By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

Curiosity kills cats but it is cowardice that more often strangles governments - especially social democratic ones in whom hopes start out high.

This should be a warning to Britain's new ALP-tutored Starmer government which is already pandering to the tabloids and avoiding decisions that might frighten the horses.

Things are more advanced in Australia, but not always in a good way. Friday's partial reversal of a move to exclude gender identity and sexuality in the next census, ended a week of bizarre governmental self-harm. An unforced error born of fear, woeful judgement and vaulting insensitivity.

Armed with the most flaccid argument since we were told harmful gambling ads would save free-to-air TV (seriously) Anthony Albanese's ministers had justified their retreat from a promise to LGBTQI+ Australians, as an effort to shield them from an ugly debate.

Literally no one believed this. Besides, who's in charge here? An elected government or a cast of reactionary shock jocks?

Surely if we learned anything from decades of peripheralising minorities it is that denying recognition is dehumanising. Actively doing that through exclusion from the official five-yearly survey of the population feels like wilful de-citizenship. Its unmistakeable message: "We don't count you because you don't count."

Anyway, it was Labor's cravenness that invited the heat in the end by pre-emptively kowtowing to News Corp sensibilities about galloping "wokeism".

Just six Labor MPs had the good conscience to speak out.

Even Liberals were aghast with Victoria's Keith Wolohan saying he "couldn't see the damage or the harm" in such questions, and Tasmania's Bridget Archer frustrated Labor "had created a controversy where there was none".

The unremarkable had become a hot mess. And Peter Dutton had notched up another win without saying boo.

Switching to damage-control mode, Albanese went on Melbourne radio on Friday to backtrack and to plead, in mitigation, his government had been focused on the cost of living, anyway. "We haven't sat down and gone through line by line on what questions will be asked in the census in two years' time, in 2026," he said.

One might have thought this is why we have portfolio ministers - so that more than one issue can be progressed at any one time?

Eight months (or less) from now, we'll have found out if the flinty Dutton was as unelectable as most in Labor have assumed.

Already, though, he's done something more remarkable than scaring a nominally progressive government into quisling incrementalism. He's bullied and jawboned it into fights with its own natural constituencies. With climate activists, women, unions, universities and their students, renters, migrants, Muslims, human rights advocates, gambling reformers, and now with the Queer community.

In the wake of the Voice disaster, a traumatised government is jumping at shadows. How it must have stung when Dutton later claimed he wasn't even worried about the questions being included.

Belatedly, Labor is coming to realise slow and (un)steady isn't cutting it.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers dialled up the energy in a scripted speech on Monday, tagging Dutton as dangerous and the "most divisive leader of a major political party in Australia's modern history".

There's some evidence for this charge but it is still quite a call if you consider Tony Abbott's relentless negativity and the overall 'witch-ditching' vibe he engendered through 2010-13 (to wit, before he won!)

That the government's second-most senior figure has escalated and personalised the attack at this point in the cycle hints at Labor's private research about Dutton and points to the shrill tone of an electoral contest shaping as a whole lot closer than envisaged.

Chalmers is no hot-head and the "divisive" tag is no mere improvisation. Remember, it was the charge Dutton himself deployed to devastating effect against Albanese's ill-fated Voice referendum.

Clinically, if coldly, Dutton reasoned if he could crack the Uluru agenda's nation-healing glow, reframing its inclusive intent as a secret agenda for securing special rights and privileges based on "race", the whole card-house would collapse. And with it, much prime ministerial prestige.

Viewed in this light, Chalmers' comments become political jujitsu - the Japanese "yielding art" of using an opponent's superior strength to put him (or her) on the floor.

In declaring Dutton a divisive and dangerous force, Labor is tacitly acknowledging the Liberal has gained momentum through his pro-Israel bullishness and blanket opposition to asylum seekers from Gaza, his calls for cuts to spending, stronger borders, stronger anti-Beijing hawkishness, his nuclear energy pivot, and his muscular attacks on the "green teals".

Thus, Labor is conceding one point to land another - that while the Liberal leader speaks in clean straight lines, this portends a certain un-Australian ferocity - that he is instinctively a punisher, an intolerant dismantler rather than a generous builder of communities.

Expect both leaders to continue advancing negatives each other informed by the responses of ordinary voters through focus group testing.

From Dutton, it will be that Albanese is a "weak" prime minister atop a weak and timid government.

For Labor the charge is Dutton is a hard-hearted and "divisive" ideologue, incapable of subtlety and hostile to a fairer, more diverse Australia.

Which narrative will ring truest with hard-bitten voters come election time, weak but inclusive or strong but divisive?

Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.