A Different Country: Understanding the Machinery That Keeps It Out of Reach (Series part 1 )
The Politics That Govern Our Country Are Not So Trivial As Picking A Football Team
I have watched the same machinery operate from every angle. I have watched the trans debate get reframed as a women's safety issue by people who have never met a trans woman and never intend to. I've seen people worry loudly about immigration while their local economy quietly depends on it — because a headline told them to worry, not an economist. I've seen the NDIS get called a drain by people who have no idea what it costs when disability goes unsupported: the hospitalisations, the family breakdowns, the legal system picking up what community support was never funded to prevent. In every case the same thing was happening. Someone had decided what the debate was about before the people affected by it had a chance to speak. That is not an accident. That is the system working exactly as designed.
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But here's what that rule actually does. It protects the people who benefit most from you not paying attention.
Politics is not an abstraction happening in Canberra. It is the reason your rent has outpaced your wages for the better part of two decades. It is why a young person in any major Australian city is looking at the same housing market their parents entered in their twenties and understanding, with cold clarity, that the door has closed. It is why the NDIS exists, and why people fight for years to access it. Politics is the operating system. Everything runs on it. Pretending otherwise does not make you neutral. It makes you easier to ignore.
And yet we treat it like picking a football team. Research on political identity consistently finds that party identification functions less like a policy preference and more like a social identity — something we inherit, something we defend, something tangled up with who we think we are and where we came from. The academic term is affective polarisation: the tendency to feel not just that the other side is wrong, but that they are bad people. It is driven by identity threat, not genuine policy disagreement. Studies show this hostility has been climbing for decades.
And that distinction matters enormously. Because when we fight about identity rather than policy, we are extraordinarily easy to manage.
Consider what happened to the resources super profits tax in 2010. The Rudd government proposed a levy on the extraordinary profits being extracted from Australian soil — profits from resources that belong to all Australians — and returning a share of them to the public. The policy had sound economic reasoning and significant public support. The mining industry spent tens of millions of dollars on a campaign to destroy it. They did not argue on the merits. They argued on identity, on fear, on the idea that your job and your way of life were under threat. And it worked. Not because the policy was bad for most Australians. Because tribal loyalty, once activated, is more powerful than self-interest. People defended a position that was costing them, because it felt like their team.
This is how structural inequality survives. Not through force, but through the human tendency to attach ourselves to a narrative and defend it past the point of reason. We scroll headlines and absorb talking points and mistake familiarity for analysis. We carry political positions we inherited like furniture we've never stopped to look at.
What happened with robodebt tells you what the cost of not watching looks like. The automated debt-recovery scheme ran from 2015 to 2019, unlawfully raising debts against some of the most vulnerable people in Australia and causing documented harm to thousands. The 2023 Royal Commission found it contributed to deaths. It was not a secret program. It was government policy. It ran for years, in part because the people most affected were not the people paying close attention to social services policy in Canberra. By the time public attention arrived, enormous harm had already been done.
But what if we just started talking? What if we stopped thinking about politics emotionally, stopped defending a team at all costs, and just talked as if it were a decision we make together about how our society works? When we do that, something shifts. We realise we agree on more than we think. We all want healthcare that works. Housing we can afford. A future for our kids.
David Pocock got elected as an independent senator and then started talking about the resources tax openly, honestly, without the tribal politics. And suddenly, the whole nation was paying attention again. Because when someone breaks the pattern and speaks plainly about what matters, people listen.
Politics is not boring. Politics is the thing that decides who gets to live safely, who gets healthcare, and who doesn't. It decides whose children inherit opportunity and whose inherit debt. Treating it like a football game — picking a team, defending it regardless, turning up every three years to vote the way you always have — is not civic participation. It is civic absenteeism wearing the costume of engagement.
The way out is not complicated, even if it is uncomfortable. Stop defending the team. Start asking what you actually want. Not what you've been told to want — what you actually want your country to look like. Who is working toward that? And what would you notice, if you were paying attention, that you have been trained not to see?
Those are not radical questions. They are the basic questions of any person making a decision with genuine stakes. The stakes don't get higher than this.
