When former prime minister Birgitte Nyborg started a new political party in Denmark during season 3 of Borgen, her fictional initiative reflected changing times in Denmark.

The flashpoints were sustainable energy, immigration from war-torn countries, and movements among old international alliances.

Marked shifts among the political and media classes, as well as voter behaviour, now reflect the non-fictional world in a fast-changing political landscape. It’s on full display each day, with any semblance of international order disrupted by a wildly capricious American president, ruthless warmongers in Russia and Israel and a rising economic giant in China.

Outside the realm of fiction in Australia, it’s worth being mindful that Robert Menzies started a new non-Labor political party in 1944 when he saw the United Australia Party was not going to be a viable party for the times, with Hitler’s war about to end and present a very different political world than the one that existed in 1939.

During the 80 years since the war, Menzies’ Liberal Party appears to have abandoned its liberal roots and is now widely seen as a spent force on the right, appealing increasingly to an ageing and conservative demographic voter base that is a pale reflection of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement in the US, rather than a party of Australian small-l liberals inspired in their philosophic outlook by the likes of John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham and John Locke.

With 220 MPs opposing Kier Starmer’s stance on Gaza, the British prime minister made a jump of logic last week in threatening to recognise the state of Palestine. The threat was built on a curious condition: If by September Israel hasn’t stopped committing its unrelenting series of war crimes against Palestinian citizens, Britain would recognise the state of Palestine.

No other country, of the 170-odd counties which recognise Palestine, has come to the issue on quite those terms. It would be like Australia saying to China “If you don’t stop persecuting the Uyghurs, we will recognise the state of Taiwan”. There is a quid pro quo of sorts somewhere in there, but if it seems like a non-sequitur, it is probably because it is a non-sequitur.

But Starmer is showing signs of desperation. While he is finally attemping to sound tough on Israel’s behaviour as a pariah state, over the past two weeks since 24 July, he can’t have helped observing that more than 600,000 British citizens signed up to a new political party launched by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. The number of Corbyn’s signatories dwarf the dwindling Labour Party membership, which now stands at a lowly 309,000, having haemorrhaged members over the past few months. Starmer cannot have failed to see that the writing is on the wall, and it’s now writ large.

Corbyn’s move, along with the strong voter signal from Labour’s left, is a reminder that voters want to see their political representatives standing for a cause. They are there to do a job, of course, and need to show they are competent, but the job needs to be couched in the language of a moral good. Australia’s former Opposition leader Peter Dutton knew that well, and never failed to couch his unwavering support for Israel as a contest between the forces of good and those of evil, focusing his relentless attacks on the “pussyfooting” of Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong on Gaza as a failure to stand for “moral clarity”.

With the blessing of the New South Wales Supreme Court, about 100,000 voters came out on 3 August to march across Sydney Harbour bridge in support of Palestine, while the Victorian police desperately attempted to thwart a similar march over King Street bridge on the same day.

Yet curiously, there is no comparable backbench parliamentary challenge to the Albanese cabinet in Australia on its problematic Gaza stance, unless the lone MP, Ed Husic, can be taken as amounting to a challenge. As a former cabinet minister, Husic is now permitted to express a view on Palestinian statehood that Fatima Payman was not allowed to express a year ago. And plenty of Labor branches are in open revolt on Gaza among other things, the other things being climate, Albanese’s failed National Anti-Corruption Commission, AUKUS and the US alliance.

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation operates as a third party from the right and the Greens are a third party from the left, but each is in an unhappy and often rancorous dance of political death with the LNP and ALP respectively, where being mutually out of step is more common than swaying in anything like harmonious alignment.

A big difference between Australian and British politics is that there is no one with the standing of Corbyn from the left in Australia to lead a third-party challenge. The only person who could possibly do such a thing is Malcolm Turnbull. He is a centrist but carries baggage, having lost the confidence of centrist voters leaning both right and left when he held power from 2015-18, before falling victim to a successful Murdoch-led assault on his prime ministership.

That said, Turnbull remains a highly articulate figure on national and international issues affecting Australia. He has instant voter recognition from both sides of the political aisle and continues to be a formidable advocate on issues that move him. The most prominent of those issues is his opposition to AUKUS, a policy initiative that many voters see as linked to Australia’s desperation not to offend Trump on any issue. Primary among those issues is Trump’s singular support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s war crimes.

Turnbull also has a longstanding position on sustainable energy and climate change, even though he lacked the political nous to progress the issue when he was in power.

Apart from Husic, there might be active support for a new party from people like Zoe Daniel and Adam Bandt, both now without parliamentary seats. Of members holding seats, Anne Aly must have trouble keeping her mouth shut these days as would Tanya Plibersek, both of whom are Albanese Government ministers. The longstanding independent Andrew Wilkie might be tempted to join a party that supported a genuinely robust anti-corruption commission and which opposed AUKUS and blind allegiance to Trump’s America First. A few Greens might make the shift. All is speculation in a Labor Party that does not leak and demands not just ministerial solidarity, but also caucus solidarity by MPs. It is anyone’s guess about who might harbour serious thoughts of defection among Labor MP ranks, but they would exist. It’s not unlike the Australian Football League: everyone knows there are gay AFL players, but no player has ever put his hand up, so officially there are none.

It’s doubtful that a new party could attract a big fish such as Jason Clare or Tony Burke these days because they are on upward career trajectories within a party with a 94-seat majority, albeit with a 34% primary voter support base. The same would probably apply to Clare O’Neil, who was treated shabbily by Albanese when moved from the Home Affairs portfolio following a High Court decision on indefinite refugee detention in 2023 that Albanese failed to support. And there’s Mark Dreyfus, who now appears to be a genuinely lost soul, but is also seemingly an entrenched Zionist.

If you were to write a fictional narrative about such a party, it would be necessary to include among the cast a media figure. As it turns out, the former Guardian Australia political editor Katherine Murphy resigned from her media job with Albanese in June and might be looking for something interesting, and former Liberal Party leader John Hewson might be a more than useful political adviser, along with former NSW premier Bob Carr. Winning the services of former political strategists like Sean Kelly or Niki Savva would be a coup, but worth a try.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.