The Albanese Government is helping pay journalists across 184 private newsrooms, raising serious questions about disclosure, independence and who really holds power to account.
Why are politicians ignoring what millions of Australians keep asking for?
Why are politicians ignoring what millions of Australians keep asking for?
There is a strange habit in Australian politics. An ordinary person raises a perfectly reasonable concern and, before long, somebody in Canberra has labelled it simplistic, divisive, populist or dangerous.
Want immigration brought back under control while the country is struggling to house the people already here? Apparently, that requires a lecture.
Think violent repeat offenders should spend more time behind bars? Prepare to be told that you do not understand the complexities of crime.
Believe women should have their own sporting competitions? You may find yourself treated as the problem.
Yet the concerns politicians dismiss keep appearing in polling and in everyday conversations. Cost of living remains the biggest issue facing Australians, followed by housing, the economy, immigration and crime. Those five issues alone tell us plenty about what is occupying people’s minds when they pay the bills, look for a rental, drive to work or worry about their neighbourhood.
None of the following ideas is particularly radical. Most of them would have been considered ordinary government business not so long ago.
Australians are not imagining the pressure. They see it every time a rental inspection draws a queue down the footpath, every time a young couple gives up on buying a home, and every time another suburb gets thousands of new residents without the roads, schools or doctors to match.
Immigration is now the fourth-biggest issue nominated by Australians in the Ipsos Issues Monitor, behind only the cost of living, housing and the economy.
A serious government would match migration to housing supply, infrastructure and the nation’s ability to absorb population growth. Canberra has too often done the reverse. It announces a huge intake, congratulates itself on the headline economic figures, then leaves state governments, councils and families to deal with the consequences.
Reducing migration during a housing shortage is not some wild experiment. It is basic arithmetic.
People do not judge an energy policy by the number of glossy announcements made in Canberra. They judge it when the bill arrives.
Australian households have been promised cheaper power so many times that the promise barely raises an eyebrow anymore. Meanwhile, families are cutting back elsewhere to keep the lights on, and small businesses are watching electricity costs eat into already-thin margins.
Living costs rose by between 2.6 and 5.2 per cent across different household groups in the year to March 2026, with housing and transport among the main contributors.
Australians want reliable power at a price they can afford. They are far less interested in whether the answer pleases activists, energy companies, bureaucrats or international conferences.
Use coal. Use gas. Consider nuclear. Build whatever is reliable and makes economic sense. The first test should be whether it keeps the power on and pushes bills down.
Politicians love announcing housing targets. Targets do not put a roof over anyone’s head.
Housing is the second-largest concern facing the country, according to the latest Ipsos Issues Monitor. That is hardly surprising. Renters are competing for scarce properties, first-home buyers are chasing prices that run away faster than they can save, and many parents have accepted that their adult children may be living at home for years.
Governments need to release land, speed up approvals, cut pointless construction rules and make it easier to build. They also need to stop pouring population growth into cities faster than homes can be completed.
There is no clever workaround. Australia needs more houses and fewer government-created obstacles to building them.
A country that cannot decide who enters is not exercising much control over its own future.
Australians have spent years watching politicians swing between tough talk, legal manoeuvring and bureaucratic excuses. Most people expect a clear system: applicants use the proper process, people without a lawful right to remain are removed, and people smugglers are given no reason to restart their trade.
Border control is not cruelty. A weak border rewards those who can pay smugglers, punishes those waiting through lawful channels and creates a deadly incentive for people to attempt dangerous journeys.
Australia learned this lesson at considerable cost. There is no good reason to learn it again.
There was a time when people knew the local police officer, or at least regularly saw a patrol car in the area. In many places, that visibility has disappeared.
Crime now ranks among the five leading national concerns measured by Ipsos. People are worried about break-ins, car theft, youth violence, drugs and repeat offenders who seem to return to the street before the paperwork is finished.
Police cannot do their jobs properly when stations are understaffed and officers are drowning in administration. Governments should recruit more frontline officers, keep stations open and move police away from desks where possible.
