Somewhere in Australia is a party that is for the decent life, proudly lived, respected on its own terms, where a life of work and service is honoured.
Clearly it has not been the two main parties this last decade…
When my father-in-law retired from a working life in metal, he did not devote himself to golf – despite being a scratch player. He was a boatie, so he walked down to the volunteer marine rescue at Mandurah, joined, and in time captained one of the craft. Nobody made him. Nobody paid him. He was keen to do it and proud to have done it, and when the radio went at two in the morning, a man in his late sixties took out a crew onto black water because people he had never met were in trouble there.
Almost everything Australian politics has forgotten how to talk about is on that boat: a skill mastered over decades, a community that asked for it, the respect of being looked to for help, and a way of giving back that nobody framed as a debt and nobody dismissed as just a pastime.
Now consider who politics thinks that man is. To one side of the conversation he is a beneficiary of luck, the Boomer generation, who against all evidence ‘had it easy’ and owes reparations to the young – as though his generation didn’t come up through rationing’s shadow, the postwar rebuild, conscription ballots, the 70s inflation shock, 18 per cent mortgage rates my mother-in-law still remembers, two recessions, and – in Victoria – a state-bank collapse. To another side he is an employee or consumer, almost meaningless once the market stops bidding for his hours or his patronage.
Many of the younger generation, children of urban professionals and educated at university in the liberal arts, see the comfort of an older generation but not the efforts or wounds behind it. They develop a third perspective: that the good life – the opportunity to enjoy an açaí bowl for breakfast outside, at a bar in Sydney’s inner-west – is no less than a human right, something they are owed – an entitlement to be invoiced, rather than a possibility that is worked towards and achieved.
Three different registers but one similar package of views that discount ordinary citizens who have worked hard, and continue to do so, for a decent living – who take pride in their work and deserve respect for what they have achieved.
Here is the whole moral proposition of what follows, and it fits into a series of short points: ‘Achieving a decent life does not then create a debt to political parties or subsequent generations, obsolescence and disrespect are not verdicts you must accept on aging, and the good life is not simply another entitlement that the latest generation may invoice its predecessors. A healthy, confident country honours the achievements of its citizens from big to small.’
The constituency nobody serves
The people who genuinely believe my points in their bones are not difficult to find. Among political leaders, there was the combination of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, John Howard, and most discounted, Tony Abbott. Among voters they are the electorates feeding One Nation here and MAGA, Meloni, and Farage abroad – tradespeople, farmers, carers, drivers, nurses, teachers, the regional and outer-suburban families my engine tracks seat by seat.
In an indication of how far the ever-elusive centre has moved, commentary often calls these electorates either far right if they have a conservative tradition, or populist if they have a Labor background. The attraction these electorates see in insurgent parties is not, despite all the intellectual debate, an ideology. The person on the train doesn’t go out with a ledger to dissect the nominal correctness or theoretical perfection of a party’s thinking – whether it is free enterprise or social welfare or common ownership. Nor are they obsessed about an oppressive elite or so furious that they want to destroy some hated upper class. Critics using the term, ‘populist’ are consciously or not trying to drag into the picture a heritage that goes back to the French Revolution and doesn’t exist at scale in Australia.
Trump sells recognition performed at events and rallies. Farage sells the idea of meaningful communities. Meloni sells the story of a nation with her voters in it. Hanson sells the vision of not being relentlessly sneered at. Pride, respect, and honour for everyone – that is the entire product line. And when it comes to the market, the product clears the shelves every time because the established parties struggle these days to supply it.
The challenge is to be credible in offering the machinery of a decent life. Labor and Liberals are rushing now to present themselves in a way that better reflects new realities. However, they will come up against a track-record and a biographical signature that undermine credibility. The gap between the human desire for a decent life and the political machinery to deliver it has grown to be the largest one in Australian politics.
Once again, I’m talking not just about national politics or community sentiment, but individual life. Research on ageing keeps finding the same thing: people live longer when they are woven into the fabric of society, when they are respected, and when they are asked to be involved – when they are sought for their hands, their experience, or their judgment.
Connection and being needed predict survival on the same order as quitting smoking. A politics that tells millions of people they are debtors, that their spent lives and earned money are no more than something to be raided, that they are unwanted leftovers until polling or the vote doesn’t go the government’s way is not simply insulting. It is, quite literally, life shortening – and my engine’s atomisation index counts the consequences electorate by electorate.
Four words, two pictures
Life, pride, respect, service. Four nouns, and the immediate danger is that they congeal into a brochure. Every failing party in the West has a values page. What the target electorates want is not a platform – and here the Liberal rebuild, circling yet another comprehensive, costed, multi-page policy process, is making a category error.
The detailed platform is a signal but to the symbolic economy, not to the material one – to editors, donors, intellectuals, professionals. A signal that one is serious, but in a credentialed way. Yet the voters who have departed don’t read footnotes or appendices. And they are correct not to. In the same way scaremongers say populist and imply guillotine, even genocide, leaders say detail and imply results. Yet anyone who’s worked within business or finance will tell you that detail has never guaranteed implementation or outcomes – while footnotes or appendices suggest, in practice, a lack of clear direction.
Instead, we should develop one or two concrete pictures from which, like the sharp end of a wedge, everything else is assumed to flow. Here are two pictures, and everything else follows from them.
