In the Western world, we are taught that order prevails over chaos.

Unfortunately, the future of Australian politics will be more like that found in the Indian Vedas and Upanishads, where order and chaos go hand-in-hand.

The ALP and the Coalition have gravitated to the dead centre of the economic-political spectrum, by appealing to the so-called ‘median voter’.

This theory assumes that the Australian electorate is a continuum of voters from conservative to progressive. Once upon a time, the median voter was an Anglo-Saxon male, in his 40s, with a wife, a family and a mortgage.

This theory, which has underpinned 100 years of Australian democracy, is dying. The ALP and the Coalition are irrevocably haemorrhaging votes to vocal, media-driven single-issue parties.

At the 2016 federal election, votes for minor parties hit their highest level since 1949. More than one in eight Australians voted for someone other than the Liberals, Nationals, ALP or the Greens, in the House of Representatives. This will continue at pace.

The Coalition and the ALP falsely believe the median voter can be found in the suburbs, where they pursue self-interest, clean their sports utes on Sunday and say ‘fair go’, ‘crikey’ and ‘yeah no’ a lot.

Many of these voters hold politicians and politics in contempt and they wouldn’t vote if it wasn’t compulsory. Support from the so-called ‘centre’ is mired in apathy.

Voter turnout for the 2016 federal election was the lowest recorded since the introduction of compulsory voting ahead of the 1925 federal election.

At the 2016 poll, nine per cent of eligible voters didn’t vote for House of Representative candidates and eight percent didn’t vote for Senate candidates. Turn out rates have been falling since the mid 1990s.

If there was a median voter living in a mythic centrist heartland, they’d be wondering why the Labor Party looks like the Liberal Party and vice a versa.

While there are some differences in tax policy and health, Australia’s two major parties have hugged the centre, with an urgency of a child clinging to his mother’s legs on the first day of school.

The political landscape has been cleared of representational and reformist forces by a terrible stasis. This has paved the way for rising disorder like that found in those ancient Sanskrit texts.

The extraordinary decline and fracturing of the mainstream media tells a parallel story. From the end of World War II to the late 1980s, political investigative journalism drew large audiences and readerships.

The battle between capitalism and democratic socialism produced dynamic and creative tension. Many of the best stories were exposes on who had power and how they used or abused it. There was a moral dimension too.

The battle (but not the war) was lost by the left. Exposes of malfeasance or criminality now confirm that the wealthy elites run the show. What weapon can voters use to fight back when political ideology has died?

What choice is there when voters can’t tell the difference between our two main political parties?

Consider the role the ‘Overton Window’ plays in Australian politics. This concept states that for politicians, there are a limited range of ideas tolerated within society. So, they only promote policies they believe the electorate will accept. So much for leadership and vision.

No matter if large numbers of voters are moving to the left and right; no matter if the Chinese are building their third aircraft carrier; if unemployment and under employment are under reported or if withdrawal of quantitative easing sends the finance markets in to a tail spin, they still wear blinkers and like old nags, plod down the road most travelled.

Those timid faces looking out of the Overton Window are your elected members.

The media has its own form of Overton Window. News selection is complex but many print stories that run counter to the values of the proprietor, which undermine advertisers or are politically radical (without being seditious), are spiked.

This creates a neutered orthodoxy yet it doesn’t stop some news proprietors producing conflict and impact stories with Hollywood values. These narratives are taken out of time, space and context and spewed out on to our phones, iPads and TV news. Salvador Dali would have loved it.

The media creates a carnival atmosphere yet beneath the razzle dazzle, a bland and homogenised polity gasps for fresh air.

The Federal Liberals typify what has gone wrong with many Australian institutions: a hopeless leader, who, like Kevin Rudd, is channelling his inner ocker to appeal to the mythic median voter; rolling scandals and resignations; to-the-death fractional brawls and the political knifing of Malcolm Turnbull.

According to Paul Kelly, in The End of Certainty, there have been two major phases of Australian economic history. The first ruled from Federation with high tariffs, the White Australia policy and central wage arbitration.

The second was the neoliberal deregulation phase, introduced by Hawke and Keating in 1984, and tinkered with by all federal governments since.

We are about to enter the third phase which will overturn the relationship between the ALP, the Coalition and voters.

The future of the Australian political landscape will contain numerous political parties. Some may become a third force in the lower house. To survive, the ALP and Coalition will need to part ways and create bold, new policies.