Max Chandler-Mather

You now need to earn a six-figure income to afford rent in any capital city across Australia.

let alone think about ever being able to buy a house and what that means for your comfortable retirement or being able to look after your kids.

You're starting to think about starting a family or you have, and you're recognizing that it's almost impossible to make ends meet in those circumstances.

And I think some people will start to feel angry about that and that's entirely justifiable.

And in fact, to be honest, what's remarkable to me actually is how little anger there is compared to just how unfair everything is at the moment.

People are being very reasonable and patient, I would argue.

But then there's a lot of also people who just feel apathetic because for them, and especially for millennials, I always ask this at forums, put up your hands if you've ever felt like you've had collective power over the political system or a sense that your involvement in politics would change anything.

And the vast majority of people say no because so often politics is something that's done to them rather than that's done with them.

And people are correctly surmising that a lot of politicians in Canberra just don't get it.

So I think there's a lot there.

We do need policies that speak to people in the sense that we show that we recognise things need to change at scale.

Rather than electricity rebates, we should be bringing the electricity system back into public hands and reversing privatisation.

Rather than just changing some of the negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts, why aren't we building public housing at the scale we used to at the same time and introducing rent caps?

There's a lot of stuff that I think we could be more forceful on as well from a policy perspective.

Well, people want change.

This is a moment where the economic and political systems that currently functions and works is decaying and breaking, and people want change.

And not just tinkering, they want a political movement that's willing to offer substantial change that is commensurate or relevant to the pain and loss of hope that people feel.

And that is evident across the country at the moment.

And the way I think about the rise of One Nation at the moment is a lot, and the way people are responding to it in the media and establishment politics, it reminds me a lot of the way people responded to Trump in 2016.

Like, oh my God, the patterns are sort of incredibly clear.