The People Are Not Expecting Too Much

Australians keep changing governments and wondering why so little changes.

They vote for cheaper living costs, functioning services, and a different national direction. They get announcements, explanations, and another list of reasons why the promised change cannot happen.

Journalist Laura Tingle explored this frustration in her 2012 essay, Great Expectations: Government, Entitlement and an Angry Nation. Her argument began with the unusually important role the government played in building Australia. Governments constructed infrastructure, supported settlement, and helped establish the economic and social arrangements upon which Australians came to depend. Expecting the government to provide security and opportunity became part of the national character.

But expectations survived changes in the way Australia was governed. From the 1980s, deregulation and privatisation reduced governments’ direct control over economic life. Politicians nevertheless continued promising prosperity and protection. The distance between those promises and what governments could deliver helped produce an increasingly angry electorate.

Tingle identified something important. Australians had been encouraged to expect results from governments that increasingly explained why those results were beyond their control.

But Tingle overlooks an important conclusion arising from her own account. That the altered compact between government and citizenry failed to continue providing prosperity and protection as Australians saw fit is itself an indictment of the changes politicians made. If the new arrangements could no longer deliver what citizens reasonably expected of their government, the failure belonged to those arrangements, not to the expectations of the people.

Tingle's assessment also places too much blame on the people doing the expecting. The language of entitlement risks making legitimate demands sound like unreasonable complaints. From that perspective, voters need to accept diminished expectations, while politicians who promise to fulfil them become part of the problem.

That gets the central question backwards.

Why should Australians lower their expectations of a government that taxes to the hilt, regulates what they do, and exercises authority over so much of their lives?

Expecting the government to control immigration is reasonable. So is expecting population policy to account for housing and infrastructure. An energy-rich country should be able to provide reliable, affordable electricity. Citizens should expect public institutions to carry out their proper functions and elected governments to honour the decisions voters have authorised.

These are basic obligations.

The more useful question is why governments so often fail to meet them, and why responsibility for failure is so difficult to pin down.

One Nation’s rise makes sense against this background.

Its appeal rests partly on refusing to accept that Australia’s direction is something Australians must simply endure. Immigration levels, energy policy, regulation, and the terms of international cooperation involve political choices. Voters are entitled to want different choices.

One Nation offers those voters an alternative to parties they associate with the existing arrangements. Its message is that Australia can change direction and that the interests of Australians should determine that direction.

Across numerous polls during 2026, One Nation has repeatedly emerged as either Australia’s most popular party or its second most popular, measured by first-preference voting intention. Surveys from different polling organisations, including DemosAU, YouGov, and Roy Morgan, have placed it ahead of the Coalition and competing directly with Labor. The breadth and persistence of that support have made One Nation a contender for a central role in the Australian Government.

Several surveys also reveal dissatisfaction with the political status quo. Australians report that the country is heading in the wrong direction, that government measures will make their lives harder, and that the major parties do not represent them. Different questions expose different aspects of the same political failure: people doubt that those governing the country understand their circumstances or intend to act on their concerns.

That revolt has reached the ballot box. At the South Australian election, One Nation outpolled the Liberals statewide and won four lower-house seats. It then won the federal seat of Farrer and the Western Australian seat of Secret Harbour in by-elections. Across different jurisdictions and electorates, voters have shown that they are prepared to put One Nation representatives into Parliament.

For One Nation, the next question is decisive: what happens after voters authorise change?

Replacing ministers will accomplish little if the power to implement their decisions remains elsewhere. A party that promises to break with the existing system must explain which parts of that system it will remove.

Australians are not expecting too much. They are expecting elected governments to possess the power necessary to fulfil their promises and accept responsibility for the results.

That requires more than winning an election. It requires restoring the authority to govern.

To be continued...

“Government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
– Abraham Lincoln