Yeah it's the climate

If your identity is attached to the Labor party and the complete failure of the Labor party losing 43-57 to One Nation is surprising to you its only because you have not spent 5 minutes looking at American politics in 2016 and mapping how closely Australian politics has followed it.

Since 2022 Labor has governed as a centre right liberal party pushing market first politics and speaking openly centre right liberal language of "aspiration" and "equality of opportunity" that tells people that the failure of the material conditions is a result of a failure of their own efforts instead of systemic issues. This was a conscious decision made by the party after 2019 to move away from any class based politics and criticism of billionaires and big business. Find me a single speech from a Labor minister after 2022 that attacks the power of oligarchy and big business as the cause for people's material conditions falling. You can't and won't find one because the Labor party is not a party of the left, its a centrist/centre right pro-business party with historical references to workers rights but refuses to campaign on class-based politics or name the capitalist class and big business as the enemy and drain on peoples material conditions.

This is the exact same path as the Democratic Party whose betrayal of working-class politics and embrace of center right liberalism ensured that peoples material conditions would fall as the rich took more and more of their wealth through assets and inequality.

In the absence of class-based politics and where mainstream liberal parties tell people the fall of their conditions is a result of their individual failure, this creates the conditions where right-wing populists supply an alternative systemic model where the failure of their conditions is due to how the system is set up. Obviously their argument that its due to immigration is false, but it doesn't matter, its a systemic explanation that makes more sense to people who are trying hard but still seeing their conditions fail.

Australia was relatively slower to fall to the right wing populist model than America due to the relatively better starting conditions of higher equality and better rights but these have been systematically undermined by decades of inequality increasing liberalism. The Labor party has been in power for half the time these forces have been at work and done absolutely nothing to attempt to turn it around because they have ideologically become a centre right liberal party that saw nothing wrong with this.

Independent leftists made this argument over and over by pointing to America, pointing out that the same conditions as what was happening in America was happening in Australia, that if things didn't change then Australia would go down the exact same path. They didn't, so we are. Until you people comprehend your party has become a right wing pro-market liberal party that refuses to provide a systematic explanation for why their material conditions are falling more and more people will flock to the alternative populist right that offers an alternative systemic model.

As for why the Greens and socialists can't and havent captured any of the vote its again the same reasons as America. Australia is dominated by a right-wing media that ridicules the left and the mainstream party of the so-called "centre left" spent years delegitimising leftist politics to the people who were still identity based Labor voters in the same way that liberal Democrats spent years delegitimising the actual left in America and hating on Bernie Sanders and left wing politicians with the same venom that Labor identity based commentators do to the Australian left. And unlike the American left we don't have an independent youtube based media sphere so we're even more doubly fucked in terms of a left-wing revival.

Women's suffrage. The abolition of slavery. Marriage equality. Before they became accepted truths, they were minority ideas — dismissed, resisted and often treated as dangerous. So how does a society decide which ideas belong at the margins and which move to the centre?

Drawing on decades of experience in community radio, journalism and research, Associate Professor Heather Anderson explores an overlooked force behind many of history's most significant social changes: community-owned media. From advancing LGBTQI+ rights to exposing corruption and amplifying voices excluded from mainstream debate, community radio has repeatedly created space for new ideas to be heard before the wider world is ready to listen.

Through stories from Australia and around the globe, Heather reveals why minority doesn't mean wrong — it often means early — and why protecting community media may be essential to protecting democracy itself. Associate Professor Heather Anderson is a community media scholar and journalist whose work examines how alternative media creates space for voices often excluded from mainstream narratives. She has been involved in community radio since the early 1990s, most notably at 4ZZZ in Meanjin/Brisbane, where she has worked across broadcasting, training, governance and archiving.

Heather’s research explores the role of community-owned media in advancing social justice, cultural expression and democratic participation. She is the author of People Powered Radio: Fifty Years of Australian Community Radio Station 4ZZZ, a definitive account of the station’s history and impact.

Through both scholarship and practice, Heather makes a compelling case for why media controlled by communities — not markets or governments — still matters.