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’t think that’s out of choice – it’s desperation.
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’re the working middle class, overlooked time and again by our major political parties.
It’s 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’t have to choose between the establishment or effectiveness. We should be able to have both in one.
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’s Network, which strove to attract Liberal women into politics. Ultimately, I ran out of patience and steam.
People have often asked me what I’ll 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’t care about ideology; they care about effectiveness. They want solutions rather than more problems.
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.
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.
This is why I have created Something Better Australia, which I hope will be the kick-starter to build Australia’s next major political party.
If that all sounds a bit too Kumbaya, I challenge you to consider whether politics has to be done the way it’s always been done in our country.
Voters’ 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’s One Nation, formed in … 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.
I’ve long resisted the idea of fragmented minor-party politics, but the current system isn’t delivering. As Labor’s dropping primary vote indicates, Australians are clearly also uninspired by a party still operating as if it’s mid-election campaign with prosaic, dull and small-target policies despite being in its second term and now wasting its sweeping majority.
Grievance politics isn’t within cooee of the solution for our times, but I absolutely understand the magnetic attraction to it.
In 2025, 340 individuals became billionaires around the world – roughly one per day – making it the best year to date for the ultra-rich. In juxtaposition, real wages and disposable income continue to fall in Australia for the worker. Trickle-down economics isn’t 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.
Simply, societies don’t work when the economy doesn’t work for the people working for it. Inequality is rife. And it’s pretty tricky to solve social cohesion and rebuild community alongside such visceral and palpable resentment for the broken systems no one’s trying to fix.
In a fraught world, we’re 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’s all just cyclical … swings and roundabouts!
The best solution often presented in these charged times is to harp on, with deluded nostalgia, about the good ol’ days, as if we might retrofit industrial age solutions into an AI reality. I also don’t believe individualism is the answer. If people of value are stepping forward, we want them in cabinet, not scattered along the crossbench.
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.
Charlotte Mortlock is a former Sky News journalist. She founded Hilma’s Network to encourage women to join the Liberal Party but is now founding Something Better Australia.
Charlotte Mortlock is a former Sky News journalist. She founded Hilma’s Network to encourage women to join the Liberal Party but is now founding Something Better Australia.