“Reaping a better dah-dì-dah of thing..ᵛ”

Modern Australian politics operates on a comfortable division of labour. On one side sits a Federal Labor government paralysed by neoliberal orthodoxy, obsessed with fiscal surpluses, small-target technocracy, and market-based solutions entirely indifferent to the structural inequalities its policy regime perpetuates.

On the other side you have a progressive movement full of moral outrage and quite good at railing against Labor’s moral bankruptcy, but which is completely disinterested in the actual work of building and wielding direct state power.

This isn’t just frustrating, it’s dangerous. In the vacuum left by Labour’s technocratic inaction and the progressive left’s moral equivalent of a performance, the hard right is quietly getting ready to come in and eat.

When the Albanese government came in, it inherited a country that had been thoroughly trashed by decades of market fundamentalism: a housing market that has become entirely financialised with housing treated as a speculative asset, stagnant real wages, a raft of underfunded and eroded public services and an energy transition which has been left to the vagaries of corporate capital. Labor’s governing philosophy has remained utterly conventional. Frightened of corporate reaction and the conservative media, Labor has adopted ‘small target’ governance as a permanent mindset.

Rather than launching a massive state-led public housing build to tackle an unprecedented housing crisis, the government relies on complex, financialised equity schemes and the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF)—mechanisms designed specifically to avoid disrupting private developers. Its focus on public finance chases budget surpluses instead of providing direct relief, abandoning the core argument that government spending can serve the public good.

The inevitable outcome is massive voter alienation. The working-class suburbs and the younger generation in particular see the two-party system as a choice between two very similar brands of elite management. One is a bit more compassionate, the other a bit more austere, but in both cases it’s a choice between two systems fundamentally committed to protecting property owners’ wealth and corporate monopolies’ power.

Yet if Labor’s neoliberalism is the root of voter alienation, then the progressive response has too frequently been its silent partner.

Progressive politics has largely devolved into an exercise in critique and moral outrage. Pointing out the Abbott, Morrison, or Albanese governments’ ongoing hypocrisy on climate targets, housing, and social security offers a satisfying sense of righteousness, yet it remains entirely detached from any actionable strategy or credible plan to build and wield material power.

This is the trap of passive resistance: calling out injustice without the institutional leverage to force a realignment of economic power achieves nothing. It grants the critic a sense of moral purity while leaving working-class conditions unchanged. Without a constructive vision of material power, moral outrage doesn’t solve the problem—it simply perpetuates it.

More fundamentally, this misjudges how political vacuums are filled. When everyday Australians look at politics and see only government technocracy and opposition moralising, they don’t naturally gravitate toward democratic socialism—they turn to grievance.

This is precisely where the hard right finds its opening. Reactionary populism succeeds not through sound economic arguments, but by validating anger and weaponising economic pain into a culture war. Conservative figures readily address the genuine struggles of people in regional areas and outer suburbs—yet instead of targeting landlord tax breaks or soaring corporate profits, they scapegoat migrants, attack renewable energy initiatives, and rail against the “woke” urban elite.

To halt its drift toward reactionary populism, Australian progressivism must drop the comforting theatre of pure moral opposition and master the mechanics of building and wielding actual power.

First, we must move beyond cultural posturing to focus on universal material needs—delivering concrete outcomes that directly improve daily lives. That requires state-built affordable housing, publicly owned utilities to lower energy bills, and aggressive labour market intervention to drive up wages.

Second, building collective power requires looking beyond parliament. Electoral politics alone will never force a timid Labor government to break with neoliberalism. Genuine leverage demands strong trade unions, tenant groups, and community coalitions that can create real economic disruption and wring concessions from both capital and the state.

Finally, we must view the state as an engine of transformation rather than a mere target for protest. The government is not just a passive referee overseeing a private market; it can build, produce, and redistribute directly.

Australia simply can’t afford a political situation in which the governing party is the guardian of neoliberal orthodoxy and the opposition is simply the venue for moralising. As long as the left don’t present a serious, organised and materialist alternative to the way things are, the hard right are going to keep reaping the bitter harvest of public alienation.

Government at all.

It is virtual civil war in our own sovereign lands and permanent warfare abroad.

John 🦘🇦🇺🌏 Sun 18102026