The Great Opening for One Nation: How the Labor and the Left Abandoned the Australian Working Class
The Australian Labor Party was built by the calloused hands of shearers, miners, wharfies, and factory workers. It was the political arm of the union movement: rough, uncompromising, and singularly focused on the material conditions of working people. That party is dead. In its place stands a coalition of inner-city professionals, university-educated activists, and public-sector bureaucrats who regard the actual working class with a mixture of embarrassment and contempt.
This is not an Australian story alone. Across the Western world, centre-Left parties have undergone the same transformation. The British Labour Party under Blair traded the unions for the City of London. The American Democratic Party swapped the lunch-pail voter for the coastal donor class. In every case, the trade was the same: abandon the economic interests of workers in exchange for the cultural affections of the professional-managerial elite.
The result is a political class that speaks endlessly about "equity" and "inclusion," while presiding over the greatest transfer of wealth from young to old, from workers to asset-holders, and from citizens to global capital in modern history.
What Labor Used to Be
The old Labor Party understood something that the current one has forgotten: if you do not own capital, your only leverage is collective. The union card, the closed shop, the strike fund, these were not relics of a bygone era. They were the instruments by which ordinary men extracted a share of prosperity from those who would happily keep all of it.
The old Labor Party was suspicious of cheap labour, whether it arrived by immigration or by offshoring, because it understood that labour supply determines labour price. You cannot simultaneously champion the worker and flood the labour market. You cannot claim to represent the battler while importing their replacement.
The old Labor Party built public housing. It believed that a working man should be able to buy a home on a single income and raise a family without his wife being forced into the workforce. It regarded full employment as the central objective of economic policy, not an afterthought to be sacrificed for inflation targets set by unaccountable central bankers.
That party is unrecognisable today.
What Labor Became
The modern Labor Party is not a workers' party. It is a party of and for the professional class. Its MPs are overwhelmingly drawn from the legal profession, from union officialdom (itself now thoroughly professionalised), from NGO administration, and from political staffer roles that require no experience outside the Canberra-UN-NGO circuit.
These are people who have never worked a day on a factory floor. They have never worried about whether their industry will exist in five years. They have never looked at a paycheque and calculated how much is left after rent, fuel, and groceries. Their material security is absolute. Their interest in the working class is anthropological: a subject to be studied, a problem to be managed, a voting bloc to be harvested every three years with the right combination of rhetoric and targeted handouts.
Meanwhile, the party's actual policy agenda has been captured by causes that are not merely irrelevant to working people but actively hostile to their interests:
Mass immigration suppresses wages in construction, hospitality, and manufacturing. Labor supports it because the professional class likes cheap restaurants and because the Treasury likes GDP growth, even if per-capita living standards stagnate.
Climate policy imposes costs on energy, transport, and manufacturing that fall heaviest on those least able to absorb them. The professional class can afford solar panels and electric vehicles. The working class cannot; they pay the higher power bills and fuel prices and get lectured for complaining.
Identity politics divides workers along lines of race, gender, and sexuality, making class solidarity impossible. You cannot organise a workforce when you are teaching them that their white male co-worker is their oppressor.
Housing policy has been an unmitigated disaster. Labor has presided over, or failed to oppose, a system that treats housing as an asset class for the already-wealthy rather than shelter for working families. Negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts remain largely intact. First-home buyers are outbid by investors with equity portfolios. And the party that once built public housing now offers means-tested grants that get capitalised into higher prices.
The Liberal Party is no alternative. It offers the same immigration settings, the same deference to global capital, the same housing policies that benefit asset-holders at the expense of workers. The difference is rhetorical: Labor pretends to care about inequality while doing nothing about it; the Liberals do not even bother with the pretence.
On the issues that matter most: who gets to live in this country, who gets to own a home, whether your children will be better off than you, the major parties have converged. The political class has reached consensus: Australia is not a nation but a market, not a people but a population, not a homeland but an opportunity for whoever can pay.
What a Workers' Party Would Actually Fight For
If a political party genuinely wanted to represent the forgotten Australians, it would not need to invent new policies. It would need to recover old ones.
Housing as shelter, not speculation. Ban foreign ownership of residential property. End negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount for investment properties. Link immigration intake to housing supply; if we cannot house the people already here, we do not import more demand.
A labour market that serves workers. Restore sector-wide bargaining. End the casualisation of permanent roles. Enforce minimum standards with a labour inspectorate that actually prosecutes. And tell the business lobby that if they want more workers, they can train Australians and pay them properly, not demand the government import them on visas that make them dependent on their employer.
Energy policy that does not immiserate the poor. Nuclear power, not intermittent renewables propped up by subsidies and backed up by gas. Reliable, affordable baseload power that keeps factories running and household bills manageable.
Trade policy that defends national interests. Free trade is not free when your trading partner, China, subsidises its industries, dumps product below cost, and steals your intellectual property. A workers' party would enforce anti-dumping laws, protect strategic industries, and stop selling off Australian assets, farmland, ports, water, to foreign state-owned enterprises.
An end to the credentialist racket. The university sector has become a pyramid scheme: sell degrees to domestic students with government loans and to international students with visa promises, while telling young Australians that trades are for failures. A workers' party would fund vocational education properly, restore the dignity of skilled manual work, and stop treating a bachelor's degree as the minimum requirement for a job that could be learned in six months.
The major parties are vulnerable because their base is shrinking. Labor's traditional working-class voters are drifting, some to the Coalition, some to One Nation, some out of the electorate entirely. The Liberals' small-business base is being consolidated by corporate chains. The two-party system is held together by habit, media inertia, and preferential voting, not by genuine representation.
One Nation, or any party that can credibly claim to represent the forgotten Australians, faces a choice. It can remain a protest vehicle, loud, cathartic, and ultimately ineffective. Or it can build a governing agenda that addresses the material conditions of working people: housing, wages, energy, sovereignty.
The demand is there. The old parties have no answer. The only question is whether anyone has the courage to supply what the electorate is increasingly demanding: a politics that puts Australians first, not as a slogan, but as the organising principle of every policy decision.
The Labor Party made its choice decades ago. It chose the professional class, the global economy, and the cultural revolution. It left the working class behind. Those workers are still here. They are still voting. And they are waiting for someone to speak for them.
