Issue 01
How Gillard and Albanese Rebuilt the Politics of Victimhood
From the union hall to the care economy: an argument about class, identity, power and the disappearance of finance from the frame.
For most of the twentieth century, the downtrodden had a clear identity and a clear enemy: the working-class proletariat against the capitalist. Labor was the party of that struggle, and the union hall was its moral foundation.
Something fundamental changed at the turn of the twenty-first century. The downtrodden did not disappear. They were redefined.
01The Pivot
Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech in 2012 was the hinge. Whatever its merits as parliamentary theatre, its lasting effect was to recast the central conflict of Australian politics. The downtrodden were no longer workers locked in struggle with capital. They were women battling misogyny, the disabled fighting a society that had failed to accommodate them. The enemy was no longer the capitalist. It was the social structures of the nation itself.
The shift was sincere, but politically transformative. A party whose base was workers now drew its moral energy from a coalition of the identity-disadvantaged. Each group has legitimate grievances. The question is what the shift did to the old struggle, and the old enemy.
02The NDIS: Compassion as Industry
The NDIS is the purest expression of the new politics. Worthy in intent, it has become an industry: hundreds of thousands of support workers, plan managers, and labour-hire middlemen funded by taxpayers.
A tradie giving his wife a traffic-control job on a site is instantly denounced as rorted nepotism. But when NDIS-funded disability support work flows to recently arrived migrants through labour-hire firms, often performed perfunctorily or on paper only, the same critics see compassionate inclusion. Both are jobs for people who need them. Only one is treated as corruption.
03The Banks Left Out of the Frame
The same double vision governs the Big Build. Cost blowouts in the tens of billions are blamed on CFMEU influence and union-friendly procurement. But notice who is missing: the banks that structure the debt and profit handsomely whether projects open on time or a decade late. The corruption narrative always terminates at the union official. The financier, who gains more from a $10 billion blowout than any union boss, is cast as the reasonable adult in the room.
This is a remarkable inversion. The old Labor movement understood that when money goes missing, you follow it to whoever holds the money. The new version understands conflict as the virtuous downtrodden versus the corrupt unions, with finance as bystander.
The old movement followed capital. The new settlement often stops at the union gate.
04The Media’s Role
The liberal media’s role is not conspiracy but selection. Journalists frame stories as “downtrodden versus corrupt unions” because it casts them as defenders of the vulnerable without requiring them to interrogate the banks or the scheme architects. A bank collecting margin on a botched megaproject is a business story, if it’s a story at all.
05Albanese’s Inheritance
Anthony Albanese inherited this settlement and refined it: progress measured in the expansion of care and support work, while housing slides beyond the reach of the working class the party was founded to serve. The worker who can’t afford a house is not offered power in the economy. He is offered a seat in the audience of someone else’s emancipation.
The tragic irony is that the new downtrodden and the old are often the same people. The working-class suburb housing the immigrant NDIS support worker is both the base of old Labor and the workforce of new Labor, cast simultaneously as corrupt union beneficiary and virtuous agent of care. The only consistent loser is class analysis itself: the idea that the fundamental divide runs between those who work for a living and those who profit from the arrangement.
That idea died quietly, somewhere between the misogyny speech and the last Big Build contract. Its passing was not mourned, because mourning it would have meant naming the banks.
