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Thanks to our enviable system of compulsory and preferential voting, Australia has largely enjoyed a centrist political life. But recently Australians have headed away from the centre and towards the edges. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s out of choice \u2013 it\u2019s desperation.<\/p>\n
Many of the political fractures of today boil down to establishment versus anti-establishment. In a bygone era, the anti-establishment were radical anarchists. Today, they\u2019re the working middle class, overlooked time and again by our major political parties.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been a long time since Australia had a bold, reformist government, and you can tell. The institutional behemoths occupying the establishment terrain are systemically flawed, disproportionately distracted by their own innards, and often meek and ineffective. Australians shouldn\u2019t have to choose between the establishment or effectiveness. We should be able to have both in one.<\/p>\n
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The left-right binaries: Anthony Albanese, Pauline Hanson and Angus Taylor.Graphic by Aresna Villanueva<\/p>\n
I spent years trying to reform the Liberal Party from within, but this year I quit both the party and the organisation I founded to recalibrate it, Hilma\u2019s Network, which strove to attract Liberal women into politics. Ultimately, I ran out of patience and steam.<\/p>\n
People have often asked me what I\u2019ll do next. I believe Australians are starving for hope and hungry for political options. They are ready to look beyond the prism and prison of left or right. Politics has well and truly become a horseshoe and such rudimentary labelling is entirely unhelpful. Most Australians don\u2019t care about ideology; they care about effectiveness. They want solutions rather than more problems.<\/p>\n
Related Article A new political movement might be unorthodox, but these are unorthodox times. Our major parties decide their policies and what they stand for behind closed doors, then try to sell them to the public. I think we should do the opposite: start with people, then build the platform with them.<\/p>\n Give the growing cohort of Australians who feel politically abandoned a chance to shape it from the get-go. Engage industry and thought leaders who best know the flaws and opportunities in their fields, and stay free from internal factional dictators and unbeholden to an unrepresentative membership.<\/p>\n This is why I have created Something Better Australia<\/a>, which I hope will be the kick-starter to build Australia\u2019s next major political party.<\/p>\n If that all sounds a bit too Kumbaya, I challenge you to consider whether politics has to be done the way it\u2019s always been done in our country.<\/p>\n Voters\u2019 desire for disruption emerged in 2022 with the teal wave, a polite tap on the shoulder. The political class is now getting another kick up the arse, with the surge in Pauline Hanson\u2019s One Nation, formed in \u2026 1997. I was in kindergarten when Hanson first entered parliament, yet the party still positions itself as an outsider. Australia, I believe, is starving for something energetic and ambitious. A new political party, not a rehashed one from 30 years ago.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve long resisted the idea of fragmented minor-party politics, but the current system isn\u2019t delivering. As Labor\u2019s dropping primary vote indicates, Australians are clearly also uninspired by a party still operating as if it\u2019s mid-election campaign with prosaic, dull and small-target policies despite being in its second term and now wasting its sweeping majority.<\/p>\n Grievance politics isn\u2019t within cooee of the solution for our times, but I absolutely understand the magnetic attraction to it.<\/p>\n In 2025, 340 individuals<\/a> became billionaires<\/a> around the world \u2013 roughly one per day \u2013 making it the best year to date for the ultra-rich. In juxtaposition, real wages and disposable income continue to fall<\/a> in Australia for the worker. Trickle-down economics isn\u2019t trickling down. Tax benefits, financial incentives and interest rate rises are lining the pockets of the capital-rich while the wage-poor in the workforce are on a hamster wheel, bolted to the ground.<\/p>\n Related Article Simply, societies don\u2019t work when the economy doesn\u2019t work for the people working for it. Inequality is rife. And it\u2019s pretty tricky to solve social cohesion and rebuild community alongside such visceral and palpable resentment for the broken systems no one\u2019s trying to fix.<\/p>\n In a fraught world, we\u2019re told to be grateful that our politics is merely lacklustre, not chaotic like others. Is this the standard we want to accept? Those in power are too cowardly to have a crack in case they lose government, while those in opposition are too arrogant to do any inward thinking, whispering to themselves at night that it\u2019s all just cyclical \u2026 swings and roundabouts!<\/p>\n The best solution often presented in these charged times is to harp on, with deluded nostalgia, about the good ol\u2019 days, as if we might retrofit industrial age solutions into an AI reality. I also don\u2019t believe individualism is the answer. If people of value are stepping forward, we want them in cabinet, not scattered along the crossbench.<\/p>\n Australians in 2026 want politics to be radical. Not in ideology, but in intention, ambition and tenacity. Ignoring that will only direct more fury at the establishment.<\/p>\n Charlotte Mortlock is a former Sky News journalist. She founded Hilma\u2019s Network to encourage women to join the Liberal Party but is now founding Something Better Australia.<\/p>\n Save<\/p>\n You have reached your maximum number of saved items.<\/p>\n Remove items from your saved list<\/a> to add more.<\/p>\n![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1777783871_705_d609bde22db5326e83e776731decb7d04d4849ee.jpeg\")
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