Max Chandler-Mather

They don't have to give up on hope that their kids will ever be able to buy a home.

They don't have to figure out how they live on a pension that doesn't increase as fast as the cost of things at the moment.

So, you know, I think there's that as well.

And I think we kind of underestimate how smart people are, ordinary people are, and recognising that a lot of the political class does treat them with contempt and so they are responding in kind.

Well, obviously, we could always do better.

I mean, I think it's a broader question about how we think about change.

And I've been very clear for a long time that change is not going to come through negotiations with the Labor Party or sort of tinkering around the edges in a broken political system.

And, you know, that might sound a little bit trite, but in really basic terms, in my experience in parliament, the way mainstream politics works is to serve large corporate interests.

And certainly that's the role of the Labor Party these days.

And if you...

might disagree with that.

It's worth just looking at some basic facts that we've seen massive declines in real wages at the same time we've seen big increases in corporate profits, the same time as the gas industry is making hundreds of billions of dollars, the Labor government would rather they don't increase taxes on them, or at the same time as they decide they're not going to increase the pension or build enough public housing for people to live in or do anything really meaningful to improve people's lives.

So there's that.

And I do think we can always do better at articulating that and recognizing that pain.

So there's that.

I think also there's an organizational question, like for us really to reach people, we do need to be at their doors.

We do need to be at their communities at a much bigger scale than we are right now.

And not there to preach or to tell people what to think, but literally just to ask what's going on in their lives and prove that we're an institution and a movement that in the first instance, once their politics dictated and directed by what people say they want changed in their lives.

There's that as well.

And then finally, I think there's a lot of work to do to demonstrate that as a political movement, we are in opposition to the political establishment.