The public should not have to settle for an online form and a reference number after their house has been robbed.
Speak to a farmer, tradie, shop owner or small manufacturer and the same frustration comes up repeatedly. There is always another form, another licence, another inspection, another rule or another fee.
Large companies can employ compliance departments. A family business usually has someone doing paperwork at the kitchen table after a full day’s work.
A lot of regulation begins with a respectable-sounding purpose. The trouble is that rules accumulate. Almost nobody in government goes back years later to ask whether they worked, whether they are still needed, or whether the cost is greater than the benefit.
Every new rule should have to clear a simple hurdle: is the problem serious enough to justify the burden being placed on ordinary people?
Too often, nobody even asks.
Australians are tired of hearing that an offender was “known to police” after another serious crime.
Those words usually mean the system had several opportunities to protect the public and failed to take them. The offender had prior convictions, breached bail, ignored court orders or received chance after chance while the community carried the risk.
Rehabilitation has a place. So does mercy. Neither requires courts to pretend that a violent repeat offender poses no danger.
Sentencing should put the safety of innocent people first. Bail laws should recognise repeated offending for what it is. Serious criminals who show no intention of changing should spend longer out of circulation.
The rights of victims deserve at least as much attention as the latest excuse offered for the offender.
Australians pay fuel excise, registration, licence fees, rates, tolls and plenty of other taxes. They are entitled to ask why so many roads still resemble patched-up obstacle courses.
Outside the capital cities, the neglect is often worse. Regional families, truck drivers and farmers travel long distances on roads that would cause an uproar if they ran through an inner-city electorate.
Basic infrastructure is not glamorous. There is no international praise for filling potholes, repairing bridges or upgrading a dangerous intersection. It simply makes daily life safer and less frustrating.
Governments should maintain what the country already has before throwing billions at prestige projects designed to produce a ministerial photo opportunity.
For decades, separate women’s competitions existed for a straightforward reason. Male puberty creates physical advantages that do not disappear because somebody changes identity.
Most Australians understood that without needing a seminar.
Female athletes should not be required to surrender places, medals, records or physical safety to satisfy a political fashion. A women’s category that does not remain based on sex will eventually cease to mean anything.
This should never have become complicated. Sport can treat every person with dignity while still preserving fair competition for women and girls.
That is neither hateful nor exclusionary. It is the reason women’s sport exists.
Governments have become very good at announcing benefits and very poor at discussing who eventually pays for them.
Debt makes spending feel painless because the bill is delayed. It still arrives. Taxpayers pay through higher taxes, reduced services, interest costs and inflationary pressure.
Cost of living is currently the dominant concern for Australians, nominated by 62 per cent of respondents in the latest Ipsos Issues Monitor. Governments cannot credibly claim to be fighting that pressure while continuing to waste money and expand programmes with little thought for long-term cost.
Public money should go to essential services, defence, infrastructure and help for people genuinely in need. Wasteful grants, bloated departments, duplicated programmes and ideological projects should be cut.
A household cannot spend forever without facing the consequences. Neither can a country.
There is no mystery here.
Australians want homes they can afford, power bills they can pay, streets where their families feel safe and a government that controls the border. They want roads maintained, criminals punished, women’s sport protected and bureaucrats kept under control.
They also want politicians to stop treating every ordinary opinion as evidence of ignorance or extremism.
Canberra may not like the message. It has heard it often enough.
“Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.”
– Ronald Reagan
The Albanese Government is helping pay journalists across 184 private newsrooms, raising serious questions about disclosure, independence and who really holds power to account.
If Cricket Australia Has Banned the National Anthem on Australia Day, It Is a National Disgrace
Australia’s surveillance machinery is already being built around your private messages, emails and files.
The Liberals must stop attacking One Nation and start holding Labor to account.
Join 50K+ readers of the no spin Weekly Dose of Common Sense email. It's FREE and published every Wednesday since 2009
