The hard right derides it in the liberal-left as "virtue signalling" - pious flag-waving by the elites around such causes as refugees, multiculturalism, climate change, and entrenched sexism - designed to show its members exist on a higher moral plane.
So what is to be made of the Turnbull government's fanatical tinkering with the nation's racial offence laws? The expression of electoral urgency, of public clamour?
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18C: stronger or weaker?
Malcolm Turnbull says he's strengthening the Racial Discrimination Act, Labor says the government is weakening it.
Hardly. Compare it to marriage equality, where there is wide support in the electorate and yet mulishness in Canberra.
Indeed, ordinary people, including many true conservatives, have been spectacularly unfussed by the prohibitions against offend, insult and humiliate on the basis of ethnicity, set out in section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act - especially in light of section 18D, which severely attenuates its sanctions anyway. But to the muscular reactionaries who have appropriated that conservative mantle, the law is itself offensive - a symbol of past obedience to leftist thought control.
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And so, under the whip from his own roiling backbench, another moderate shibboleth associated with the social mainstream, with Malcolm Turnbull himself, and with national unity, has been slain. On Harmony Day. Priceless.
The Senate is unlikely to pass the change, meaning this is also shaping as another lose-lose for Turnbull, who could be lumbered with the image damage of caving to some of the zoo's madder monkeys, and then failing to change the law any way.
It's been said that he's shored up his support from the party's right through this. Perhaps, but the external optics are not good. While a case may be made against 18C's precise wording, it does that case no good to have the backing of ex-cabinet voices who lacked the sand to do it themselves while in office and who now delight in causing trouble for Turnbull as regularly as possible.
If the whole point is to bring the legal tests closer to the realm of common sense - the so-called person-in-the-street test - then the question arises: what is the functional perceptive difference among ordinary folk between the existing words, on the one hand, and the replacement, "harass"?
As marginal seat MPs noted - many with significant ethnic populations - the problems with 18C are (a) vastly exaggerated for ideological purposes, and (b) largely associated with the laborious processes of the Human Rights Commission, when handling vexatious complaints.
This change either portends racial vilification that is currently unlawful, or it is gesture politics born of over-reaction. The result perhaps of what happens when you offend, insult, and humiliate, political reactionaries.
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