Amy Remeikis is known for her incisive political commentary and experience as a journalist at Fairfax and Guardian Australia. She is currently Chief Political Analyst at the Australia Institute.
It’s not hard to see why the politics of grievance is flourishing in this environment. It has fertile ground. People are angry because it’s one of the only things they can still afford, and yet the economy is still being viewed through the lenses of those who have the most.
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Hanson, who Albanese barely names let alone fights, is enough to attract those who are tired of Labor not having the fights that matter. In the absence of anything to believe in, people turn to anger and being told they’re right. Again, the fight doesn’t go away just because someone doesn’t want to have it, it just goes elsewhere.
Albanese is a politician’s politician and a very effective negotiator – but in terms of reading the room, he tends to see things the way he thinks they should be, rather than how they are. This is not a problem for those who agree with his view of the world, but it is for those wanting more.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but Pauline Hanson and others in her far-right ilk may be among Australia’s most open politicians – at least when it comes to their agendas.
So much of our politics is a distraction. And deliberately so. Fake fights over nuclear – no one in mainstream politics actually believes nuclear would ever happen, but both Labor and the Coalition are happy to fight over it, because it gives both a point of difference in an increasingly political monoculture.
It says a lot about who holds control in today’s world by how we talk about AI. The “inevitability” that surrounds the AI conversation – as in, there is no choice but to just adopt this technology, so get on board or get left behind – is, of course, a fallacy.
Of all the stupidity Australians have accepted as “normal”, our relationship with house prices may be among the most ridiculous. This nation is in the grips of a media panic over a small blip in house prices. This blip apparently deserves wall-to-wall coverage and dire warnings of impending doom.
Labor finished the last parliamentary week on a high. There is a feeling within caucus that the party has a plan for dealing with One Nation, helped along by the fact the Coalition is completely without one.
If there is one thing all leaders should be focused on, it should be maintaining trust. In our institutions and our democracy, and all those foundations which underpin it. Which is why it is so strange that the federal press gallery continues to hold its Midwinter Ball.
You can almost trace the rise of political discontent across Western democracies to the increase of big dumb utes on our roads. This is not about class or the type of person attracted by the road rambos, but what their popularity says about us as societies.
