Back in 2019, in the lead-up to the election, I wrote about Bill Shorten’s strategy of deliberately pitting younger Australians against their parents and grandparents. At the time, voters saw through it and rejected Labor’s divisive approach. That clarity did not hold in 2022 or 2025. Today, what was once troubling has become entrenched. Division is no longer incidental to politics; it has become a deliberate strategy.
Those who seek to govern a nation carry a responsibility to unite its people, not fracture them into competing tribes. Yet politics is increasingly prosecuted through a divide-and-conquer lens young against old, renter against homeowner, worker against retiree, conservative against progressive. Compounding this, social media has turned division into a public sport, amplifying outrage and rewarding tribal loyalty over reason. The result is a country increasingly sorted and ranked by ethnicity, identity, and grievance, with citizens themselves drawn into inflaming the very divisions that weaken us all.
This moment feels like a real test of Australian society. A society that once prided itself on fairness, a fair go, personal responsibility, and the dignity of effort. A society built on the idea that you advance by standing on your own two feet, not by tearing others down. That social compact has been under pressure for years, but today’s politics has taken it further actively rewarding resentment and weaponising difference.
A growing number of grievance-driven political parties thrive on this environment. They do not seek to govern or unify; they seek to inflame. Their success depends on keeping Australians angry convinced that someone else is to blame for every frustration and every failure. These movements offer identity in place of policy, outrage in place of solutions, and permanent conflict in place of progress.
This should concern all of us.
When politics teaches people to see their neighbours as enemies because of their age, their success, their background, or their beliefs; it corrodes trust. When ideology matters more than cohesion, the nation weakens. When conservatives are caricatured as immoral and progressives as un-Australian, debate dies and tribalism takes its place.
We are told these divisions are natural, even necessary. They are not. They are cultivated often deliberately by those who profit politically from grievance and division.
There is a growing push to replace a shared national identity with competing group identities, to reframe aspiration as greed, success as exploitation, and disagreement as moral failure. This is not compassion. It is a politics of envy dressed up as justice.
Younger Australians are being told that their struggles are caused not by poor policy, housing shortages, or economic mismanagement—but by their parents’ generation, by those who worked, saved, and played by the rules. That narrative may be emotionally satisfying, but it is false. Families are not the enemy. Communities are not the enemy. A political class and grievance parties that benefit from keeping Australians angry at one another are.
We are, once again, at a crossroads.
The choice before us is not simply left or right, conservative or progressive. It is between a society that values unity, effort, and mutual obligation—or one that thrives on resentment, division, and permanent conflict.
History is clear on this point: nations that turn inward on themselves, that fracture along identity lines, do not become fairer or freer. They become weaker, angrier, and more easily controlled.
We should choose carefully and act responsibly. Debate and disagreement are the lifeblood of democracy, but division that corrodes trust and cohesion destroys nations. Unity must be built, defended, and valued. Once a society is conditioned to see itself as a collection of enemies, restoring it is no easy task.
This Australia Day, let us remember what makes our country truly great: a society that values fairness, effort, and community; a nation where families, neighbours, and fellow citizens are allies, not enemies; and a people willing to defend unity over envy, and common purpose over division. That is the Australia worth preserving.
