By Stephen Saunders
Major-party election-offerings are unsympathetic to ordinary voters. Coalition indolence (and overstated Trump fears) may well re-elect Labor or (heavens no) Labor-Greens.
At MacroBusiness also The Australian, I’ve portrayed Election 2025 as a winning romp for the top 20% regardless of who becomes prime minister.
Meaning, little improvement across crucial indicators such as inequality, immigration and housing, energy and environment, education, and taxation.
This comes through in parties’ motherhood policies. Taken in alpha order, no hidden bias, eh?
Coalition
Global-north discourse rues the backslide to inequality, under post-1970s neoliberal policies. Down Under, income inequality and wealth inequality are on a roll. Even the Coalition cites collapsing real-income growth. Post-COVID – if not pre-COVID.
The intelligentsia, notably Treasury overlords, is relaxed and comfortable. Are we lucky or what? Look over there, chirps government ABC, it’s wicked Donald Trump.
In January, Peter Dutton soft-launched his Back on Track policy booklet. Which mentions inequality once—as an Indigenous problem. Last year, the Coalition promised net migration at 160,000, now they talk about “rebalancing”.
What a squib, considering Labor’s destructive 1.3 million immigration deluge over 2022-25.
For housing, they’d boost supply, fund infrastructure, fight inflation, and “sensibly” reduce migration. These platitudes would deliver another 20 years of housing hunger games.
Meantime, the guiding light of Labor’s ideological and unaffordable energy policy is UN fairytale, net-zero emissions. As “realised” by an alphabet-soup of federal climate-energy bailiwicks – AEMC, AEMO, AER, CCA, CSIRO, DCCEEW, EAP, ICEDS, ISP, NZEA, you name it.
Dutton too defers to net-zero, via nuclear not renewables. He offers an energy “plan” to lower energy bills and “unlock” more gas. The gas-export cartel has nothing to fear.
Education would go “back to basics”, matching existing dollar-for-dollar funding agreements.
That won’t budge the past (coming) decade of increasing inequity, enrolments shifting to advantaged schools, disadvantage concentrating, diverging student achievement. You don’t need a higher education, to cotton onto Australia’s divisive church-versus-state system.
Nor is it any secret; our tax system panders to corporations and resources. The system leverages real estate speculation, leaving wage earners marooned by post-1970s bracket-creep.
What about broadening taxes on resources, land, and consumption? Sorry, Ken Henry’s booklet stays mum. Supposedly, voters get “lower, simpler and fairer” taxes.
Greens
Life being a box of chocolates, Greens retail 47 policy flavours. Their special sauce for Economic Justice is UN gobbledegook of “net negative global carbon economy”. Immigration policy too is boilerplate UN. Citizens—who largely reject mass migration—get no say.
Trust the Greens to find harshness in Labor’s world-level open-borders blitz. Which they somehow construe as a vile migrant-bashing race to the bottom.
Anything less than 300,000 per annum is demonic racism. Relating housing to population growth is an unacceptable premise. Cue their Housing and Homelessness policy. “Free” government money would generate perpetual supplies of eco-friendly public and rental housing.
But the Greens are pro-environment, right? Actually, as early as 1998, they denied the effects of population on the environment, deeming that line to be racist. Today, their fully-woke Environmental policy trumpets global citizenship and global warming.
The top 20% embraces UN climate-action net-zero groupthink. But trust the Greens to go the extra mile. As with the pixies at Climate Council and ANU-ICEDS, net-zero 2050 isn’t exotic enough. It ought to be 2035.
Greens favour state schools, if not contesting the church-schools funding. Arguably, their soak-the-rich tax policies have merit, but these wouldn’t be supported by Liberal or Labor.
Labor
Mate, if Labor even has a plain spun policy prospectus, you’ll have to wait. Meantime, let’s patronise voters with brief lines of website motherhood and 170 pages of platform motherhood.
How “lucky” are voters, enjoying three years of lower inflation, moving wages, tax cuts, and energy relief? In his second term, Anthony Albanese will…zzz…zzz.
On truthy ABC recently, Labor’s Health Minister derided an embattled dad-renter. We’re “working very hard” he smirked, to reduce immigration and “build more houses”.
Wow, the gaslighting when it comes to immigration and housing is off the charts.
Check out this excellent question and the shocking responses from tonight’s Q&A program: pic.twitter.com/5rEik8gFND
— Biko Konstantinos (@BikoKonstantin1) March 10, 2025
In fact, Labor platform (para 85) buried Albanese’s radical population-agenda. In successive Budgets, his Treasury has lied about immigration targets, by 50% and more. To gay applause from the top 20%, his 1.3 million tops Kevin Rudd’s record by an improbable half a million.
Icing the cake, Albo signed amateur-hour qualifications and migration compacts with sectarian India. These lopsided deals wouldn’t have proceeded in Bob Hawke’s day. Today’s power-elite loves it, notably the Coalition. To query it would be racist.
