When the political class keeps choosing to squeeze outer-suburban, mortgage-stressed, salaried workers, we shouldn’t be surprised to see these people turning to One Nation.

On the night of his ‘miracle’ in 2019, Scott Morrison stood before a euphoric room and thanked the quiet Australians. It was a masterstroke of political poetry, a phrase that meant everything and therefore nothing, a Rorschach blot onto which the entire commentariat could immediately project a face.

And what a face it was! Within hours we were being shown who these people supposedly were: the aspirational mortgage-belt couple, the small-business owner pushed around by red tape, the franking-credit retiree, the tradie who didn’t want to lose his ute to a Labor climate policy. A new generation of Howard’s battlers, reverently sketched. The quiet Australian, we were told, was disciplined, self-reliant, faintly aggrieved and, crucially, exactly the kind of person who reads the opinion pages and might one day be persuaded to write for them. Note my sarcasm here.

There was, of course, zero data behind any of it. Morrison’s line was an instinct dressed up as an insight, and the images that followed were not the product of research but of imagination. Nobody could point to a survey that isolated this voter or proved they swung the result. The “quiet Australian” was a story the winners told themselves about why they had won, subsequently taking that imaginary voter type to the 2022 election campaign and being roundly beaten.

The exercise was revealing all the same, just not in the way it was meant to be. The faces we were shown told us very little about who actually decided the 2019 election. What they told us, in exquisite detail, was which Australians the political and commentariat class are willing to lend agency to. Who gets to be a protagonist in the national story. Who is imagined as having interests, grievances and a vote worth courting. And it is almost never the people who are genuinely quiet.

The real quiet Australians are not quiet because they’ve been anointed with a flattering label. They’re quiet because nobody is looking. They do the work the rest of us would rather not think about, let alone do. Aged care. Disability support. Cleaning. The night shift in the meatworks. And the one profession that has done as much for the health of this country as any nurse or any doctor, and gets a fraction of the gratitude. The garbo.

We have built an entire civilisation on the back of a job we are faintly embarrassed by. To........

© Pearls and Irritations