’s defection has been so revealing. Commentators have focused on party discipline, electoral arithmetic, and the prestige of serving in a party of government. But the voters Joyce is speaking to no longer measure their political life in those terms. They measure it in cultural security, public safety, community continuity, and a sense that their voice still counts for something in a system that has grown unresponsive. They are not interested in the internal hierarchies of the Coalition. They are interested in whether anyone in Parliament appears willing to defend the world they actually live in rather than the one imagined in Canberra meeting rooms.

It is fashionable to dismiss all this as populism. The word allows the political class to avoid asking why so many people feel unheard in the first place. Populism is not a cause. It is a symptom. When voters discover that the parties they once relied upon no longer share their instincts or priorities, they look elsewhere. This is not a failure of the voters. It is a failure of the parties.

Australia is entering a realignment that the political class still struggles to interpret.

The divide is no longer Left versus Right. It is between those who believe social cohesion matters and those who treat it as an inconvenience. Between those who see culture as a shared inheritance and those who see it as a lifestyle accessory. Between those who expect borders to mean something and those who treat them as a bureaucratic detail. The Coalition has not grasped that the voters leaving them are doing so for reasons that are moral rather than ideological.

Barnaby Joyce did not trigger this shift. He recognised it earlier than the commentators who have spent years explaining it away. If the Liberals and Nationals want to remain parties of government, they will have to stop lecturing their base about the sensible centre and start asking why the centre no longer feels sensible to the people who built the country. Until they do, they will keep losing voters to the places that still speak plainly, even when those places make the political class uncomfortable.

The real story is not Barnaby Joyce’s departure. It is the establishment Right’s confusion at why anyone would leave. That confusion is the clearest sign of how much has changed, and how much more change is still to come.