Max Chandler-Mather

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.

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.