Another Australian flag is going up in my street in regional NSW. Unlike the regional Australia Chris Bowen spoke of at the National Press Club last week, our village isn’t a suburb. Many of the towns and villages out here are too small to have suburbs. I’d wager Bowen thinks the outer edges of the major capitals count as regional Australia. That level of out-of-touchness is common in our political class.
When Angus Taylor spoke about One Nation as a response to the Liberal Party’s failings, he argued that putting a match to the system would only drive up costs for voters. Better, he said, to back a Liberal Party that returned to its core values. The trouble is that ‘core values’ are often just a slogan. Parties claim them when convenient and abandon them when the polling shifts. In a liberal democracy, values are what people actually hold, within the law and without trampling on others. They are not marketing slogans.
I’ve long heard the ‘fair go’ held up as a core Australian value. Kevin Rudd once called it a ‘fair shake of the sauce bottle’. It reminded me of the opening of Strictly Ballroom, all high-pitched cultural cringe and middle-aged theatricality. If Rudd had said ‘fair suck of the sav’, he’d have been closer to the real thing – an irreverent up-yours to the establishment.
Today I presented signed copies of Aaron Patrick’s The Last Battle to friends and neighbours. Aaron had spoken at the inaugural Lone Pine Gala Dinner I wrote about in these pages. (Thanks to Peter and his son, who flew in from Melbourne and Brisbane after reading the piece, and for saying g’day.)
As the books changed hands, the talk turned quickly to Ben Roberts-Smith, then to the state of politics, then to why Pauline Hanson seems the only one who gets it. Then to politicians’ superannuation – ordinary Australians can’t touch theirs until a certain age, yet we pay for politicians while they’re in office and keep paying them after they leave on terms most of us will never see.
People are livid. This is no longer tall-poppy syndrome or healthy scepticism. They want the whole system burnt to the ground. For many, Roberts-Smith was doing his duty while the political class looked after itself, as it always does.
Anecdotes of women in their seventies living in cars after losing their houses are everywhere. Meanwhile politicians tell us to tighten our belts, or worse, take the roof racks off. Labor MPs film TikTok-style videos while people are weed-spraying, driving trucks, rouseabouting, working in cafés and cleaning. I did an eight-hour barista shift in a regional café last Sunday. It nearly killed me. I did harder things in the Army, but in my late fifties that shift was hell. Imagine a pollie lasting the distance.
The divide between ordinary Australians and the political class could not be greater. Politicians lecture us about what they stand for and then do the opposite. They may not all have lived by the skin of their teeth, but few have ever scrounged for durrie butts while properly down and out.
The gap shows in the numbers. Jim Chalmers and Chris Bowen post ‘the facts’ on housing and energy. Westpac says mortgage applications are down 20 per cent, Commonwealth Bank 15 per cent, while yet another renewable energy project heads into administration.
The Coalition cannot atone for its own failings. People remember it is part of the problem. They are already waiting for Tim Wilson to challenge Angus Taylor now that Andrew Hastie has been, as veterans might put it, tap-dancing on his bits in golf shoes. I cannot picture Tim Wilson walking into a real regional pub, the kind that exists outside the outer suburbs our political class mistakes for the bush.
I still think Angus Taylor has the goods to make a go of it, but trust in the major parties is gone. The wets in the Liberals are as bad as Labor and the Teals. The Nationals retain a base, yet it is scattered and crumbling where One Nation is advancing. Many everyday punters worry that One Nation lacks the capacity to govern. At least it is representing their concerns.
The bottom line is simple. The major parties do not grasp how deeply they are hated. That is because the political class is not merely out of touch. It lives in a different world.
While many politicians enjoyed European summer holidays, ordinary Australians shivered their way to work – truckies and factory hands, tradies in the frost, cleaners battling cold and damp, retail staff dealing with self-entitled bush lawyers, country servos wrestling regulations designed for big business, and small operators forced to restructure trusts because Labor wants more of other people’s money.
The Opposition resembles that old joke book on the achievements of the Hawke government – an entire volume of blank pages, complete with front and back matter. It has the appearance of an opposition but opposes almost nothing. Ordinary punters can see it.
One Nation has tapped into the discontent of people who have had enough of self-entitled politicians feathering their own nests while shafting everyone else.
Ordinary Australians identify with Ben Roberts-Smith because he is a hero. He did the dirty work. He did his duty. And he was shafted for it.
Any wonder they want to put a match to the whole system.
Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you would like to support his writing, or read more of Michael, please visit his website.
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