This high praise for ordinariness comes from a middle-aged, self-made businessman - Tjaart Reinkman, let's call him - born in Victoria around 1950 to Dutch parents. His commitment to ordinariness is many-layered. It began at school, where he wanted to fit in and hated his Dutch heritage: "I wanted to be just like everybody else. You know, like Barry Lugg and David Higgins and Graeme Boyle - just ordinary names, being ordinary people. I didn't want to be different in any way."

As Tjaart made his way into the wider world and joined the Young Farmers, ordinariness took on the pleasures of sociability, and the belief that one should judge people by who they are and what they could do. He still doesn't really trust people who are "bluebloods". In his business, Tjaart's belief in the importance of ordinariness is expressed in the care that he takes to remember his employees' first names and their personal circumstances, and his shunning of conspicuous displays of wealth. And it informs his concern at the way society has become more unequal over the past decade, and his compassion for people made redundant by the pace of social change - "the casualties of war", he calls them - who he meets as a volunteer at a regular church-run breakfast.

The people Tjaart serves there are also likely to describe themselves as ordinary. Mark Peel said of the poor people he talked with for his wonderful book Voices from the Lowest Rung that "If those to whom I spoke were best characterised as disadvantaged, they mostly called themselves ‘ordinary'."

For the past four years I have been writing a book with Anthony Moran called ‘Ordinary People's Politics', and Tjaart Reinkman is one of the people whose life and political outlook it describes. It comes out of a large, two-part interview project. The first phase was in the late '80s, when a group of researchers interviewed people at length for a project called ‘Images of Australia'. Then, earlier this decade, colleagues and I repeated that process, interviewing some of the original participants and some new ones.

Writing about ordinariness in today's political climate is a fraught enterprise. Since John Howard's election and the rise and fall of Pauline Hanson, being ordinary has become a contested political commodity. Howard's success is regularly attributed to his understanding of ordinary people, as in Paul Kelly's claim in the Australian after the 2004 election that Howard "doesn't have to imagine what ordinary Australians think - he has just to decide what he thinks because they are virtually the same". And the failings of Howard's opponents are regularly explained by their being out of touch with ordinary Australians.

Howard-haters are accused not of hating Howard's policies, but rather of hating all those Australians who voted for him. When David Williamson reflected in the Bulletin on the narrow materialism of his companions on a cruise ship, the Australian took up the cudgels against his sneering attack. The paper's energy came less from empathy for ordinary Australians than the chance, yet again, to attack the Left art-establishment as arrogant and self-interested. And Williamson's piece was less sociological observation than an expression of the Australian intelligentsia's continuing ambivalence about suburbia.

When I wrote in a Quarterly Essay last year about four ordinary people who voted for Howard, that ordinary chappie Christopher Pearson was seriously discomfited. He found them "too close for comfort to clichés from the world of Fountain Gate, the land of Kath & Kim" and chastised me for not tackling Howard's more middle-class supporters. But these were real people I was writing about, their words I was reporting, their lives I was describing - and why to them voting Liberal seemed a reasonable thing to do. Who is uneasy with ordinary Australians here?