Lying about cheaper energy, Labor platform didn’t “solve the housing crisis” either. Hence their housing agenda, accord, council, fund, target, and schedule, for an “aspirational” build of 1.2 million homes over 2024-29.
It’s never happening. Even if it did, that wouldn’t accelerate housing affordability. Not while the relentless population growth and juicy tax breaks remain.
Again, Labor’s energy-policy hinges on net-zero. But our physical emissions won’t really have fallen 43% by 2030. The bipartisan safeguard mechanism is a crock.
In Treasury agitprop, fake net-zero promotes Australia to a globally envied energy superpower in the UN net-zero transformation stream. Among ordinary voters, however, energy prices creep ever higher, abated by “free” energy relief.
Though Labor’s environment platform ticked boxes, population growth is off the scale, disregarding land clearing, habitat destruction, native-forest logging, water profligacy, and species extinctions/invasions. Maybe the net-zero pilgrimage is paved with coal.
That funding-settlement favouring church-schools is a Coalition-Labor concordat. Bishops, imams, rabbis, all can breathe easy, irrespective of the election outcome. While Labor, like the Coalition, evinces little interest in broadening the tax base.
Pauline Hanson One Nation, Sustainable Australia Party
PHON has a couple of federal senators, though voting for this party is deemed racist. They used to advocate net-zero migration, backpedalling to 130,000 migration visas annually. Yep, like Dutton, Hanson has wobbled.
SAP was once Sustainable Population Party. Like nearly all environmentally concerned groups, they’ve gone woke. Desirous of low migration (70,000 net) but also net-zero by 2035.
Teals et al
Backed by Climate 200 funding, Teals support climate action and anti-corruption.
Heiresses Kate Chaney (WA) and Allegra Spender (NSW) are huge hypocrites on immigration and housing. Esteeming climate action, they also endorse open borders. The immigration deluge gets parked at a safe distance from their ritzy habitats.
David Pocock (ACT) favours “sensible conservation” on immigration. Among 227 federal members and senators, only a tiny minority strongly demand low migration or a net-zero rethink. Pocock wouldn’t openly consort with them. In woke Canberra, that’s a suicide letter.
Influencers overplay the Teal-Green differences. More recently, however, Teals have started to push for tax reform.
Onya bike, Coalition
Sure, Australia is still healthy and wealthy, with untold iron and carbon yet to ship. Granted, individual parliamentarians win respect, through hard work for their communities.
But the party “contest” is dispiriting, eying off each other, not voters. Platforms drip with indolence and contempt. Revelling in visibly destructive (gas cartel, massive migration) or plainly stupid (supply-side housing, net-zero 2035) solutions.
There’s little yearning to sustain the economy long-term, serving communities, and containing inequality. Triennially, parties pretend to care.
In the other hemisphere however, you can find national polities appearing to attune more to local citizen welfare. Little Denmark and Norway are oft cited. Closer to home, consider Japan and Singapore.
Then reconsider our 1970s and 1980s. The Bank of Mum and Dad could snaffle housing, but local paisanos also had a shot. Intentionally, today’s housing goodies are strongly directed towards economic migrants and BMD. It’s so wrong.
Hence my remark that the top 20% is the real election winner. As they stoke sectarianism and inequality, their imagined Australia is a socially-just multicultural nirvana ascending to net-zero.
The top 20% claim altruism whilst deriding “hip pocket” concerns of the rest. Ordinary voters are ignorant. Heavens, most lack degrees. How could they begin to fathom our industry-sectoral pathways to net-zero?
For the left-elite in particular, ordinary voters are also racist. Flouting high-level directives, they rejected The Voice. If they’re struggling now, they deserve it.
Albanese and his Treasurer are apparatchiks, loyal to globalism, donors, and party. Not voters. They talk of one million jobs plus real wage growth. They walk open borders, the long dive in real-wages, suburban crush-loading, falling living standards, and world-ranked housing unaffordability.
Since 1931, no first-term government has lost. Yet even Dutton, I claim, could have gotten well out front. After cyclones Trump and Alfred however, the latest polls put Labor back ahead.
Back on Track doesn’t cut it, being cautiously me-too. With Dutton own-goals, proposing nuclear net-zero and squibbing immigration-housing. Now comes his red herring of deporting deviant dual-nationals. He spent too long at Home Affairs.
At docile ABC, Labor’s open-borders net-zero demolition-derby is called “playing it safe” and did we mention Trump? Indeed, Labor may well return to power, riding overblown Trump insinuations.
The uninspiring Coalition might have to wait their 6-12 years for Australia’s largely ceremonial changeovers of government.
As for a Labor-Greens government? Heavens forbid. To my obsolete 20th century mentality, their toxic mix of UN-dogma and race-hysterics is scarcely recognisable as Australian.
