Foreign aid doesn’t come at the expense of struggling Aussies
If anything, the more generous a country is to foreigners, the more it usually provides for its own people.
Much of One Nation’s Farrer victory will be put down to right-wing, grievance-fuelled anger. As ever, politics will move further to the right to accommodate it. But politics-as-usual won't cut it with under-45s who are fed up and happy to show it.
Mon 11 May 2026 12.00 AEST
Photo: AAP Image/Susie Dodds
Anger is one of our foundational emotions. We can instantly recognise it in another human. And in politics we love to let it drive the drama of policy, and how it’s covered.
One Nation won the Farrer by-election on Saturday, claiming its first seat in the Lower House.
Much of that victory will be put down to people’s anger, the “f–k the lot of youse” attitude that Rob Harris, reporting for the Nine Newspapers, identified in his profile of voters in the town of Griffith.
We can recognise that anger fairly easily – right-wing anger and the politics of grievance is an ongoing theme in a lot of Western nations.
We know how to deal with it – our politics moves further to the right. That those policies don’t work to address the root cause of the grievance doesn’t matter, politicians can tell the media they are doing something, that they recognise the anger, they understand it, and they are responding to it.
Most of the time, that means doing exactly what they have always done, but, as Tim Dunlop wrote in a recent piece, focused on Anthony Albanese’s most recent Western Australian address, dressing it up a little with rhetoric.
Angus Taylor is coating his speeches in One Nation sauce, further pushing the bounds of acceptable public racism, fear and public enemies. Albanese prefers to crumb his speeches with progressive notes, while dipping into One Nation’s sauce. Underneath though, it’s mostly the same policies, mostly just business as usual. At least when it comes to the economics.
We treat that anger as justified, as something politicians need to respond to, even if the response is harmful to the economically vulnerable. That’s the sensible reaction. So Pauline Hanson, a multimillionaire, can fly into a struggling electorate, on a multimillion-dollar donated private plane, and tell people they should be angry at people poorer than them, and that makes total sense.
We’ll move the whole body politic to the right rather than address the failing infrastructure of the regions, the poorer health access, the unfair resource allocation, be it water or land, while telling people they can’t have any assistance in the budget because that would make inflation worse.
But there is a shift coming, whether the political and media classes are ready for it or not.
We are so used to responding to right-wing anger, to waging culture wars with no end but plenty of harm (as long as it’s not to us) to motivate voters, and to create drama for headlines, that we’re not seeing the underlying generational anger that transcends what we’ve created as “normal”.
The Albanese government has done a lot to tease that Tuesday’s budget is going to address generational inequality. People younger than 45 are shaping up as the prized voter class, with gen X shifting into retirement and baby boomers moving into aged- care homes.
And largely, people under 45 do not care about the budget rules that have set coverage since the Howard years. They do not care about budget debt. They do not care about spending caps. They do care about cuts to services, and the unfairness of our tax and subsidy system, which allows some to hoard wealth and assets while others have none.
Telling someone under 45, who is struggling to pay their housing and other living costs, who is seeing no wage growth, who does not have a pathway to promotion because their industry is undercutting their work with AI or other tech advancements, that cutting the capital gains tax discount may cut investment isn’t going to get the sage nodding along that commentators usually expect.
Younger workers are savvy enough to know that government leg-ups for that sort of capital isn’t returned to the workers – it usually goes to shareholders. National debt doesn’t matter when you can’t see a way out of yours, let alone live a life unburdened by it.
The white-hot anger around the Reserve Bank’s decision to increase interest rates – something Michele Bullock herself acknowledged won’t actually do anything to curb inflation – just so it can be seen to be doing something, anything for the market, and win the praise of the economic hawks that dominate our media, should point to the fact that those in power have dismissed a certain anger for too long.
That some within the Albanese government are alert enough to it to at least frame some of their own budget commentary around it is something. But it will take some time before material action follows those words.
It will take even longer for political and economic commentators to learn that what they think is “sensible” and “rational” doesn’t cut it with people who rightly don’t consider their own situations to be sensible or rational.
This sort of anger is usually dismissed as the folly of youth – or, worse yet, just another leftie rant – but it’s growing. And it’s feeding the overall feeling of discontent.
This gives the “f–k the lot of youse’’ narrative a boost. But ignoring the undercurrents means it’s not as easily solved as politicians – and the media that covers them – might suggest. And continuing to push it off is not the answer.
Amy Remeikis is a contributing editor for The New Daily and chief political analyst for The Australia Institute
This article was first published on The New Daily.
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If anything, the more generous a country is to foreigners, the more it usually provides for its own people.
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