If you’re Australian (and your name isn’t Murdoch or Assange), getting on the front page in Britain isn’t easy.

It helps if you’ve got in a fistfight with a kangaroo. Or been arrested for captaining a motorised Esky along a legal roadway while drunk as a skunk.

Another thing that’ll rocket you up the British news algorithm, as Senator Lidia Thorpe established under laboratory conditions in Parliament’s Great Hall this week, is having a crack at a visiting monarch.

Senator Thorpe cemented her role as a one-woman federal stimulus package for the struggling Australian news industry on Monday when she shouted “F**k the colony!” at visiting King Charles, demanding a treaty and generating three distinct cycles of coverage.

First: the breaking news of her intervention as it happened.

Second: the schedule-flooding line-up of experts called in to TV and radio studios to assess the precise degree of Antipodean insult, and whether it was worse or better than Paul Keating putting his arm around the King’s late mother’s back on her visit to Sydney 32 years ago.

(Naturally, a healthy number of Australia’s radical free-speech advocates found themselves sufficiently unencumbered by prior engagements to pop up and call for the senator’s immediate sacking).

And third: Yesterday’s customary cocktail of national nonchalance/thrilledness when we GOT ON THE NEWS IN LONDON (“She’s Awful!”, groaned The Sun of the independent Victorian senator, whose raised fist and possum-skin also graced the front pages of The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express)

King Charles himself did not seem especially bothered. Being shouted at, after all, is pretty thin gruel, threat-wise, to a man who — on an Australian visit 30 years earlier — was shot at.

Moreover, Senator Thorpe — a charismatic rabble-rouser who divorced her Greens parents several years ago and has encountered an unusual degree of public interest in her love life — is basically the closest equivalent the Australian Parliament has to Prince Harry.

So, much as organisers in Parliament House must have blanched on Monday to hear the guest of honour loudly and publicly reprimanded for his personal links to a racist system of colonial oppression, it must calmly be remembered that this is not the King’s first rodeo on this front, even in his immediate family.

In this fracturing world, however, where the ability of politicians to command mainstream attention declines commensurately with the legacy news media’s ability to deliver it — the events of this week have been a good demonstration of what works.

And what works is conflict.

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The perverse incentive for politicians to generate conflict

This has always been true of political media coverage to a certain extent. In the very building where Senator Thorpe confronted the monarch, we in the media report far more zealously on the one-in-10 pieces of government legislation that are contested or controversial than we do the nine in 10 that pass rather unremarkably through the parliament.

That’s not as unreasonable as it sounds, by the way. Our parliament is designed to harness the benefits of adversarialism. Our system actively obliges the government — the wielder of formal power — to share a space with its opponents, to hear from those with whom it disagrees, and where necessary find a compromise. Disagreement in a democracy is not just a healthy thing, it’s a lever that we use to prise open difficult problems and sort through them rigorously, ensuring every perspective is heard.

Being able to cope with criticism, even when it’s unreasonable — in fact, especially when it’s unreasonable — is a mark of human maturity and confidence we are entitled to expect from our political leaders and monarchs, and indeed should practise ourselves wherever possible.

But the reasonable tendency to focus on conflict in political reporting creates a perverse incentive for politicians to generate it, and this phenomenon has worsened with the fracturing of media audiences.

Sometimes, the major parties will occupy broadly similar policy positions on a major issue, but feign a greater degree of difference in order to generate conflict, attract attention and recruit from the ranks of the outraged.

Backbenchers audition for advancement and TV minutes by being outrageous, trenchant or destructive. We reward them with screen time and eyeballs. Sometimes, in the face of a problem that would respond better to consensus and compromise, it makes more strategic sense to foment conflict or to portray one’s adversary as extreme and intractable, as stupid or malign.

Over the past few decades, this has certainly been true in climate change and immigration, both significant policy areas in which political consensus would have been useful and indeed probably existed at many junctures to a greater degree than might have been obvious from the spittle-flecked rhetoric.

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Collaboration earns trust from the governed as well

The other problem with our pro-conflict bias is that it under-rewards the hard work and goodwill required to achieve compromise, particularly in difficult or fissile policy areas.

In recent months, for instance, while the Parliament seemed ready to blow apart over everything from Gaza to immigration to housing, it might quite easily have been missed that various parties, working together, took difficult decisions and addressed some longstanding structural issues.

Reform of the exponentially costly aged care system, for instance, has been a too-hard-basket problem for decades. But lengthy negotiations between the Government and Opposition last month secured an extremely significant — and you’d have to say, given the tribalised state of politics, statistically unlikely — deal between the major parties and savings of $12.6 billion over 11 years.

Aged care is an extremely fertile ground for scare campaigns, but it’s likely you won’t hear one in this area because the government’s Aged Care Minister Anika Wells and her opposition counterpart Anne Ruston both have skin in the game; having worked on the reforms with a degree of collaboration, both parties now own it.

Similarly, the NDIS — born with bipartisan support back in the ferocious and divided final days of the Gillard minority government — this year underwent a redesign in which the government and opposition agreed on reforms that are promised to carve $14.4 billion from its rapidly-expanding budget over four years.

Balancing the need for financial sustainability with the interests and justified fears of society’s most vulnerable and habitually overlooked is delicate work, and compromise is always imperfect and messy. Conflict is unavoidable. But a democratic system in which participants trust each other to work collaboratively — and forgo opportunities for partisan shouting even when they are extremely tempting — is a system that earns trust from the governed too.