Max Chandler-Mather

Thanks for having me.

Oh, two things.

One, massive increases in financial stress.

And it's been occurring since COVID and it's really starting to bite.

And I think there is a wild underestimation actually at the moment, just how much financial pain people are in.

There's over a million kids in poverty in Australia at the moment.

There are pensioners, single parents making tough choices at the supermarket about whether or not they buy enough food to eat that week or pay the rent.

kids going to school without shoes, all sorts of things.

And in a wealthy country like that, that's unacceptable.

And it is starting to bite now into higher and higher income brackets.

And that pain is being underestimated by almost the entire political class.

And the second feature is people are disconnected from politics.

You know, in the 20th century, you have these large collective institutions like trade unions that represented 50% of the workforce.

Trade union densities collapse now to 13%.

And people are disconnected from politics in that sense and experience politics as an individual.

And so I think there's this void at the moment.

I think One Nation, for a lot of people, are the chance to break with the status quo in some way, to at least start to change things because of the pain they're in, because of the sense of lack of hope that they have in mainstream politics and the sense that, and they're not wrong, the sense that the political class treats them with contempt.

And they do.

There is a real grain of truth in the fact that at the same time as politicians are paid over $200,000 a year, they keep turning around and talking about the fact that we all have to make tough choices.

Well, they don't have to choose between feeding their kids and paying the rent.