Tom Mende

“The yiayia would not need to sit a test about prime ministers she had never heard of to participate in the Australia she had already built with her hands.” Kos, Australia already existed as a country before our yiayias moved here. I am proud that they contributed but it’s seriously disrespectful to pretend that Australia didn’t exist until our families arrived as migrants post World War II. Your rhetoric is sectarian and seriously divisive. It’s driving people apart because you are constantly needling Australians from Anglo-Celtic backgrounds with long established history in the country.

Look who is starting to wake up.. Not in my life I would’ve thought haha Why aren’t more people speaking up? You’re complicit if you don’t

The 5 million Angus Taylor thinks don’t vote and the millions in their households who do. Angus Taylor thinks he’s punishing non-citizens. They can’t vote, so it’s a free hit. That’s the entire logic. But it’s a logic only someone who has never lived in the big cities would consider. In the suburbs that decide elections, the household, not the individual, is the political unit. Three generations under one roof or in the same suburb. Grandparents on partner visas. Parents holding PR while the citizenship queue grinds on. Citizen kids enrolled to vote, working part-time, doing the family’s Services Australia paperwork at the kitchen table. Strip the NDIS from a permanent resident and you have not touched a single voter directly. You have touched their daughter. Their son. Their citizen niece. And they vote, very deliberately, for the people in their family who cannot. This is exactly the structural shape of post-war migrant Australia. Greek, Italian, Maltese, Lebanese, Vietnamese households where the citizen children voted for the whole family. It is alive and well, three generations on, in the outer suburbs the Coalition needs to win government. Taylor has told every one of those households that in his Australia, their parents are second-class. He thinks he’s chasing Hanson voters in Farrer. He’s actually handing Labor a permanent structural lock on the seats that decide who governs. And he has possibly committed his party to losing opposition status at the next election. Full piece and analysis below