In an arena awash with beige, colourful politicians stick out.
The mavericks and firebrands are relatively rare in modern Australian politics, while the ideologues and idealists are slightly more common.
They are attracted to public service for largely different reasons. Idealists want to apply balm to ease society's ills and ideologues push for surgery particularly in areas such as abortion laws and gay rights. But do they add to or detract from the political debate?
Opposition spokesman on families, community services and indigenous affairs Tony Abbott is the classic ideologue on some issues.
Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts Peter Garrett is cast as the idealistic rocker who entered politics and lost his way.
Both had an interesting week.
Abbott hankered for the era when couples could divorce only if they proved one of 14 grounds such as adultery, habitual drunkenness or insanity. No-fault divorces were introduced in the mid-1970s.
Abbott's book Battlelines will be on the shelves soon, and he says, ''The point I make in the book is that a society that is moving towards some kind of recognition of gay unions, for instance, is surely capable of providing additional recognition to what might be thought of as traditional marriage.
''Something akin to a Matrimonial Causes Act marriage ought to be an option for people who would like it.
''Even though [marriage] is probably the most important commitment that any human being can make, in fact there are many, many contracts which are harder to enter and harder to get out of than this one.''
Abbott sees the book as a ''coming out'' for conservatism, suggesting strengthening ''traditional families values'' should be placed high on the Liberal Party's policy agenda.
Abbott is a capable, experienced politician with a bit of charisma who has made no secret of the fact that he still harbours leadership ambitions.
But his divorce proposal is ridiculous, particularly coming from a man who rails against the ''nanny state'' when it comes to issues such as penalising parents who smoke in cars when their children are in the back seat.
Former Labor premier Peter Dowding a barrister and family law specialist pointed out the folly of Abbott's idea.
''It's like Alice in Wonderland. It's like stepping through a looking glass into la-la land where Tony Abbott happily sits with his morality judging people while no one's life gets harder or easier,'' Dowding said.
''If people separate because they're unhappy with each other and live their lives apart, is he suggesting we want to go back to the 1960s and before when private investigators jump through windows and photograph people in bed?''
It also reinforces the caricature Abbott is the ''Mad Monk'' peddling his right-wing manifesto in an era when successful leaders are straddling the centre line.
To Abbott's left is Garrett, who helped forge the Nuclear Disarmament Party, was president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and belted out protest songs as lead singer of Midnight Oil.
''Mining companies, pastoral companies, uranium companies, collected companies, got more right than people, got more say than people'' is the refrain from the 1986 hit Dead Heart.
The media frequently played the song this week as the backing track when Garrett gave the green light for a uranium mine in South Australia and was denounced as a phoney, hypocrite and sell-out as a result.
The minister copped flak from the left and environmental groups. The Australian Conservation Foundation argued the mine would harm the environment and the Government's approval for the new operation was ''out of step with community opinion and inconsistent with Labor's commitment to best-practice industry standards''.
The foundation's nuclear-free campaigner David Noonan warned, ''Canberra has given a secretive American uranium company the green light to conduct activities it would not be permitted to conduct in the USA. General Atomics and its subsidiary Heathgate Resources will be directly dumping increased volumes of liquid radioactive and heavy metal wastes to the groundwater with no requirement for rehabilitation.'' Greens senator Scott Ludlam said Garrett had got it wrong. ''It's time we had an environment minister who stuck up for the environment. At the moment we just seem to have two mining and industry ministers. It's an industry that we shouldn't be getting any further into than we already are,'' Ludlam said.
Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull encapsulated the main criticism. ''This approval shows that Mr Garrett is as big a phoney as the Prime Minister. He spent his whole life denouncing uranium mining and wanting to shut it down,'' Turnbull said.
Garrett called it the ''same old song'' from opponents who seemed to forget that he had joined the Labor Party. ''When you recognise that the party has made a decision about a policy matter, over which you may have had a different opinion, you accept that party decision,'' Garrett said.
''I came into the Parliament to be a team player. I came into the Parliament to make a difference. I sit on the front bench proudly as a cabinet minister and as the best environment minister I can be, and this decision and all other decisions that I am making are entirely consistent with that.''
Garrett stressed that he had taken advice from Australia's best scientists before making the ''difficult decision'' about the uranium mine, which would be ''world's best practice in terms of disposal'' and subject to ''absolutely rigorous'' monitoring.
Garrett could have vied again for a seat on the cross benches but chose to join a major party, swapping the opportunity to publicly savage government policy for the chance to forge it.
It is ludicrous to expect that he would move into a main camp and start tearing down the tents. But he has surely disappointed those who want to cling to the caricature Garrett is the popular rocker who sang protest songs and wore the ''sorry'' suit during the Sydney Olympics closing ceremony.
Ideologues and idealists add colour to the Australia's political landscape. But do they raise the level of debate?
It's pointless to try to sway a right-wing ideologue when the debate centres on some issues, such as abortion, embryonic stem cell research and the ''sanctity of marriage''. It is the same with the left wing, which has its touchstone issues as well.
Regardless of their political affiliation, ideologues will fiercely argue their point, so opponents must lift their game to garner public support. But this doesn't necessarily translate into better laws, because compromise can be near impossible.
There should always be a place for idealism: ''cherishing or the pursuit of high or noble principles, purposes, goals''. These could range from apologising to indigenous Australians for past wrongs to rolling out the national broadband network.
Extraordinary things can be achieved when leaders take the proverbial leap of faith, challenge the status quo and share their vision on what the country could be.
As was recently pointed out by environmentalists, Martin Luther King would never have attracted the same level of support if he had stated, ''I have a catastrophe''.
Danielle Cronin is political correspondent for The Canberra Times.
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