Sad to know it's not just us in wackadoo yanky-doodle land that suffers "business politics first, electorate last" type problems.
I hope you guys can get it sorted before it gets end-stage malignant like ours is.
It's not going to hit USA levels of insanity by any margin.
First, our politicians, even the conservative ones, aren't anywhere near as bible-thumping as yours. It's standard fare for American politicians to jump up with "God this, God that" but here, it's an anomaly.
Second, we already have instant-runoff voting. That means we can still vote for third parties without worrying about the spoiler effect. What this means is that the true right-wing whackos actually have separate parties rather than trying to all shoe-horn into the center-right party.
Take the "One Nation" party for example, with all their meme-worthy wackiness. They're a separate party here, vilified by both the right and left mainstream parties. However, if this was the USA with it's first-past-the-post system then they wouldn't exist as a separate party but would be a faction of the conservative party. So yes, we
do have Republican-level lunatics in politics here, however they're mostly cordoned off in their own fringe parties, not shoe-horned into diametrically opposed mega-parties.
However, I think some in the Ameripol thread wouldn't like these conclusions of instant-run-off: while it would be much harder for the far-right to hijack the center-right party in Australia because they're cordoned off in a multitude of fringe right-wing parties, by equal measure the far-left is
also cordoned off in a multitude of far-left parties rather than being represented in the center-left.