Were the Melbourne protesters lawless unionists or brave freedom fighters?

One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter, the cliché goes.

While the union movement is divided over the Andrews government’s vaccine mandate in the construction industry and its decision to shut the industry down for widespread non-compliance with public health orders, it’s unanimous in its condemnation of this week’s violent protests in Melbourne directed at the CFMMEU, the Andrews government and pretty much anyone else nearby.

The ACTU supports the mandate and the shutdown, while the CFMMEU opposes the mandate and insists much of vaccine hesitancy among construction workers is due to confusion over AstraZeneca and the lack of a vaccination information campaign from the government (at least the union put its money where its mouth is and funded its own media campaign).

The divisions among unions, however, have their parallel in a much starker division between elements of the Coalition. Liberal MP Fiona Martin — who is actually from Sydney, not Melbourne — condemned the violent protests as “Lawless unions. Wrecking the vaccine rollout” — accompanied, inconveniently, by a photo of CFMMEU officials being attacked by rioters.

The Australian Financial Review today tried to get around that inconvenience by arguing that CFMMEU officials being attacked was simply payback for its tactics and violence. If this wasn’t union thuggery, it must be the result of union thuggery. Either way, it was the traditional business narrative of lawless unions.

But it was a very different message from elsewhere in the Coalition, where the rioters were cheered on. George Christensen supports the rioters so strongly he has called for police to be arrested — prompting fury from his Nationals colleagues. So much so that former deputy prime minister Michael McCormack criticised new Nats leader Barnaby Joyce for not pulling the Queensland MP into line.

No lawless unions or CFMMEU blowback for Christensen — just brave freedom fighters. But Christensen is an outlier, surely — an extremist even among his own crowd?

Cue Victorian Liberal Alan Tudge — he of robodebt, an affair with his staffer and, most famously carpark rorts — to cry freedom. “I do not recognise our city or state anymore. The normal democratic checks and balances are gone. Basic freedoms are denied. The community is fracturing… It is not right and cannot go on.”

Tudge’s message was more in tune with the feckless “Dictator Dan” line of the Victorian opposition, which has embraced conspiracy theories and extremist rhetoric in an effort to undermine lockdowns throughout 2020 and 2021, rather than successfully focusing on Andrews’ colossal quarantine failures in 2020.

As Cam Wilson has shown here at Crikey, Christensen has watched the way far-right political figures have exploited communities online in the United States to build support, and sought to ape their business model, albeit so far with less success. Christensen has followed the path of numerous extremist figures in the US in attacking lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccination and promoting unproved COVID cures.

The bigger story in the US is the extent to which that manipulation and embrace of extremist, violent politics has shifted from fringe elements of the Republican Party to now dominate that party, which even after Trump’s defeat is slowly but surely purging itself of non-extremists, let alone whatever few remaining moderates might be left.

The lesson from the GOP appears to be that if you let the extremist infection into your own ranks, it can end up dominating you.

Is the same thing starting to happen to the Liberals? Far from Craig Kelly and Christensen representing a kind of fading populism, are they just the start?

The likes of Martin and the Berejiklian government in New South Wales represent a more traditional Liberal Party — pro-business donor, anti-union, pro-investment — which, on issues like a vaccine mandate, are directly at odds with the extremists, but which might find their populism handy if it delivers traditional goals like deregulation.

That was the devil’s deal that American business made with Trump — let him ride populism to victory so he could deliver their agenda of deregulation and tax cuts. As the GOP becomes ever more extreme and loses elections, it doesn’t look like such a great bargain.

The Liberal Party is a different beast with a different structure and, compared with the Republican Party, its grassroots have less power. But the LNP, where the grassroots have more say, might prove a vector for infection that will last longer than COVID.