The first picture is a wage and a house. In 1907 an Australian judge defined the fair wage as what lets a working man keep a family in frugal comfort – the Harvester standard, this country’s native invention, the decent life written into law before almost anywhere else worldwide. We built a settlement on it, but then we dismantled it and told our workers the market had spoken.
The picture to restore is one sentence long: an environment where a full-time wage on a trade or in a profession houses a family in reach of their workplace. And the key instrument is just one number: the Harvester Index, published every year. Can the relevant median full-time wage achieve this, city by city – put it beside the inflation figure on the news, and govern until the answer is yes.
It is not, I should quickly add, a wage mandate but a report card the whole country can mark. Housing supply, energy costs, migration composition, tax – every fight finds its place in the queue behind that number, which is the point: the voter doesn’t need the appendix, doesn’t need always to worry about the mechanics, because the number is the accountability.
The second picture is the boat. Service that is honoured, at every age, priced so the honour is real. At the front of life this could include exchange – a funded degree or trade in return for years of service, in uniform or in the emergency services or, longer-served, in the understaffed wards and classrooms; both sides pay, so belonging is earned, not advertised.
In the middle of life: the city professional handed what his symbolic economy doesn’t always offer – physical, community engagement in voluntary services. And at the far end, Mandurah: the retired metalworker asked to captain a marine rescue boat, because forty years of skill is a national asset and everybody on that jetty knows it.
Indeed, the boat is yet another exchange: this time linking young and old rather than individual and state – the young learn the water, the old are asked for judgment. The appetite for both types of bargain is not hypothesised, but already existing. There are internet platforms where the young trade their labour for board, formation, and belonging; there are podcast platforms which link experience or insight with the appetite for learning. People are paying to grow and to be of use. Elsewhere we have the ADF gap year, the volunteer emergency service; in the past, America had the GI bill. The challenge is not conceptual or demand-driven; it is more that Australia has not properly asked.
These two pictures are more than enough for parties to start on.
The point is not words – as some leaders think – nor is it appendices, as other leaders think. It is the evolution of policy as leaders pursue concrete scenarios: for example, introducing a master-tradesman title with the prestige of a doctorate, removing degree requirements from public jobs not needing them, incentivising job experience over the increasing number of PhDs that are not truly useful, and ensuring vital community roles for experienced elders – not just those young professionals who are less interested in the job itself and a lot more interested in their future CV.
The whole thing doesn’t need to be pre-announced as some visionary package. The risk of over-planning has been clear since at least the 1970s. The process can be more intuitive; a system of discovery. The picture becomes a heuristic; policies become the furniture. The outcomes are visual and concrete, not proposed and ethereal.
Denmark – plotting an almost unique path in Western politics – offers some enlightening examples, not least its early retirement scheme under the real-world slogan, ‘It’s Arne’s turn now.’
The sentence
Any party could pick this up; that is what makes it a test rather than an endorsement. It is Labor’s inheritance by way of Harvester and the party’s abandoned voters. It is the Liberals’ by way of the Forgotten People, if they could stop drafting appendices long enough to notice. It is what One Nation would build if One Nation were given the opportunity to build.
But a package is only as credible as the life that carries it, and my engine scores that constraint as a factor in its own right: promises are discounted by the distance between the pledge and the biography. Trump and Meloni were believed not because their plans were better but because their lives made the pursuit plausible.
Taylor’s problem is the inverse, and it is structural: an Oxford and McKinsey résumé promising to restore the material economy is the symbolic economy asking for trust in translation – maximum discount. Albanese’s council-flat origin bought credibility once; three decades of apparatus have repriced it, because the signature test is not where you started but what your subsequent, adult life proves you would fight for.
And the market has just spoken twice: in the space of six weeks, Labour in London and Labor in Melbourne both defenestrated leaders in desperation – Burnham the chameleon everyman installed, Allan gone four months from an election as concern about One Nation rises – parties hurriedly reaching for corrected signatures and finding, in a pipeline now built to manufacture the wrong biographies, no more than empty signifiers.
The winner in the process needs more than a party room’s vote: the winning team needs a messenger whose biography makes the promise easy to believe. Given that messenger, the victor buys the largest unserved constituency in the country with the two plainest ideas in this column: a published number and an honoured invitation. Currently Hanson stands in poll position.
And the stake goes on the record, as everything else in my series of articles does: if a party runs the two pictures cleanly – a wage that houses; service that is respected – behind a leader whose life fits the promise, and the battler electorates do not move toward it within two elections, then I have misread what those electorates want, and I will say it.
I don’t expect to do so. Not because I’m good at forecasting the future, but because the demand signal is already out there in the world.
Every time my father-in-law took a boat onto black water because there was an emergency at 2am – however stupid the emergency – he would come back exhausted but happy and proud, even if no one knew about the effort.
Government is at risk of tipping over from casual indifference about community respect to something more serious and detrimental to social fabric. How can we gauge the size of this indifference despite party PR or its assertions? One test is by comparing what programmes exist and how they are designed.
A government party that is for the decent life, proudly lived, respected on its own terms, that honours service in any form at all ages, does not yet exist – the leader that achieves it will have a background that instinctively understands and naturally reaches out for the world I am describing. The CFA in Victoria and equivalent teams in other states will continue to combat fires just as the rescue boats in Mandurah, on a far smaller scale, will continue to help sailors out at sea. People at the local level still do the right thing, even as parties spend their own time obsessing over soundbites and comprehensive footnotes.
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